Here’s the press release from Theo Ubique:

THEO UBIQUE EXPANDING TO FOUR PRODUCTIONS FOR 2009-10 SEASON
First Production, “The Taming of the Shrew,” Opens August 30

Chicago, July 29, 2009 — Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre, a Rogers Park company performing at the intimate No Exit Café, is extending its 2009-10 season from three to four productions, including William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Man of La Mancha,” Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” and a fourth production to be announced later.

Fred Anzevino, co-founder and artistic director, who directed the company’s previous plays, is working on a new adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” transforming it into a light opera.  He will co-direct it with Beverle Bloch.  Two new directors with Theo Ubique will direct the first two plays of the 2009-10 season.   Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Liz Lauren

By Brian Hieggelke

Here’s how Mattie Hawkinson’s spending her summer in Chicago: babysitting for her friends, playing with their dogs, showing her extended family around the sites of Chicago—”I’ve been to the Art Institute so many times I almost bought a membership”—going for ice cream, taking walks in the park. “Anything innocent,” she says. Kind of a mother’s dream, when your twentysomething daughter’s living thousands of miles away in the big city.

Except that every day at 7:30pm, she steps onto the stage at the Biograph Theatre and steps into the role of Una, the victim of a pedophile more than a decade earlier when she was twelve. And that pedophile, who she spends the next ninety or so minutes locked into a confrontation with, is played by none other than Chicago theater’s reigning leading man, William Petersen, who famously deserted top billing in television’s top show, “CSI,” so that he could return to the town of his formative years, and play roles like that of the onetime child molester in David Harrower’s harrowing drama, “Blackbird.” Innocent daytime pursuits for Hawkinson are not youthful frivolity, but rather a necessary counterbalance to the darkly damaged soul she inhabits each night.

Read the rest of this entry »

Angela Ingersoll and Charissa Armon/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

It’s fitting that “The Mistress Cycle” takes the point-of-view of “the other woman,” a perspective usually overlooked in most romantic narratives, since it’s the first theatrical production watched from the stage of the spectacular Auditorium Theatre, and that’s an equally unusual vista. Set in a “black-box” seating a mere 200, it’s awe-inspiring to gaze out on the nearly 4,000 empty seats, and to take in Adler & Sullivan’s glorious space from a vantage usually reserved for performers. The show itself, the restaging of a 2007 production by suburban Apple Tree Theatre, is a pleasant if somewhat unchallenging night of music executed in its highest form. Crafted as a one-act song cycle, rather than a dramatically staged musical, Jenny Giering (music) and Beth Blatt (lyrics) are onto something reasonably fresh and economical here, with five actors gliding around a small performance space transformed into a cabaret-style nightclub and singing their stories. Some strange juxtapositions lurk below the surface, though. The recurring throughline of characters who “love outside the lines” without apology, with its strong feminist currents, gets undermined by such constructions as having the eroticist and serial lover Anais Nin (played with vixenish vigor by Angela Ingersoll in the standout performance amongst a sturdy cast) take center stage with the song “Papa,” which blames the unconventionality of her life, so unabashed in its writings, on the bathetic notion that she was just working out daddy issues. Read the rest of this entry »

Donald Blair and Chris Cantelmi (foreground)/Photo: Johnny Knight

Without even knowing the rest of playwright Brett Neveu’s canon—something I’m loathe to admit given how cherished this homegrown Chicago playwright is—I see “The Last Barbecue,” first presented in Chicago nine years ago under the direction of Ann Filmer and currently being revived by 16^th Street Theater in Berwyn (with Filmer once again at the helm), as something of an exercise and experiment, a play whose ultimate value may have been more beneficial to an up-and-coming playwright than to—dare I say—his audience, especially nine years later.

At its basic, this eighty-minute chamber piece centers around a family (mother, father, son, wife and old girlfriend) and their interactions at a barbecue that never starts and around a reunion that we never actually see. As in Chekhov, the characters don’t necessarily speak with each other as much as they talk to and past one another.  As with Beckett, characters are referenced but never appear, and activities are prepped (a croquet match) but never begin. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Pogue and Karen Yates/Photo: Scott Cooper

By now, the real-life events that provoked John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” are as famous as the play itself.  How a young African-American man in the 1980s maneuvered his way into the homes of New York’s upper crust and bamboozled the likes of Calvin Klein under the false pretenses that he was actor Sidney Poitier’s son.  How the playwright got slapped with a $60 million lawsuit by said African-American imposter claiming that his life had been plagiarized for the show’s hit Off-Broadway run in 1990.  And how he famously picketed the play’s London premiere two years later and had to be removed by the British police.  Poor guy, he probably should have bothered to see the play.

