Chicago

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:…

THE FORCE OF FORGIVENESS What’s too ugly or scary to process, let alone to confront, in real life is grist for the mill of theater, such as how a gun appears and death comes out of nowhere. In the optimistically titled The Gospel of Lovingkindness, hit-and-run scenes present the prelude to, and aftermath of, a…

BAPTISM IN WORDS Seminar, Theresa Rebeck’s utterly engaging one-act, is all about the wonders and terrors of writing. Both in the author’s dazzling dialogue and the fascinating issues she confronts–authorial authenticity and the corruption of ambition on art–these 105 minutes seethe and surge. A lucky audience reaps a harvest of biting psychology, whiplash wit, sexual…

HAPPY IN THEIR SECOND HOME It’s its second annual homecoming, the much-anticipated, event-filled Alvin Ailey American Theater arrives at the Auditorium Theatre, as well as to community venues all over Chicago. Bringing with them three complete programs of dazzling dance, this 2014 edition showcases the troupe’s vital verve, reminding audiences why they retain a love…

CHERCHEZ LA CORPSE Sometimes truths get told that only murder can out. The quaint, perhaps anachronistic, setting for David Alex’ problematic two-act drama, just premiered by MadKap Productions, is a book repair shop. (Nowadays it’s hard enough to sell paper literature, let alone fix it.) In this dingy cellar cluttered with vellum covers and scrolled…

WHEN THE BRASS RING IS JUST ANOTHER NOOSE The siren song of the bitch-goddess “success” croons loud and clear in this cautionary, modern melodrama. Golden Boy, Clifford Odets’ 77-year-old potboiler about a guy who decides to use his fingers as a fist rather than to play an instrument, hasn’t lost its knockout impact or visceral…

FRANCE TRIMS ITS 1% WITH THE GUILLOTINE 2014 has been as good to 1859 as it was to the late 18th century. Christopher M. Walsh’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel’”a saga of unexpected heroism during the French Revolution–is Lifeline Theatre latest page-to-stage triumph. Dickens put faces to history, and in 150 minutes Walsh’s new version…

A SEXUAL CAGE FIGHT The punning title’”Cock’”is a heavy clue on what to expect. From the moment you enter, you know you won’t confuse this 80-minute tour de theatre with anything else. Profiles Theatre’s auditorium has been transformed into a cock-fighting amphitheater: Three rows of unpainted wooden bleachers hang above a “cock pit,” one designed…

RACIAL PROFILING AND YOU Smoothly staged by Jessica Thebus for the Goodman Theatre local premiere, the blame game reaches Olympic proportions in Tracey Scott Wilson’s wicked two-act troublemaker, Buzzer. Perilously set in a gentrifying neighborhood in New York City, this slick, almost sit-comic, slice-of-change depicts three old friends in dangerous new circumstances. The character contrast…

WHEN PLAYTIME IS OVER Somewhere between “Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After” there is a very adult world of tests, losses, disappointments, and grief. Despite this, we assert our agency; or as a baker’s wife sings in Into the Woods, “If you know what you want, then you go and you find it,…