SPOILER ALERT: THE PLAYWRIGHT DID IT Here’s the warning issued to the press on Monday night. It’s about critiquing Goodman Theatre’s imported New York staging of Gloria: “In the hopes of maintaining the integrity of the experience of Gloria for our patrons, the playwright [MacArthur “genius” winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins] and the director [Evan Cabnet] respectfully…

ANOTHER BAND OF BROTHERS At a certain “tipping point” in the mid-20th century, passing for straight became one lie too many. A generation before the Stonewall riots, a generation after Henry Gerber started the first gay rights organization in roaring ‘20s Chicago, and over two generations after Oscar Wilde paid a terrible price for a…

THE PURITY OF INFINITY Mathematics can be maddening. Unless reflected in music (as in Bach), the “numbers game” feels stuck in a seemingly sterile realm of abstract entities, perfect in their predictability and infinite in range and scope. Math seems inhuman’”if not, as in its wartime applications, anti-human. It takes a rare play, like Proof…

THE HERO JOURNEY OF A  DRAG QUEEN Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is, of course, a much-loved 1994 “staying out” film from seemingly straight Australia. It spins the peripatetic tale of three Sydney drag queens who stuff their sequins and silicone onto the title vehicle (a “wayward bus” worthy of Steinbeck) and cross the Australian Outback….

LEARNING TO BE DEAD Orpheus usually gets top billing in the classical Greek legend. He is of course the master of music who literally goes to Hell to retrieve his beloved Eurydice, abducted by Hades, king of the underworld. In Sarah Ruhl’s deeply personal 90-minute one-act the emphasis is on the kidnap victim, not the…

WHAT OF OUR  SUFFERING IN THE NIGHT? Ambition should be made of smarter stuff. Nearly three hours of unfocused agitation, What of the Night? begs its own incoherent question. It’s not the night that’s at stake in Marí­a Irene Fornés’s four-play epic. It’s the well-being of an audience who, perplexed, provoked but never enlightened, endure a…

CATHARSIS IN A BASEMENT It’s not easy for actors to lose control without losing the role as well. A master of concentrated dread and systematic despair, Kate Buddeke haunts this solo show. She completely controls it too. Her America, a drama by Chicago writer Brett Neveu that’s part of Greenhouse Theater Center’s “Solo Celebration,” is…

A VERY DISPENSABLE DOOM Famed for her sardonic 1948 short story “The Lottery” and the scary novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson was a Gothic gadfly in the Eisenhower Era, full of apocalyptic post-war angst and Cold War panic-peddling. She industriously penned fright-freighted tales of…