“Six Degrees of Separation,” now in an entertaining but unmoving revival courtesy of Eclipse, isn’t really “about” Paul, as Guare has christened the young African-American conman for his play.  Yes, Paul arrives at the doorstep of moneyed Manhattanites—here, an ambitious art dealer and his socialite wife Ouisa—under the false pretenses that he is Sidney Poitier’s son, has been violently mugged and is a classmate of the couple’s kids at Harvard.  But any similarities to real life end there.  During the ninety minutes that follow, Guare turns Paul not into a character but into a catalyst by which everyone else entertains questions of race, class, money and morals.  Guare, a raw absurdist in his early playwriting years but a flashy intellectual by the time he wrote “Six Degrees” (but thankfully not as pompous as he became with “Four Baboons Adoring the Sun” which followed), shows shades of both playwrights here, playing around with time and structure, dazzling with his intellectual veracity (one “verbal aria” effortlessly deconstructs Salinger, draws literary references to Chekhov and Beckett and references European attitudes to blacks) yet occasionally wallowing in the waters of low-brow sitcom dialogue, especially in scenes involving affluent Manhattan children.  Clearly there’s a lot of seductive surface glitz here, but the key to the play’s emotional heart is two-fold, and Eclipse’s production boasts at least one in the actor playing Paul. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Matthew Hooks

There is something about entering a poorly marked building of halls and doorways and sitting on a hard floor in what feels like a storage unit to watch a series of scenes in which one person after the next dies a horribly gruesome death that makes a person squirm a little inside. I’m pretty sure that feeling is exactly the point. Abraham Werewolf’s “DECADENCE: The Two Faces of Robert LaPage” is raw and frayed around the edges, but this upstart company, now producing its second show, is finding something that just might work, a gritty experience with a few genuinely scary moments.  Actually, a couple of plays are happening here.  To see the show twice is to see the show once. Audiences may sit in one of two rooms and watch different scenes of blood and gore.  In the end, the stories on two stages collide in a death-filled finale that could stand to push the boundaries a bit more. The writing and performances are inconsistent; some fall flat while others are beautifully chilling or funny or sad. Abraham Werewolf is still finding its footing, but something about this project evokes a zeitgeist that I imagine to be similar to the early days of some of Chicago’s more illustrious ensemble-based theaters. (William Scott)

At the Post Family’s gallery and workshop, 1821 W. Hubbard #202, abrahamwerewolf.com, through August 22. $15-$25.

Here’s City Lit’s press release:

CITY LIT THEATER ANNOUNCES

2009-2010 SEASON

30^th ANNIVERSARY SEASON WILL BE CELEBRATED

WITH HAMMETT, GRAHAME, SHAKESPEARE, FINNEY,

AND THE RETURN OF P. G. WODEHOUSE

The work of P. G. Wodehouse, the most frequently produced author in City Lit Theater’s history, will return as part of the theatre’s Thirtieth Anniversary 2009-2010 Season, artistic director Terry McCabe announced today, along with world premiere adaptations of novels by Dashiell Hammett and Jack Finney, a Shakespeare tragedy, and a musical adaptation of a beloved Kenneth Grahame classic for all ages.

City Lit’s 2009-2010 season consists of The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, Macbeth by William Shakespeare, The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney and Oh Boy! by P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times is reporting that Merce Cunningham, the titan of dance and interdisciplanary art, has died. Merce’s company is scheduled to perform in Chicago this fall, at the Dance Center of Columbia College, where he’s been a regular every other year for the past several years. While it’s too early to tell whether anything will change regarding the Chicago schedule, Cunningham was actively planning for a specific legacy for his company after his death, involving a two-year tour and then a closure of the company.

The"Bye Bye Liver" cast, left to right: Lindsey Fisher, Sherra Lasley, Joshua Dunkin, Mike Ehmann, Jeff Strickland (not pictured: Mike Barton)/Photo: Jason Robinette

Pub Theater Company moves to a new space with a beer garden just in time to open a third year of “Bye Bye Liver: the Chicago Drinking Play” on July 24th.  At the new Pub Theater at Fizz, 3320 N. Lincoln, company president Byron Hatfield promises, “You will have a very funny time and cheap drinks.”  The company’s formula is pretty basic, Hatfield says, if you give people laughs and liquor, “You pretty much can’t fail.”

After two successful runs of Bye Bye Liver, Pub Theater began attracting crowds that were too big for its space at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, and started looking for its own space in Lakeview, where many of the company members and audience members lived. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from The Theatre School:

The Theatre School at DePaul University Announces the 2009-2010 Season

The Theatre School at DePaul University (John Culbert, Dean) is pleased to announce upcoming productions for its 2009-2010 Season. Throughout its 80+ year history, the school has provided Chicago audiences with affordable and meaningful theatrical experiences. Students are involved in all aspects of production – as actors, designers, dramaturges, technicians, directors and production staff; and are fully supported by the professional faculty and staff of The Theatre School. This season will feature everything from classic children’s tales to a world premiere of a play written and developed in class at The Theatre School, and many worlds in between.   Read the rest of this entry »