With a commanding performance by its title character, “Lucinda’s Bed” may offer one of the finest star turns ever by an inanimate object. Playwright Mia McCullough cleverly tells a woman’s tale by setting every scene in and around her bed: it’s where the dreams and prayers of childhood unfold, where the mischief of sexual awakening unfurls, where a marriage and family are cradled, where betrayal is contemplated, where betrayal is covered up. It’s a place of birth, a place of death. How could a mere actor compete with such gravitas?

A teen Lucinda prays to an absent god but meets the monster under her bed. He’s not scary, though, but embodied by a devilishly seductive Lucas Neff, who plays the monster (in all his incarnations) with a charismatic understated cool. In this world premiere late in its run at Chicago Dramatists, director Jessi D. Hill hustles us through the life of Lucinda, played with earnest vigor by Elizabeth Laidlaw, keeping the pace so crackling that we don’t think much about how empty her life really is, until Lucinda realizes it herself late in the play. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

June 16, 1816 remains a legendary night in literary circles. A group of writers and their friends that gathered at Villa Diodati, Switzerland—including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon after to marry Shelley), Claire Clairmont and John William Polidori—were read stories aloud by Lord Byron, after which Byron suggested that each member of the group try to write a ghost story.

Although Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont lost interest in the contest, Byron himself wrote “The Vampyre”—itself a precursor to Bram Stoker’s later “Dracula”—and Polidori wrote a now-forgotten untitled story about a skull-headed lady who was punished for peeping through a keyhole.  Meanwhile, Mary Shelley wrote one of the most famous novels of all time, “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.”

Even with Mary’s famous literary husband pushing for publication of “Frankenstein,” no conventional publisher was willing to take the risk of releasing such a shocking tale of a scientist daring to create an artificial man—only to have it turn on him—to an unsuspecting public. By the time the novel finally appeared, response was immediate and overwhelming, and it quickly became one of the biggest and best-selling books of the nineteenth century.

Nearly two hundred years later, the story continues to tantalize, to fascinate anew since now, as then, it appears that we are on the verge of major medical “advancements” based on generating life out of death or from completely synthetic means. Whether this be in the form of stem cell research that seeks to advance disease treatment from the harvest of human embryos or cloning and the ongoing trajectory that life be more efficiently and conveniently generated by non-organic means, the only shift across two centuries appears to be better technology. It’s that resonance that brings two very different versions of it to two major stages in Chicago this week. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Paul Metreyeon

A colorful but unsubstantial adaptation of “Frankenstein” that ultimately feels derivative both of the novel/Karloff film and the Hypocrites’ previous work. In a Newcity interview earlier this fall, Sean Graney expressed his intention to piece the show together out of  various “dead material” from previous adaptations, but in this skeletal version, much of the story is lost and the show itself is what feels dead. With bloody dolls hanging from the ceiling, creepy suicides in wedding dresses, and the Hypocrites’ aggressive promenade style, the show is visually appealing (though you have to work to see the cast much of the time—the MCA space feels cramped, and the actors moved around out of my view more than half the time no matter how hard I tried to keep up). Acting is energetic but often  inconsistent and even uncontrolled, and the schizophrenic mood—horror and screaming with tacked-on modern one-liners like a running joke about canned cheese—keep the show from building up real dramatic momentum. The bottom line is that while their treatment of “Oedipus” breathed new life into the play last spring, the Hypocrites and Graney make a mistake in believing that they need to make “Frankenstein” colorful, edgy, and modern to make it interesting. I found myself more often than not simply watching the black-and-white Karloff film, projected behind the stage, and finding it more moving than the anxious, histrionic postmodernism in front. (Monica Westin)

At the MCA, 220 East Chicago, (312)397-4010. Through November 1.

A new musical production of “Man of La Mancha” opened October 18 at the Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre (See review here). The production is in association with Michael James—co-owner of the Heartland Cafe—whose father Hal James won the Tony Award in 1966 for Best Musical with the original Broadway production as co-producer. “I certainly gave my dad a hard time, but I loved him,” says James. “To be completely honest, when he was doing the ‘Man of La Mancha’ production, I was more interested in civil rights, football and women.” James is setting up an exhibition of memorabilia from the original production for the run of the play. “It is a play of real importance. I’m just glad that we could do it. It’s been really great being a part of this resurgence of theatre,” says James.

Alisa Marier

RECOMMENDED

You gotta love Saint Sebastian Players. The member-supported group performs because they must; it’s not any different from what motivates their “professional” colleagues over at the Goodman. It’s populist theater at its most accessible.

With that, Edgar Lee Masters’ amalgam of small-town Illinois life is a fitting choice; it’s populist poetry that became a populist performance piece. The 1914 book challenged poetic convention, exposing a rural community’s hypocrisy through the eyes of its dearly departed.

The production has its flaws. The lighting design often puts performers in the dark, the musical numbers could be better miked, and director Jonathan Hagloch’s staging is a bit stagnant. But Hagloch’s adaptation flows with the right mixture of comedy and tragedy and the game cast’s raw energy works. Ensemble members Alisa Marier and Eric Prahl bring affable, varied approaches to their characters. They’re regular people, telling the sad, funny stories of regular people. (Lisa Buscani)

“Spoon River Anthology” plays at Saint Sebastian Players at St Bonaventure Church, 1625 W. Diversey,  (773)404-7922, through November 15.

RECOMMENDED

Lillian Hellman’s politics remain interesting because she understood how complicated her beliefs were; progress comes at a price. Hellman deftly investigates the Gordian knot of social issues featured in “Days to Come” with sly humor and heartbreaking pathos.

