Chicago

SMOKEFALL GETS IN YOUR EYES It opened a year ago in Goodman’s smaller Owen Theatre. Due to rave reviews and popular demand, it’s now the fall opener in the larger Albert enclave. Clearly, Noah Haidle’s Smokefall struck a lot of nerves and vital organs. Its funky fame can put a critic who missed its 2013…

A VANDAL OF AN ENDING Thirty-something actor and writer Hamish Linklater’s The Vandal is one of those plays that starts well and ends poorly. It begins with a middle-aged woman waiting at a bus stop in Kingston, New York. She’s soon joined by a teenaged boy who engages her in conversation. The realism of the…

A WHISTLEBLOWER’S CONVENIENT SUICIDE Urgent, cinematic, and breathlessly intense in everything but its intermission, TimeLine Theatre Company’s true-life exposé of a truth-teller and his martyrdom delivers a heavy dose of thinking theater. Its rather un-ironic title accuses the audience as much as the authorities. Soon to become a feature film, Danny Casolaro Died for You…

LAUGHTER IS THE WORST MEDICINE Humor and hygiene play off each other in Sarah Ruhl’s much-praised but not altogether satisfying 2004 romantic comedy. Now fitfully revived by the new Bluebird Arts troupe, Luda Lopatina Solomon’s staging feels no less half-hearted than this mood-shifting script deserves. Bluebird’s two-act domestic drama is a strange amalgam of magic…

THE MANY LOVE(S OF) DON GIOVANNI Why does Chicago love Mozart’s Don Giovanni so much? Well-received as Lyric Opera’s first production back in 1954, and revived many times over the ensuing decades, including the company’s fiftieth anniversary in 2004, Don Giovanni just won’t go away, despite the titular character’s climactic comeuppance and ignominious death. The…

LOVE AS A MOVEABLE FEAST Conor McPherson’s plays are so rooted in the characters that plot is really revelation. With unforced warmth, he captures loneliness in the act of self-effacement and love as the best way to prove we’re really here. Steppenwolf Theatre’s fall offering The Night Alive is no nocturne’”it’s typically gritty, with self-inventing…

A BEDTIME STORY FOR EVERY ADULT With a justifiably extended run, Route 66 Theatre Company’s richly rewarding world premiere of Caitlin (A Twist of Water) Parrish’s The Downpour is a story as sweet as it is scary’”no easy feat in writing or staging. But director Erica Weiss has a Midas touch, and Parrish’s tantalizingly twisting…

MAD ABOUT JOHN DOE Trap Door Theatre is entered via a long narrow gap between two Bucktown restaurants. Upon arrival, Artistic Director Beata Pilch assigns audience members a number and Mike Steele seats them. Already in costume for their roles as madhouse attendants, Pilch and Steele look suitably frightening and forbidding. This disquieting introduction sets…

OUT OF THE COUNTRY AND OUT OF LUCK Seldom has a title been more ironic: The World of Extreme Happiness, specifically the booming factory city of Shenzhen in urban China, is definitely extreme. You feel it in the particular pain endured by the rural poor who flock there, hoping to change or make their fortunes….

STAY FOR  A WEILL An impeccable labor of love, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s heartfelt homage, A Kurt Weill Cabaret, pays unstinting tribute to a deft and dynamic composer. Kurt Weill’s impressive range stretched from the agitprop intensity of Three Penny Opera, the signature piece for the decadent Weimar Republic, to the Broadway sophistication of One Touch…

STOREFRONT SHENANIGANS Have you ever heard of Bad Settlement Theatre Company? Well, don’t worry about it if you haven’t. Up until the opening of House Theatre’s production of Season on the Line, this off-off-off-Broadway theater company only existed in the imagination of playwright Shawn Pfautsch, whose new work celebrates the theater as it deconstructs it….

GOTHIC FRICTION There soon will be plenty of haunted houses and Halloween-themed plays cropping up, but if you’re looking for a genuinely creepy production now, you’ll find it in Lifeline Theatre’s updated version of Christina Calvit’s original adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre (last seen at Lifeline 13 years ago), which depicts the…

AFTER THE FALL IS OVER A Midwest premiere by Northlight Theatre, Amanda Peet’s topical domestic drama The Commons of Pensacola isn’t exactly about Bernie Madoff’s unimprisoned wife nor how her family deals with disgrace. But as inspired speculation, it will do’”at least until a tell-all Ruth Madoff exposé comes along. Apart from dramatizing the collateral…

SUNSET ASSISTED DYING Samuel D. Hunter, Victory Gardens Theater ensemble playwright and recent recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award, specializes in tender tales of gutsy outsiders, spunky survivors who use their pain to feel that of others. Produced by V.G. in 2013, his The Whale celebrated the humanity of a terminally obese man (the wonderful…

TALESPINNING AT ITS MOST LITERAL Running only through this weekend, Joffrey Ballet’s captivating evening, Stories in Motion, delivers three richly imagined dance narratives, complete with storybook sets, exotic and erotic costumes, and supple choreography to fully explore cunningly contrasted music played by an unimprovable orchestra. The result is unadulterated delight, enriched by the emotions that…

A FORCED FRENZY Some well-meant productions make you feel bad because you care so little. That’s perilously close to what transpires in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s louder-than-life revival of King Lear. No question, the drama already detonates on the page. Shakespeare presents a searing ancient-to-present plight: An arrogant monarch mistakenly confuses his daughters’ love for lip…

REALITY THEFT Twisting a devious course over a mere 80 minutes and across Lookingglass Theatre’s nearly barebones thrust stage, this puzzle play by Lucas Hnath (whose equally treacherous Isaac’s Eye just opened at Writers Theatre) throws us onto a roller coaster ride of shifting sympathies and strategic lies. One mistaken assumption’”a rich mother is certain…

VIDEO WILL OUT Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy becomes, appropriately, a 115-minute, one-act opera by Ernest Bloch, a dour offering first produced in 1910 at the Opera-Comique in Paris. An inventive local premiere by Chicago Opera Theater at the Harris Theatre in Millennium Park, this “lyric drama in seven scenes,” which employs Bloch’s English translation from Edmond…

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A CITY As artist, poet, and actor Tony Fitzpatrick prepares to leave Chicago for New Orleans, he presents his theater piece, The Midnight City: a personal conversation that documents the Windy City, certainly, but also history, heroes, and art. Friend and co-writer Stan Klein’”who previously appeared with Fitzpatrick in This…