Chicago

RECRUITING FOR THE 1% Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár  is much better known for the spindrift, gossamer pleasures of his Liliom (which inspired Carousel) and The Good Fairy (which gave us Make a Wish), musicals drawn from quicksilver dramas of artful delicacy and effortless charm. Written in the dangerous year of 1929, Molnár’s The President (originally entitled…

A WILD(E) ADAPTATION A spectacle that swirls and thrills, The House Theatre of Chicago’s Dorian has updated Oscar Wilde’s classic cautionary tale from Victorian music halls to today’s club scene. Their “promenade” production also transforms an ambulatory audience into vintage voyeurs, even stalkers. As they perambulate around the capacious Chopin stage (a seating area is…

THE CONDITIONAL KINDNESS OF STRANGERS An episodic evening set in and around a hotel near O’Hare Airport, Marisa Wegrzyn’s  itinerant one-act both celebrates and red-flags those encounters, seemingly causeless and effectless, that in fact change and define us–at the time, more than we know or need to. It promises to be wild but, better, ends up…

WATCHING LOSERS LOSE IS A LOSE/LOSE SITUATION After a brief show of compassion for life’s casualties and some welcome sympathy for the underdog in Good People and The Motherfucker with the Hat, Steppenwolf Theatre Company is back to a bad habit’”amusing an audience by mugging poor slobs. An unwelcome world premiere, Mona Monsour’s two-act downer…

THE BANALITY OF SURVIVAL A crowded creation, Our Class remembers the Holocaust by forgetting nothing. Intent on conscience-keeping, burning to reclaim a slice of history, this dogged docudrama, a generous-to-onerous Midwest premiere by Remy Bumppo, is Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s painstaking and pains-giving depiction of genocide in a microcosm (this is no Shoah, the 9-hour, 23-minute 1985…

SECOND CITY DEPRAVED AND BACK ON TRACK Dark thoughts, insecurity and regrets may seem like particularly bleak material to base a sketch comedy show around, but their universality makes them strong subjects. Placed in the hands of the extremely talented cast performing on The Second City’s main stage, Depraved New World offers some huge laughs…

FREED FROM A CELLAR The inception of this 2006 work from Chicago’s neighborhood-based Albany Park Theater Project is a remark made by a 14-year-old member of their youth ensemble: “I learned to love when I was 10 years old.” Her true-life story is the basis of APTP’s 80-minute cri de coeur, the fourth offering by…

BLING BRINGS CLOSURE Now playing at Chicago’s downtown Storefront Theatre, The Jewels, TUTA Theatre’s world premiere adaptation of a story by Guy de Maupassant, is not to be confused with The Necklace, the masterpiece by this “French Chekhov” (or “French O. Henry” for that matter). That gem from 1884, with its bittersweet twist of an…

AS YOU BIKE IT Growing up and accepting change and loss are very personal processes. Buzz22, whose mission is to stage “stories to explore the coming of age,” has been following the grand tradition of Star Wars and Harry Potter by using epic tales to frame the struggle to forge your own identity and come…

FUR A GOOD TIME, CALL  MASOCHISM ON PARADE David Ives’ two-person fetish comedy, Venus in Fur, is a  sexy crowd pleaser  and an actors’ tour de force  exercise. The play casts a spell of “delicious cruelty,” but beyond the sado-masochism that it both celebrates and exploits, it’s even more manipulative than it pretends to be. The joke, such as…

(SOCIAL) MEDIA MADNESS Gay playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (contributor to Glee and Big Love) may have stumbled with his over-the-top dark comedy Say You Love Satan–produced in Chicago by About Face Theatre–but this Raven Theatre revival of the burning drama that Steppenwolf debuted seven years ago proves a rare skill: Aguirre-Sacasa can create solid stagecraft with…

LIES ARE HARD TO LIMIT Are some lies lighter than others and thus lesser? Charles Van Doren will always be tainted for knowing the answers in advance in the 1959 Geritol quiz show scandal. Serial liar Stephen Glass manufactured article after article from whole cloth in the National Review. Whatever truth he might have told,…

THE RHAPSODIC SIDE OF STALKING Stendhal wrote a story once about a man who also wrote a story as a way to force himself to fall in love. It seems an impossibly pure task. Passion carries that degree of difficultyand overcomes it with precision, power and, well, passion. Stephen Sondheim has been cheaply faulted for…

SCRIPT ABOUT VIDEO GAME USAGE NEEDS FIXES Early in Leveling Up at Steppenwolf Theatre, professional gamer Ian (Clancy McCartney) makes it clear that he prefers playing video games all day rather than going out in the real world; games, he says, give him “epic wins.” Perhaps a reference to Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken:…