Playwright Lee Blessing has a pitch-perfect ear for exasperated teenspeak in this comedic drama (which debuted at last year’s Humana Festival) about the awkward, broken-down relationship between an 18-year-old girl and her well-intentioned ex-stepfather.

The story also involves a road trip, crummy motels, an abortion, Chlamydia, marital infidelity and references to gang rape, incest and molestation. All that’s missing is a drug habit and this would be prime material (if I may steal a line from Showtime’s “United States of Tara”) for a “Lifetime lady tampon movie.”

That’s not to say there isn’t meat on this bone. The relationships that form in step-families are complicated and frequently ill-defined. What happens, Blessing asks, when a marriage ends and a philandering step-dad is out on his ass, estranged from a kid he once supposedly cared about?

Allison Torem plays the girl—sullen and vulnerable, with a knack for the penetrating putdown; she names a stuffed animal “Vicious Penis Destroyer.”

Darrell W. Cox is the stepfather, a writer by trade and dorky suburbanite by dress. (Darcy Elora Hofer’s costumes for Cox are like quotation marks: the fanny pack, the mom jeans, the white sneakers—cliches that feel painted on.) He’s not easy to like; so self-involved that he breaks down sobbing as they wait in the lobby of an abortion clinic while his stepdaughter sits stoically nearby, trying to get him to shut up.

But before that can happen, they embark on a roadtrip that is meant to draw them together. Or offer some kind of closure. Or shed light on who they are as individuals. I’m not sure I actually cared by the end, which is the play’s main drawback; plentiful melodrama laced with sarcasm (yeay!) but the payoff is zilch and Cox’s character is never fully realized in human terms.

That said, Blessing can write a funny line. His sense of humor does most of the heavy lifting and director Joe Jahraus’ staging matches it beat for beat with just the right comedic timing. (Nina Metz)

At Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway, (773)549-1815 or www.profilestheatre.org. Thu-Sat 8p/Sun 7p. $25-$30. Through March 1.

Kevin Kenneally as Ben Hubbard with his sister Regina Giddens, played by Linda Reiter

RECOMMENDED

“Greed is good,” “Wall Street’s” Gordon Gekko maintains. But for the Hubbard family in Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes,” greed isn’t good; it’s fatal.

Predatory philistines, the Hubbards are closing in on the business transaction of their careers: to bring a cotton mill to their sleepy Alabama town. But Horace Giddens (Ted Hoerl), a key investor, steadfastly refuses to commit his money; he’s reticent to partner with wife Regina (Linda Reiter) and her morally compromised brothers, Oscar (Don Bender) and Ben (Kevin Kenneally) Hubbard. Shady dealings and avaricious mind games ensue.

Brandon Bruce’s direction effectively spotlights the perilous chess game of Hubbard family life. Kenneally’s oily, ominous charm is a wicked pleasure; Eileen Niccolai as sister-in-law Birdie is a sad reminder of the cultured civility the family lacks. But Reiter’s most devastating moments occur when her character says little or nothing; she understands the power of silence. (Lisa Buscani)

At the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln, (773)404-7336. Through March 8

RECOMMENDED

Chinese Nobel Laureate and political dissident Gao Xingjian’s 1986 play, “The Other Shore,” focuses on the quest for spiritual enlightenment as well as the necessary yet problematic connection that binds humans together. Halcyon Theatre Ensemble approaches the script with a committed enthusiasm and fluid pacing that keeps the movement-oriented piece clipping along.

“The Other Shore’s” series of vignettes demonstrate the constant struggle of the individual against the collective consciousness; the audience sees men and women chafe against society’s attitudes towards sex, peer pressure, government and faith. Clunky translations aside, the play effectively explores issues we clash with everyday.

Jenn Adams’ direction prevents the cast from indulging in “bad Godspell” insincerity that could drag the production down; Tony Adams’ lighting and sound design complements the stripped-down set. Ensemble standouts include Danny Taylor, Kristine Wakefield, Samantha Garcia and Irene Kapustina, who invest Gao’s bare-bones language with appealing humor and tenderness. (Lisa Buscani)

At Lincoln Square Arts Center in the Barry United Methodist Church, 4754 N. Leavitt, (312) 458-9170. Through February 21.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Karen Aldridge as Lady Macbeth

RECOMMENDED
No play has more superstition surrounding it than Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” a name and title that traditionally dare not even be spoken backstage nor anywhere near a theater lest it become haunted; hence, the moniker “The Scottish Play,” a safer alternative that will keep the goblins and witches at bay. That is certainly one interpretation. Another is to see “Macbeth” as conscience gone berserk in blood-lusting after power and, ergo, nothing in the play is taken literally.