The wealthy Rodman family struggles to keep their brush factory open in the face of a strike. Andrew Rodman (Joe McCauley) brings in violent strike breakers; as factory conditions deteriorate, the Rodmans fall to pieces as well.

The script has its glitches; wife Julie Rodman’s (Leavey Ballou) dalliance with union man Leo Whalen (Tim Patrick Miller) seems to materialize out of thin air. But the ensemble, under Kathy Scambiatterra’s astute direction, smoothes over the rough spots: Miller’s regular-joe organizer is a model of conflicted decency; Gerard Jamroz’s slimy hood is a silky menace. Eustace Allen’s teeth-sucking thug is great fun; in typical Hellman fashion, we love the characters we should hate. (Lisa Buscani)

“Days to Come” plays at The Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark, 866 811-4111, through November 29.

Obie award-winning playwright Adam Bock’s latest work attempts to examine the effects of isolationism on the gay community. Instead, he creates a stew of implausibility and half-formed argument.

The Flowers acting troupe is a “created” family of actors and tech staff who fight so hard you’d think they were related. Bock has obviously spent time in the theater yet has no idea how one is run; his dramatization creates so many questions, the mind boggles. What Chicago theater company cancels one production and mounts Shakespeare the next night? How do either of the plays-within-the-play comment on the issues at hand? Was the fifteen-minute snippet of “Romeo and Juliet” necessary?

The ensemble does what it can with the material. Bruch Reed is vulnerable and stretched; Kieran Kredell shows a wide, believable range. But the best performances can’t salvage a piece that tries to say so much and fails to say it. (Lisa Buscani)

“The Flowers” plays at About Face Theatre at Stage Left Theatre, 3408 N. Sheffield, (866)811-4111, through November 7.

Theo Ubique’s revival of the 1960s musical “Man of La Mancha” isn’t the subtlest of productions. It’s bold, brash, in-your-face and boasting the kind of dark psychological acuteness of acting and emotional commitment by actors often relegated to straight drama. It’s been beautifully directed by David Heimann, his debut here in Chicago, imaginatively staged by choreographer Maggie Portman—I am continually and happily surprised at how creative these folks are with such an unforgiving space—and powerfully designed by Carrie Colden, who has transformed the charming No Exit Café into a claustrophobic, garish looking and puke-green tiled asylum holding cell. Clearly, there is a concept to embrace here and nobody in this production is letting go. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Tim Thomas

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

Writer, performer, artistic director and—given her new show at the Steppenwolf Theatre—adaptor Tanya Saracho would like you to know she’s on “hiatus.” And yet, after spending just a few minutes with this vivacious 33-year-old life force, I wonder just what she’s on hiatus from.

This interview almost doesn’t happen. Everyone seems to want a piece of Saracho this weekend, and I’m lucky to get an hour with her on the day of the premiere of “The House on Mango Street,” the play she has adapted from the book of the same name by novelist Sandra Cisneros. And so it is 2pm on Saturday—an hour before the press performance—and we’re whisked away to a conference room on a lower floor by David Rosenberg, the Steppenwolf’s indefatigable publicist who, travelling down the stairwell, skillfully yet gently asks Tanya if she will condescend to a phone interview with another journalist on Monday. “The day of the Jeffs,” inquires an alarmed Saracho, who will be up for three Jeff Awards that evening and who has just picked up a dress for the occasion (“Nordstrom” she had told me earlier, as if on the red carpet).  When at last we get to talking, and she rattles off her projects in her rapid-fire Span-English-hybrid lingo (something that has become a trademark of the dialogue in her plays), it’s a vertiginous experience:  along with “Mango” she has been revising and restaging “Lunatica(s)” for its November 18 premiere at Chicago Dramatists, where the show is scheduled to run for an ambitious three months (“we’re going to trust that Latinos want to see it for three months”).  She’s workshopping a new piece about queerness, culture and race—in collaboration with About Face Theater—for next year’s Latino Theatre Festival at the Goodman. She’s single-handedly heading Teatro Luna, the ten-year old company she founded with former co-Artistic Director Coya Paz, and working on a strategic plan. She has a draft due in January for an adaptation of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” for Teatro Vista (“I have to go away for a week and finish since everyone knows more about Chekhov than I do”).  And although Saracho could not confirm exactly the circumstances under which she may be working on the book of a new musical, she does tell me it’s about “hookers at the turn of the century.”  I’m subsequently serenaded with a few bars from the opening number to “Pippin,” a show she did in high school when she was a real musical-theater geek.

I’m sorry, but did someone say something about being on hiatus? Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Karen Wade

By Sharon Hoyer

In an uncommonly lucid analysis of plagiarism and influence published in Harper’s Magazine a couple of years ago, Jonathan Lethem mades the case that appropriation and originality are indelibly fused in the creation of art. The balance of the former to the latter is often the subject of heated debate, especially when copyrights (read: money) is involved. Artists tend to be fiercely protective of their work and rightfully so; the creative product is their cultural and, to a fortunate few, economic currency. By the same token, acute awareness, frequently to the point of paralysis—what Harold Bloom fetchingly labeled the Anxiety of Influence—of one’s creative predecessors is the cumbersome bag of inspiration that comes with the informed creation of literature, music, plastic arts and, since the advent of video, dance.

Julia Rhoads and Lucky Plush Productions waded into the murky subject of appropriation, intellectual property and theft this year, inviting people to steal, buy or share dance on their Web site stealthisdance.com (derived from Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book”), and probing their own mental spaces for choreography remembered and misremembered. The video housed on their site—memory “samples,” impersonations, donated moves and choreographic “mash-ups” blending iconic dance phrases from “Swan Lake,” Martha Graham, “Thriller” and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”—is source material for their performance this weekend, entitled “Punk Yankees.” Read the rest of this entry »