Chicago

IT’S NOT SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE KITCHEN Along with cutting meat for a living, Valerie, the butcher in Marisa Wegrzyn’s impressive The Butcher of Baraboo, is a middle-aged woman who is the center of an over-the-top dysfunctional family  that takes the audience on a funny, disturbing, sometimes harrowing ride at A Red Orchid Theater….

THE PLAY’S ACTING’S THE THING Plenty of negatives can be directed toward Lee Blessing’s Chesapeake, which suffers from personality disorder: Is it a satire? A comedy? A fantasy? Does it even know, or care? Fortunately, these critical reservations are mostly disarmed by Greg Matthew Anderson’s brilliant performance. This is a good thing because Mr. Anderson…

HAUNTINGLY INTIMATE Ghost stories are difficult to bring off on stage. The physical reality of flesh and blood actors works against the sense of the supernatural and the suspense and horror that give the genre its distinctive flavor. That’s why ghost stories are generally more effective on the printed page or in the movies or…

A FREUDIAN TRIP Freud’s Last Session at the Mercury Theater is a “what if” play. What if the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the English professor and author C. S. Lewis met in Freud’s study in London for a morning of conversation? What if that meeting took place in 1939 on the day World War…

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, IT’S A TELLTALE TITLE Suzan-Lori Parks claimed that her play Fucking A, now playing at the Urban Theater Company, was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. The Hawthorne work centers on a strong-willed Puritan woman named Hester who is forced to wear a scarlet letter by her community as…

ALL ABOUT ALFRED AND LYNN Ten Chimneys is the name of the estate near Madison, Wisconsin, where the famous American husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne retreated annually to prepare for their season on the American stage. The estate is now a major tourist attraction, a monument to the lives and careers…

WHAT A DIFFERENCE TEN YEARS MAKE The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later tells the story of Matthew Shepard and how it affected those involved a decade after his 1998 murder. As with its point of origin The Laramie Project (also running concurrently as staged readings) disparate denizens of this infamous town in Wyoming have been…

REAL GENIUS OR REAL CLUNKER? Tennessee Williams wrote at least 10 plays that are more accessible and commercially viable than his Camino Real (pronounced CA-mino Reel). Even the most zealous playgoer likely has never seen a production of this perplexing symbolic drama. So when the Goodman Theatre placed the 1953 play on the company’s 2011-2012…

THE BOOK ISN’T READY, BUT BRING IT ON ANYWAY Bring It On at the Cadillac Palace Theatre is cut from the Legally Blonde cloth of contemporary musical theater: they are both inspired by motion pictures (Bring It On spun off into five movies from 2000 to 2009), and feature a lithe young blonde heroine, a…

A REVIVAL THAT’S WORTH THE PRICE The Price (1968), in a solid revival at the Raven Theatre, demonstrates Arthur Miller at the top of his game – writing intense, eloquent, densely textured dramas about families under stress.   The production may have been marred a bit on opening night by some line-reading glitches, but the staging…

A STRANGE MIXTURE OF BELLY-LAUGH FARCE AND POLITICAL INTRIGUE The North Plan at Theater Wit is either a farce with dark political conspiracy overtones or a political conspiracy drama played heavily for farce. Playwright Jason Wells may intend to say serious things about the political state of the nation, but if the audience doesn’t take…

A BLUEPRINT FOR ACTIVISM The Occupy Wall Street movement would do well to take a tip from the longest running show in Chicago, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (TML). The event may take place every week indoors at the Neo-Futurarium — above a funeral home in the Andersonville neighborhood — but it…

SECOND CITY GROWS UP Second City is expanding its cabaret empire in a new Chicago venue currently housing five shows. The operation carries the umbrella title of the UP Comedy Club, located on the third floor of Piper’s Alley near the Second City Mainstage and e.t.c. performance spaces. One of three Second City cabaret spaces,…

THE ACTING FILLS YOU UP BUT THE ADAPTATION LEAVES YOU HUNGRY FOR LESS Elise Blackwell’s slender 2003 novel Hunger tells the harrowing story of a group of Russian scientists trying to survive the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Blackwell’s novel has been adapted into a drama receiving its world premiere at the Lifeline…

A DRESS THAT’S ALREADY OUT OF STYLE The two-character romantic play typically follows a set pattern. A man and a woman have just met. They are very different in lifestyles and initially they don’t hit it off. But gradually they connect, and by the end of the story they are either in a happy-ever-after clinch…

A CRIMINAL SCRIPT OF AN EVIL STORY Lucy Prebble’s play Enron tries to dramatize the Enron financial scandal, one which serves as a poster child for everything greedy and immoral and corrupt in the American financial system. The play was a big hit in London, but the Broadway outing died after a few performances. Interestingly,…