And then there is Barbara Gaines, who updates “Macbeth” to the present day but where nothing, absolutely nothing, is left to the imagination. Given how many metaphorical Macbeths roam the moors of our minds, there is something to be said for the novelty of having everything spelled out, however unnerving. And from the opening moments when we see soldiers in commando fatigues machine-gunning those who are lying face down on the ground, we are reminded that however much we think that Macbeth’s era was a more brutal one than ours, think again.

When Lady Macbeth (Karen Aldridge) speaks of her plucked nipples, she does so topless and the audience is staring right at them, fully exposed. The three witches meld in and out of a hoard of paparazzi and journalists and one of them who shows us a bloody, newborn baby is male (Mike Nussbaum), not that it matters much, as they are unisex witches, and their voices during their incantations and prophecies are electronically altered to eerie effect. When Macbeth starts to lose it at the dinner table, we see what he sees: a grotesque, bloody head staring at him accusingly that gradually becomes more real, taking the physical form of a mutilated walking corpse that interacts and chases him, right into the audience. When the children of Macbeth’s rival are murdered, we are mercilessly shown the act, complete with an audible neck crack. Lady Macbeth’s death, the details of which are never spelled out in the play itself, is shown as her naked body in a bathtub of blood, making the suicide often implied in the text explicit.

Macbeth (Ben Carlson) has the physical demeanor of a skinhead and imagines himself as king via video clips of statements that he makes, ironically, which become no longer necessary nor relevant after he actually becomes king. And when an African-American becomes king at the end and those video clips are restored overhead, an analogy to the start of an Obama presidency is made complete.

All of this could be viewed as violent theater of the absurd for its own sake, but whatever we may chose to make of all of this—and I suspect that many will find it all much too much—Gaines’ gratuitous interpretation can be fully supported by the Bard’s own words. In this, the proceedings are a marked contrast from say, Robert Falls’ “King Lear” where the excesses had little if anything to do with the text and where special effects ended up concealing far more than they revealed.

In the end, Gaines’ “Macbeth” gives us plenty of haunting and disturbing images to take away, to be sure, but none more explicit or timely than bearing in mind that all of the excesses come about as the direct result of the potentially corrupting effect of power. (Dennis Polkow)

“Macbeth” plays through March 8 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand (at Navy Pier),  (312)595-5600. $44-$70.

By Monica Westin

This winter Timeline will present the world premiere of Masha Obolensky’s “Not Enough Air,” which explores the circumstances behind the writing of the play “Machinal,” journalist-turned-playwright Sophie Treadwell’s expressionist tour-de-force attempt to understand the real case of Ruth Snyder’s murder of her husband. We spoke with Obolensky a few weeks ago to examine her own biographical project.

I was immediately struck by the obvious parallel of your work with Sophie’s: “Machinal” asks how one woman could reach a point at which she would carry out such a crime, while “Not Enough Air” confronts why Sophie, a journalist, became so involved in the case that she would write an intensely felt play about it.

Yes, the original hook, what first interested me, was this idea of a woman interpreting another woman, about eight years ago… it’s been a long process. Originally I was going to have the young woman [in "Machinal"] and Ruth played by the same actress, and I’ve been toying with those roles for years. Because it was originally written for a workshop, I thought of it as just a theater piece and shelved it for years, until I decided to drag it out and format it in 2006 for a play festival. Because I’ve been working on it for so many years, ["Not Enough Air"] has turned out to be very layered, as I’ve grown up with it in some ways and come to understand Sophie and “Machinal” on different levels, I hope. I’ve really wrestled with the story, and with the notion of being able to interpret or speak for Sophie, and I hope that struggle comes through as well.

What kind of relationship are you hoping “Not Enough Air” will have to “Machinal”? And how does that play out on the level of say, stylistics—for example, “Machinal” is an extremely expressionist piece that makes use of soundscape and repetition.

Let’s see… how realistic is my play? Most of the scenes are a mix, with a lot of styles clashing up against each other. I suppose I should say first that what I’m presenting about Sophie’s life is comprised of a lot of speculation on my part, especially the scenes of Sophie and her husband [sports reporter William O. McGeehan]. I was intrigued that they lived in separate residences and that, from what I’ve read, as Sophie became more successful, their arrangement ceased to work for him. The scenes with Mac and Sophie I guess would say are more naturalistic; then there’s the whole media circus, which is more like “Machinal,” more abstracted and expressionist… and then as the play goes on, language sort of breaks down in a way, so that the second act approaches the internal process as opposed to the plot-based first act; following the trial, I’ve tried to get in Sophie’s mind. There are pieces of “Machinal” in it, and I ended up mirroring or taking some of Sophie’s techniques, such as lots of repetition, or very packed emotional words that are disjointed. Sound was very important to me, as in “Machinal,” and the director at Timeline is doing his own thing with the sound, while allowing room for that interest of mine.

