MESSING UP MURDER The cops may be blue, the victims black, but in  Six Corners  the predominant color is gray. Marinating in moral relativism, this independent installment in Chicago playwright Keith Huff’s “cop trilogy” (also  A Steady Rain  and  The Detective’s Wife) is an inside job in the best way. Huff, who married into a cop family and knows the…

AN EVERGREEN PARABLE OF RESISTANCE It’s a two-act tonic, this  Madwoman of Chaillot. Life, Jean Giraudoux knew, is never safe from our constant “fever of destruction.” When decency gets beaten down, it’s good to know that it can be saved by the sewers of Paris, the final focus of  this 1945 rampant satire from the French playwright….

IN CYBER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM On the Internet or just IRL, there’s joy in striking back — turning the tables and trolling the bullies. But what’s rotten one way is no better when reversed. That’s one of many toxic lessons in  The Burn, a useful and even redemptive cautionary parable from Philip…

TASTING YOUR MORTALITY In the bleak midwinter ’” appropriately ’” comes this dour drama. A Chicago premiere from Steppenwolf Theatre Company, this 2014 Obie winner will  not  let you warm your hands by its fire. Like Raven Theatre’s current  Nice Girl  or Shattered Globe Theatre’s  Five Mile Lake, Clare Barron’s  You Got Older  marinates in the failures of trapped characters. Their every…