Joseph Wycoff, Will Zahrn (front), Steve Pickering/Photo: Michael Brosilow

Many a great disaster film begins with a disheveled scientist making a discovery that is bound to change the course of human civilization forever. And yet, when he stands before a delegation of politicians or military leaders, no one listens. Next Theatre’s “War with the Newts,” based on Karel Capek’s 1936 novel, has a similar scene, and yet it doesn’t come until halfway through the second act. Mr. Povondra (a spirited Joseph Wycoff), butler to a Czech industrialist, claims responsibility for having opened the doors that led to the discovery and exploitation of a new species of pearl-diving, island-building newt-people, who eventually grow smart enough to desire world takeover.

While the adaptation necessarily finds a new satirical target despite remaining in the original time period, it can’t reconcile its new environmental slant—with overtures toward Katrina and the recent oil spill—with the unavoidably human element of Capek’s pre-WWII prescience. Povondra’s mission through all this is to record the history for which he takes responsibility, but as inevitable as the newt uprising may be, it’s not a history we feel doomed to repeat.

The ensemble, especially Will Zahrn as the industrialist and Steve Pickering as a swarthy sea captain, certainly bring welcome theatricality to this science-fiction narrative, though. The elegant period design by Collette Pollard takes advantage of Loyola’s generous facilities, and yet the newt puppets, though beautiful, seem unnecessary. Jason Loewith’s direction finds a well-paced balance between humor and horror. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Next Theatre, The Mullady Theatre, Loyola University Chicago, 1125 West Loyola, (847)475-1875. Through June 20.

Janet Ulrich Brooks and Craig Spidle

Immigrants bring their home with them in their culture. Playwright James Sherman returns with a salute to the historic Yiddish theater through the door-slamming, hand-wringing, arched-eyebrow farce he’s best known for.  It’s a mixed bag.

Commercial actor Jack (Craig Spidle) performs a benefit reading of an old Yiddish play with his wife (Janet Ulrich Brooks) and an attractive newcomer (Laura Scheinbaum) he has his eye on. Simultaneously, his grandfather Jacob confronts similar artistic and romantic challenges on what is left of the Yiddish theater circuit.

The ensemble masters the comic timing that farces demand. Spidle handles the Jack/Jacob duality with aplomb, but it’s hard to root for a guy so deeply into his lechery. Brooks, a fine talent, is wasted as the wife who does nothing but chase after her wandering hubby. Scheinbaum is fresh and quick, but her relationship with Jack/Jacob is improbable. Such an important theater scene deserves more. (Lisa Buscani)

Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln, (773)871-3000, through June 20.

In this numbingly drab one-man show, actor Ben Pardo languidly moves around the sparse stage reciting poetry for a full hour—and although the amount of memorization here is rather impressive, the delivery is decidedly not. From very brief Emily Dickinson and A.E. Houseman pieces, to the lengthy Samuel Taylor Coleridge classic “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—which takes up more than half the show’s running time—Pardo imbues them all with the same lifeless line readings.

If these were original pieces, or even more obscure pieces by renowned writers, these dull recitations may have retained a bit of interest, if only from a scholarly viewpoint, but Pardo has chosen standard texts, including the infamous “Hamlet” soliloquy—yes, the one that begins “To be or not to be!” Pretentiousness, thy name is Pardo.

Even the most stirring Shakespearean dialogue falls flat here: lengthy pauses are deadening to the show’s already bloated running time, the blocking feels like mere wandering and by the end I expected an undergraduate professor to stand up and begin giving notes on basic dramatic delivery. (Zach Freeman)

Gorilla Tango, 1919 North Milwaukee, (773)598-4549, through July 2. $10.

Chiké Johnson and Allen Gilmore/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Don’t let the exotic title fool you. “Sizwe Banzi is Dead” speaks loud and clear to a contemporary audience on at least three different levels: as dazzling monologue play, as powerful political drama and as valuable social history chronicle.

The play, a collaboration between writer Athol Fugard and South African theater artists John Kani and Winston Ntshona, began life in the early 1970s, and features a back story as vibrant and fascinating as the play itself. Censored heavily throughout its early life, the production experienced the dehumanizing effects of apartheid when its black writers had to pose as Fugard’s servants in order to remain working artists on the play. Another horrifying absurdity of the times was the so-called “pass laws” that regulated and restricted the movement of blacks in the country and what they could or could not do for work. Indeed, moving around from town to town in search of work or to plant new roots became as complicated and dangerous for some as if they were actively participating in a political protest. Forced to carry around a pass book that had to be produced on demand, blacks experienced what someone today would if they were forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet tracking their every move. Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Parkinson, Eric Hissom, Ted Deasy/Photo: Craig Schwartz

The premise of this show is simply to take the shooting script for the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film “The 39 Steps”—one of the best films Hitch made in England before he moved to Hollywood—and have it acted out with a clever cast of four, with three of the actors taking on multiple roles, often right within the same scene. Add to that constant references and canned soundtrack bits from Hitchcock’s later, better-known American films and popular television series and you have an evening of live thriller references that may send sleuth nerds into orbit as they one by one tally up the source of the allusions.