I’m going to ask the obvious question about identifying with Treadwell, another actress, playwright, woman writer.

One thing that interested me the most was this concept of illness, which ends up being a major theme in the play. Sophie suffered from what was called neurasthenia, and she was in and out of sanitariums so much that you wonder how she managed to write as much as she did. I wonder how much the illness fueled what she did, or held her back. As a coincidence, I actually have something called adrenal insufficiency, which would probably have been diagnosed as neurasthenia back then. In “Machinal,” the young woman is described as having neurasthenia as well, and Ruth Synder, the woman in the trial, is described as having fits. I kept thinking about symptoms and asking—what are these women symptoms of? Are these symptoms still around? And that makes me think about why writing this play now might still matter. Recently in New York women playwrights have been meeting with artistic directors and asking why there are still so few plays being produced that are written by women. Why can’t we speak about this symptom in a way that feels productive— in a recent New York Times article women playwrights spoke of feeling that it just wasn’t up for discussion and that by bringing it up they felt as if they were being perceived as complainers or whiners. The symptoms that preoccupied Sophie haven’t gone away.

Opens January 21 at Timeline Theatre, 615 W. Wellington, (773) 281-8463.

Melinda Chua Smith

RECOMMENDED
Broadway in Chicago, eat your heart out. Drury Lane Oakbrook’s thrilling and thumping-good production of the Boubil/Schonberg/Maltby musical “Miss Saigon” is by far the best Broadway-caliber musical revival currently not “in Chicago.”

In many respects, it’s better than the original. That staging, that proliferated in the early 1990s and that I saw via several companies around the globe, was certainly something to behold—the raising of a thirty-foot statue of Ho Chi Minh for a “Nixon in China”-like Communist parade, the working Cadillac El Dorado (upon which, of course, the prosthetic-Asian-eye-lidded English actor Jonathan Pryce humped in an orgasmic frenzy), and of course that helicopter (that broke down in mid-air during an early London performance I saw and added an unwelcome thirty-five-minute intermission to the second act). Still, one could argue that the spectacle all but swamped the story, reducing the piece to little more than a lush sounding and spectacularly melodramatic piece of operetta (“Miss Saigon” is through composed—light on actual numbers but heavy on Asian-stringed musical leitmotivs and heavily orchestrated recitative).

Drury Lane’s production, in a lean and fluid staging by director Rachel Rockwell and choreographer Stacey Flaster, also thrills the ears and eyes as there isn’t a weak voice in the cast—the women are particularly strong belters—while musical director Roberta Duchak sustains tension throughout the show’s many shifting tempos. And the production looks gorgeous: designer Kevin Depinet’s structure of slatted bamboo walls sets the right mood and becomes a neutral canvas upon which Jesse Klug’s sumptuous lighting and Mike Tutaj’s smart projections easily create atmosphere (from a fiery sunrise to a boysenberry-colored sunset). As for that famous American evacuation scene, it’s accomplished sans helicopter but with enough imaginative pizzazz to remain a moment of sweeping emotional storytelling and staging. And that’s what makes this revival as good if not better than the original: the emotional wallop it packs. Just try to remain unmoved as desperate men and women claw at a barbed-wire fence (another staging coup by Rockwell and co.), or as bar girls sing about their celluloid-fantasy dreams of acquiring a better life in America while American soldiers mechanically fondle them (a beautiful stage tableau).

I don’t know how successful Drury Lane’s transferred shows have fared downtown these past few seasons, but they would be apt to eventually move this property. Then our city could truly boast of having some quality Broadway in Chicago. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook, (630)530-0111. Wed 1:30pm/Thu 1:30pm & 8:00 pm/Fri 8:30pm/Sat 5pm & 8:30pm/Sun 2pm & 6pm. $29-$35. Through March 8.

“You’re too young to be here!” one of my colleagues said, spotting me at the opening of “Grease.” I was flattered, naturally, but as the youngest of a five-sibling postwar American family, I vividly remember real-life greasers, fascinatingly dangerous and cutting-edge creatures of social revolution that have about as much to do with “Grease” as real-life gangsters have to do with “Guys and Dolls.”

