From left: Adrian Danzig, Samuel Taylor, John Judd/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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What if all the magical action in “The Tempest” happened inside the head of one bitter, wronged man? “The Feast” portrays a tormented Prospero (John Judd) commanding his slaves Ariel (Samuel Taylor) and Caliban (Adrian Danzig) to repeatedly act out an unfolding drama of his own creation using masks and puppets. Read the rest of this entry »

Tamberla Perry, Geoffrey Owens, Marc Grapey, Patrick Clear/Photo: Eric Y. Exit

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When David Mamet was on Charlie Rose promoting the New York premiere of his new play “Race” last year, he was naturally enough asked what he thought of President Obama. “I would rather not answer that question,” he said after a long silence, “as it might influence how people approach this play.” Since then, Mamet has released his infamous liberal-to-conservative manifesto, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” a kind of upside-down Augustine’s “Confessions” where he describes Obama’s “Change” that was so “accepted by a drugged populace and a supine press” as “the unfortunate descent of a productive nation into socialism” where “racial tensions have devolved to acrimony unknown in this country for decades.” Of Obama’s declaration that “Selma belongs to me, too,” Mamet assesses, “but the credit does not.”

No wonder in promoting the Chicago premiere of “Race” that Goodman Theatre, Mamet’s old stomping ground, has by and large turned the production over to its African-American director Chuck Smith. Also no wonder that, while Goodman’s gift shop had plenty of copies of “Race” on hand and virtually any other Mamet play for sale during intermission opening night as well as his book of theater essays, “The Secret Knowledge,” Mamet’s latest and most controversial opus, was nowhere to be found. Read the rest of this entry »

Leah Karpel, Ryan Heindl, JJ Phillips and Jess Berry/Photo:Michael Brosilow

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Lest one be confused by the title of this 2009 Simon Stephens play, Griffin opens the show with the image of British schoolchildren rocking out to Big Black’s “Kerosene,” a mean thrasher whose lines ”Probably come to die in this town, lived here my whole life” encapsulate the very palpable fears of the play’s protagonists. Ever the mouthpiece for disenfranchised youths, the punk ethos pervades the show, if not the aesthetic. Set in a suburb of Manchester, England, and inspired by the 1999 Columbine shootings, “Punk Rock” creates a portait of teenage violence that seems to come from a modern disdain for small-town, middle-class monotony. Read the rest of this entry »

Katie Petrunich, Shannon McGuire, Madelyn Doyle, Julie Brannen and Kaitlin Bishop.

“I’m pretty committed to doing solos every year,” Margi Cole tells me. “It’s important to me as a director and leader to put myself in a position where I’m learning.”

Taking that position this year involved a trip across the pond to work with American choreographer Deborah Hay. Hay—a Merce Cunningham alum—has made herself a nexus of artist development with the Solo Performance Commissioning Project, in which twenty dancers apply to learn a single solo piece created by Hay. After a week and a half of intensive study and coaching, participants disperse to their homes around the globe, continuing to work independently for at least three months before performing the piece in public. Read the rest of this entry »

Former Bolshoi principal dancer Mikhail Lavrovsky places new choreography on Prokofiev’s famous score in this staging by the State Ballet Theatre of Russia. The Voronezh-based (south of Moscow, some 300 miles from the Ukraine border) company has been around since 1961, but is a somewhat new import to the States. Read the rest of this entry »

Teagle Bougere/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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There’s a certain advantage to adapting a masterpiece of literature to the stage: the story and the characters are proven entities, not likely to elicit complaints about plausibility or development. But there is an even bigger disadvantage: not only will audiences inevitably make comparisons, usually unfavorable, to the primary work, but the distillation of a novel the length of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” into a three-hour stage play (including two intermissions) will necessitate vast edits that might threaten clarity even if, as is the case here, the dialogue is drawn strictly from Ellison’s text. Contrarily, the risk is equally great that careful adherence to the text will result in a work that, while unquestioned genius on the page, is plodding on the stage.

Fortunately, most of these potential problems have been avoided with Oren Jacoby’s world-premiere adaptation of “Invisible Man,” now playing at Court. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Cesar Moza

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“Dark Play or Stories for Boys” is a cautionary tale about teenagers’ willingness to avoid face-to-face conversations and retreat to the worldwide web in order to feel what they want to feel. The omnipresence of the internet today, and the resulting confusion about what’s real and what’s not real, perpetuates cruelty that only shows through their stifled cries. Director Anthony Moseley’s intimate staging and the undeniable rawness of the actors render “Dark Play” a deeply felt Chicago premiere. Read the rest of this entry »

E. Faye Butler and Susie McMonagle/Photo: Starbelly Studios

During the Depression, as America experienced a drastic disillusionment with the idea of progress, a nostalgia set in for the pre-industrial past. The embodiment of that is Susannah (Susie McMonagle), an ambitious and tightly wound ethnomusicologist working for the Library of Congress, who encounters the gruff and skeptical Pearl (E. Faye Butler), an African-American prisoner originally from the Sea Islands who contains within herself a treasury of antebellum songs. She may even possess Susannah’s Holy Grail: pre-slavery songs brought over from Africa. Pearl is initially unimpressed by Susannah’s quest—“You be a white woman, and this is your dream?” Replies Susannah: “When a person dies, a library is lost.” Her primitive recording equipment is an attempt to stave off extinction and create a kind of immortality for herself and her informants. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Peter Coombs

Playwright Mark Saltzman (“Sesame Street”) may have numerous Emmys under his belt, but this story (sold as a comedic mystery) often feels more pedagogical and over-explanatory than action-packed. This could be due to director Wayne Mell’s indecision on whether to fully embrace the more slapstick aspects of the script or the heavier themes of brotherhood; not only are the titular Collyers brothers with issues, so are the NYPD cops assigned to the case when one Collyer turns up dead and another goes missing. Additionally, the success of the reality show “Hoarders” means that set designer Andrei Onegin is challenged with presenting the audience with an overflowing mansion (more than 130 tons recovered!) that outdoes what we’ve seen on television. Read the rest of this entry »

Erin Myers, Rob Fagin, Laura Shatkus and Niall McGinty/Photo: Anthony Aicardi

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Before the opening-night performance, 16th Street artistic director Ann Filmer shared with the audience the genesis of her bringing Eric Pfeffinger’s “Accidental Rapture” back to the stage nine years after she’d seen it performed by a tiny theater company in Chicago. She could think of no better time, she said, for a play about the Rapture than in 2012, the year the Mayan calendar predicted the world would meet its apocalypse. And, although she did not mention it, there’s another strong reason to stage this play now: its narrative about the challenges that two groups of Americans—fundamentalist Christians and secular humanists—have in getting along seems more relevant than ever in this election year.

After years of growing farther apart, onetime college partners-in-mischief are reunited when Paul (Niall McGinty) and his wife Amy (Laura Shatkus)—now pretentious professors in Chicago—travel to Philadelphia for the baby shower of  Richard (Rob Fagin) and his wife Kim (Erin Myers), the latter being the only member of this cohort who did not attend college together and, to make it worse, is an evangelical Christian who has brought Richard firmly back into the flock he’d deserted in his youth. Read the rest of this entry »