SMART DRAMA REVEALS POLAR ATTRACTION A world premiere production, Mat Smart’s The Royal Society of Antarctica at The Gift Theatre is easily one of the year’s best new plays. Smart, who worked briefly as a janitor at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, mines that experience in this story of adventurous men and women living and working…

THE SCOTTISH TRAGEDY: NEVER SAY DIE You can’t kill the Scottish tragedy. Written 408 years after  Macbeth,  Dunsinane  is the Shakespeare sequel we never knew we needed. Now on tour at Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Navy Pier, this co-production by the National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Shakespeare Theater brings new wounds to some very different combat. David Greig’s…

OPT OUT OF  A PLOT THAT’S NOT The real “sweeter option” is to miss this altogether. A new work written by company member John Henry Roberts and hyper-directed by Marti Lyons, The Sweeter Option is also Strawdog Theatre Company’s 100th production. Well, purely by default, it provides a good excuse to praise the previous ninety-nine. Alas,…

YANKEE DOODLE DUD Of all the plays inspired by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Yankee Tavern has got to be one of the worst. Steven Dietz’s play, which takes place in New York City five years after the attacks, thrives on conspiracy theories. While the first half is more or less a rambling…

FAME BY DAY, A CLOSET AT NIGHT This retrospective 2010 drama by British playwright Dylan Costello is so well meant, you want to forgive it for its good intentions. But–well–don’t stop the presses! This tale of closeted homosexuals who defy the studios to pursue their love in 1949 Hollywood  (and end up divided but not conquered),…

DEFINITIVE DATES ON INDEPENDENCE DAY In this 95-minute one-act called Four, half the “dialogue” seems unspoken but not unfelt. The audience is literally just along for the ride. Christopher Shinn (who wrote the troubled Teddy Ferrara, recently performed at Goodman Theatre) depicts two strategic couples–one straight, mixed-race, mixed-age; one gay, mixed-race, mixed-age–in Hartford, Connecticut on…

A PASSION PLAY FROM PLACID Like a baby on a breast, Lifeline Theatre thrives on adaptations of “coming of age” novels. As with  many memory-rich predecessors, Jessica Wright Buha’s clear and present stage version of One Came Home, Amy Timberlake’s “heroine journey” best-seller from 2013, hangs on seminal turning points. Buha efficiently establishes clear relationships among…

SHRINK, ENLARGE THYSELF! Christopher Hampton’s dramas are marvels of complicated construction, starting in the past and finding us fast. A retelling of the “creation myth” of psychoanalysis, this variegated 2002 offering is compelling in its Chicago premiere by Idle Muse Theatre Company. The Talking Cure contrasts Sigmund Freud (Vincent Mahler) and Carl Jung (Patrick Doolin)….

DARK DOINGS IN POSTWAR PARIS Now in an appropriately driven local premiere by Chicago Opera Theater, Tobias Picker’s two-and-a-half hour opera from 2001 delivers a bleak harvest of shame. The illicit lovers in Emile Zola’s scandalous 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, based on a true tale of working-class lovers in Paris who murder the woman’s husband…

A VICTORIAN TALE FOR TODAY Jackie Robinson was not, it seems, the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Long before 1946, Moses Fleetwood Walker was a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings and later for the Syracuse Stars. He was an invaluable athlete circa 1884, so much so that local racists became fans…

DOOMSDAY THERAPY The peculiar premise behind Matt Lyle’s lifestyle comedy, now running in a moderately intriguing Midwest premiere by The Ruckus, is that for some folks the end of the world will be a character-building, equalizing opportunity–a second chance for losers who didn’t earn a first one. If it doesn’t kill them, adversity brings friends…

ALL KINDS OF ADMISSIONS A peculiarly persuasive puzzle play, Daniel Pearle’s resonant A Kid Like Jake strategically omits the title character from the cast of characters. That’s very right: This four-year-old is a work in progress who alters as we hear his parents’ very different reactions to a boy who may well want to become…

A REALLY REALLY TIMELY PLAY 29-year old playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo’s Really Really premiered at Virginia’s Signature Theatre in 2012 before heading to Off-Broadway, where it was helmed by Chicago’s own David Cromer. Colaizzo’s first play generated controversy and buzz; now it’s getting a Midwest debut during Interrobang Theatre Project’s fifth season. Centering on a…

VOGUEING IT AT VERSAILLES The putative appeal of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette is that everyone likes to watch a train wreck. Now exfoliating in Steppenwolf’s upper stage in a dispensable Chicago premiere, this 2012 sendup of celebrity worship and its fickle reversals is a fitting showcase in costly Steppenwolf style. A splendid mirror runway reflects…