If you are a working theater critic in Chicago, you have probably seen more productions of “Grease” than just about any other musical. It’s a constant audience favorite and will sell out no matter what you do with or to it, but one of the reasons that I was curious to check out this national touring production based on the Broadway revival cast via a network talent show was to see if having some younger blood might do this shopworn work some good. We have endured “Grease!” in so many guises: the one where a middle-aged star of “Grease 2” was trying to play Danny sporting a toupee that kept slipping or where an elderly Davy Jones of the Monkees played the American deejay complete with his working-class British accent particularly stand out, or when Frankie Avalon decided to turn the show into an impromptu concert during his walk-on as the Teen Angel. Did I mention Archie Bunker’s daughter as the school teacher or the demon-possessed girl in “The Exorcist” as the love interest? There have been ex-Bradys, former disco queens, has-been teen idols, you name it.

Yes, this cast is young, but every time one takes the stage for a solo slot, it’s as if the audience members are still judges for a talent show: you get lots of over-emoting, flashy moves and generally over-exaggerated performances that have little to do with the material and much more about the individual performers who look to be extending their fifteen minutes of fame however they can. And much of the audience seems to get the idea and reacts wildly, as if cheering is now a scripted part of the show.

One bizarre decision is the inclusion of the disco songs from the movie that were never part of the play, which means you get a long opening dance sequence to Barry Gibb’s “Grease is the Word” along with melodrama songs from the movie at inopportune spots in the play, which really doesn’t work very well in terms of dramaturgy. And then there’s “American Idol” celebrity Taylor Hicks emerging out of a large ice cream cone, blandly crooning away as the Teen Angel in an ill-fitting glittery suit and silver hair to match.

The whole thing gave me a great idea, that I really do think would work and would be far more entertaining than this rather overdone vanilla production: where is Bill Murray when you need him? The Chicago native and longtime “Saturday Night Live” and film star could make a comeback as the bad airport lounge singer that he used to do on SNL. And then at least we could know that we were laughing with the cast. (Dennis Polkow)

“Grease” plays through January 18 at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress Parkway, (312)902-1400, $26-$85.

RECOMMENDED

Fresh off Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord and the Young Vic in London, the pedigree of “The Investigation” alone is fairly theatrical: it’s a semi-fictional documentary written by Peter Weiss about the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, based on transcripts from Nazi war trials; adapted by one of the kings of postmodern French cultural theory, Jean Baudrillard; and finally adapted once more by Dorcy Rugamba, Isabelly Dyselinx and the Rwandan theater company Urwintore into a production that points out its uncanny similarity to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Weiss’ original play was most noted for its participation in the genre of what’s now called “docudrama,” using verbatim testimony of victims and the officials in the concentration camps, in addition being one of the earliest plays written about the Holocaust. While presenting a new, contemporary parallel/superimposed context for the play, this show also cuts down the original five-hour play to eighty minutes and attempts to universalize its historical moment. Perhaps most appealingly, in contrast to the usual black and white rhetoric that dominates most plays about the Holocaust, Rugamba, who directs the show, told BBC in the fall that what drew him most to the play was that it “exposes the facts clinically, methodically, and allows the public to draw their own conclusions about the stories… It is this method of giving responsibility to the audience that most appealed to me.” (Monica Westin)

At Chicago Shakespeare, 800 East Grand Avenue, (312)595-5600. January 21-31.

RECOMMENDED

Being an engaged spectator is a peculiar skill; to fully absorb and process original acts of creation requires the kind of mental clarity, relaxation and undivided focus that’s a rare commodity in our twittering age, when audiences from the AMC to the Lyric must be reminded to silence their mobiles like children reluctant to brush their teeth before bed. Dance demands this dying skill in abundance, as a medium that uses unique physical language to speak to an ever more sedentary, disembodied culture. CDI/Concert Dance Inc borrows a phrase coined by Newsweek—“Digital Fidgeting”—to look at the electronic culprits fracturing our fragile attention spans and the isolating effects of instantaneous, virtual socialization. The piece is part of an evening of works by CDI Artistic Director Venetia Stifler and company dedicated to communication, or lack thereof. Also on the program is “Meetings Along the Edge,” an investigation of cultural intersection set in part to a collaborative composition by Ravi Shankar and Phillip Glass, and “When All is Said and Done,” a journey through the permutations of romantic love. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, (312)337-6543. January 16-18 and 23-25. Fri and Sat 8pm, Sun 3pm. $20 in advance, $25 at the door.