Would that all of this added up to a meaningful whole worthy of the Master of Suspense by actually supplying some, but the references themselves are usually so forced and clichéd that they tend to stick out of the plot like a sore thumb: “Which way did they go?” “North by Northwest.” Yikes. Add to that a detachment of the cast from each other and to the audience and you have a rather wooden evening, a bit like trying to stage a game of “Clue.” Read the rest of this entry »

Benjamin Sprunger, Brendan Melanson/Photo: Lee Miller

RECOMMENDED

Despite its prosaic title, “2,000 Feet Away” is actually a delicate and complex play that takes on a delicate and complex issue that few if any playwrights are tackling today: adults having sex with minors. If I hesitate to use the term pedophile it’s because the play, an American premiere by Steep Theatre Company, isn’t really about pedophilia, even though Australian playwright Anthony Weigh confusingly includes a very minor character, a man in his forties corresponding with a pre-pubescent girl, who’s clearly a pedophile. It also doesn’t help matters when the law, such as that from the 2005 Iowa State Legislature that made it illegal for a registered sex offender to live within 2,000 feet of child-populated places like daycare centers, schools and parks, blurs the distinction between a sex offender, someone who has had intercourse with a person under the legal age of consent, and a pedophile—an adult who eroticizes and has sex with children. It may sound like I’m splitting hairs here, but the subject fascinates me and it’s important to make a distinction between a card-carrying member of NAMBLA, the highly controversial, highly illegal and gay-community-divisive North American Man Boy Love Association, and a gay man in his thirties or older who has a positive, affirming and consensual sexual relationship with a teenager. These complex cross-generational relationships have also been well-documented and embraced within the lesbian community, but are almost entirely unknown and incomprehensible to heterosexuals. It’s a thorny and controversial issue. It’s tough to have an intelligent discussion about this with a diverse group of people without offending someone. And quite frankly, you’ll look at this play in a different way whether you’re gay or straight and whether you have children or not. Read the rest of this entry »

Dana Black, Rachel Rizzuto, Lindsey Gavel, Ian Westerfer, Jacqueline Stone, Stacie Beth Green/Photo: Vojkan Radonjic

RECOMMENDED

This early Brecht musical, centering around a hedonistic antihero, presents a huge intellectual and aesthetic challenge to any acting company, but after TUTA’s “The Wedding” this fall, another early Brecht adaptation, it’s no surprise that director Zeljko Djukic handles it adeptly. In fact, one leaves wondering whether Brecht’s first, and obviously most juvenile, play is frankly worthy of their treatment. Baal has historically been presented as a rock star, a heartbreaking romantic figure drunk on alcohol, women and nature, where the entire plot of the play revolves around his use and abuse of women, the fallout thereof, and his eventual tragic demise. It’s not a politically correct show, to say the least. TUTA’s byline for the show frames Baal with an updated, twenty-first-century hipster rhetoric: “Is it better to stick to one’s beliefs or sell out?” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Even the most open-minded are still prisoners to our abilities and inclinations. In Profiles’ latest, Annie Baker’s script examines the theory that our tolerance is only an extension of our comfort levels.

Joyce (Barb Stasiw) and Phyllis (Cheryl Graeff) welcome a visiting artist (Joe Jahraus) into their home during Body Awareness Week, Phyllis’ dry-as-dust artistic paean to physicality. The artist, a photographer who specializes in female nudes, brings controversy and twinges of longing to the couple and their interpersonally clueless son (Eric Burgher).

The ensemble captures the folly of reasoning and knowledge in the face of a craving for connection. Stasiw shows her character’s need for something beyond logic; Graeff’s Phyllis is a more-than-willing hostage to the political fiefdoms of academia. But the show’s standout is Burgher, who careens between monotone Rain Man and raging threat at the drop of a hat. Each is brittle, lonely and searching for a way into themselves. (Lisa Buscani)

At Profiles Theatre, 4147 North Broadway, (773)549-1815, through June 6.

Natasha Lowe, Matt Hawkins and Stacy Stoltz/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Even though director David Cromer is taking New York by storm, he has thankfully not forgotten his way home.  His Writers’ Theatre production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” is one of the most anticipated shows of the season. As we have come to expect with a Cromer play in his native Chicago, the theater space itself has been torn up and transformed in such a radical way that you completely enter into the cramped space of the Kowalski New Orleans flat before one line of dialogue is uttered.

Cromer’s symbol for the play is the bed, and is the first thing that you see as you enter the space, and you practically have to walk over it to get to the section of seats running parallel to it. (There are also seats surrounding both sides of the kitchen and a “neutral” block of seats straggling both.) The audience is configured in such a way that no matter where you are, there are moments in the play where the characters will be virtually right in your face, or in another part of the house where they may be almost unseen. Thus, if you are sitting in the bedroom, for instance, you sometimes miss some of what is going on in the kitchen, and vice-versa. This could be perceived as a weakness, and yet it proves quite effective in demanding closer audience attention, of having to listen more carefully one moment, and cover your ears the next, just as in real life. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura T Fisher and Mark Comiskey

To get it over with at once, Plasticene’s “From A Fading Light” fails so miserably as the work of serious high-minded art it so desperately wants to be, that one could almost appreciate it for the piece of entertainingly pretentious theater it does not intend to be.

The trouble starts early on. You’re handed a playing card with a picture of a particular bird species on it and instructed to stay with your group as a preteen-looking pagegirl, wearing a costume that wouldn’t be out of place at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, ushers you around the three levels of the St. Paul’s Cultural Center, a dilapidated church and rectory that serves as the playing space for this multi-site-specific event. Down into the basement. Through the labyrinthine corridor to the kitchen. Up a winding staircase into the attic. Outside onto the patio. Although I was part of the “Blue Jay” group, there must have been a “Crow” group since another pageboy would frequently emit a “caw…caw…caw” call while shepherding his small group past mine. What this bird motif has to do with the actual show, I have no idea.

What follows are a series of nineteen or so terse scenes between two or more individuals (the production features a total of six performers, three male and three female) with little spoken narrative. Two women chop carrots and prepare a stew in the kitchen, the aroma of which smelled wonderful but made my already-unengaged mind contemplate post-show dinner options instead of what was happening in front of me. Read the rest of this entry »