Lisa Pederson's hoot of a Halloween costume, a year after mastectomy

For thirty years, ever since she was a teenager, Lisa Pedersen has been told that she should do comedy. After surviving cancer, she finally decided to give it a shot and started performing at the “Your Sunday Best” open-mic at Schubas.

“I’m trying to spread the word about cancer,” she says. Pedersen wants people to remember that it’s out there but if we remain positive things will get better. “I had a lot of surgeries and pain but I always maintained my sense of humor,” she says.

Starting June 5 at 11pm and running Saturday nights through June 26, Pederson will be performing her one-hour standup-comedy act “Laughing in the Face of Cancer” at Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 North Milwaukee. Pedersen plans to donate her proceeds from the $10 tickets to the shows to Imerman Angels, an organization that connects cancer fighters with cancer survivors.

Cancer is a sensitive subject; Pedersen hopes her act will help people feel more comfortable asking questions.

“I expected someone to say that’s inappropriate and wrong but that’s not been the case,” she says of her show. “People who are struggling want to be laughing and enjoying life,” Pedersen says. “Things happen but we have to keep moving forward.”

This is not just a show for cancer survivors: Pederson promises that everybody will be able to appreciate her humor because everyone’s life has been touched by cancer in one way or another.

“The humor will hopefully remind people that they are not alone and it’s okay to laugh—it’s okay to laugh at yourself.” (Ashley Abramowicz)

RECOMMENDED

There are no seats for “Fuerza Bruta: Look Up”; you’ll spend the entire sixty-five minutes standing on the stage of the Auditorium Theatre. Actually, you’ll spend most of the time jumping, cheering and dancing along with the joyous cast of this truly spectacular event, leaving the theater in a state of euphoria, wanting more. Or not, if your idea of a night at the theater is a well-defined personal space and a performance that at least attempts to create a cohesive narrative. Cohesion is consciously, anarchically rejected in “Fuerza Bruta,” as evidenced in one of the pieces—the show is made up of a series of disconnected performance fragments—when the cast is crammed into a too-small room above and in front of the audience, fidgeting to the point of destruction, where walls made of boxes, furniture in the form of checkered-tableclothed plastic tables, chairs and trash cans are soon rained down toward us. Soon free of the confines of conformity, the cast breaks into a joyous dance before descending the stage to frolic amongst the audience, dancing, breaking harmless styrofoam forms over unexpectant heads and then suddenly disappearing to regroup for the next piece.

A cultural mashup that might be the perfect entertainment for our times, “Fuerza Bruta: Look Up” is a burst of joy, a feast for the eyes, ears and mind. A fin-du-monde what-the-hellness seems to wash over the whole affair, sometimes decadent, sometimes erotic, always playful. The cast is a handsome mix of youngish boho chics, with a vaguely exotic aura emanating from the Argentinean origins of the work’s artistic director/impresario Diqui James (who also co-founded the seminal “De La Guardia”), composer Gaby Kerpel and many of the other key creators and cast members. The show’s pieces seem to alternate between a dystopian futurism and a utopian surrealism, with tableaus distinctly conjuring up visual art motifs from those movements. Or, alternately, men suffer, women play. As in a man, in a suit and tie, running on a giant treadmill for no apparent reason. He is shot, wounded and keeps running. Does he represent the seemingly constant state of political turmoil, with coup d’états and brutal military regimes that haunt Latin America? Or perhaps the inextricable blend of big business and violence that accompanies commercial power flexed outside its natural borders? Juxtaposed with such dramatic imagery, women soon frolic balletically on a giant shimmering wall, as if dancing on the wind. Later, erotic nymphs enchant the crowd in a giant overhead dipping pool of sorts, conjuring up Homerian Sirens, Surrealism and synchronized swimming at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

EP's "Baal"

Why have there been so many productions of “Baal” this year?  “So many” in this case means two, but that’s two more than anyone might expect of Brecht’s juvenile obscure drama, and it’s a question that’s been raised all year by various critics. “Baal” is Brecht’s first play, written in 1918, before he beame a Marxist, before epic theater and it’s full of the kind of unfocused passion and anger you’d expect of a young playwright. Its plot is difficult to follow, no matter how strong the production (and I thought both Chicago shows this year were fairly strong); there’s no real dramatic arc, just a number of violent and tragic episodes concerning antihero Baal and the lives he destroys in his all-consuming desires. The show’s misogyny is striking—women only exist to fall in love with and then be rejected or even murdered by Baal.

Baal is very much a young poet’s play about youthful bohemianism. Its production history is patchy and strange; Brecht rewrote it several times in the twenties for various productions, and each time it changed to match a different political agenda. The most famous production is perhaps David Bowie’s made-for-TV movie (he released songs from the play as an EP), and Baal has most often been made into a rock-star figure, with his own peculiar hard-living—sex, drugs, alcohol and, oddly, nature—and ballads about himself. However, both EP Theater and TUTA’s productions this season have turned Baal into a kind of contemporary hipster figure, and I think it’s this reinvention that might help to explain why this show seems to be speaking to theater companies at this moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Todd Rosenberg

RECOMMENDED

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC) is closing out the season this weekend with a Summer program that exemplifies why these dancers truly are cultural badasses. Adding a fifth world premiere to their repertoire this season, HSDC will unveil Aszure Barton’s first work for the main company of dancers.  Through a process working with each company member to develop a shared language, Barton’s piece will highlight the individuality of this eclectic group of artists and their power to function as ensemble.  As we went to press, problems with music rights postponed the theatrical premiere of  Alejandro Cerrudo’s “Deep Down Dos” until the fall; it has been replaced with “Bitter Suite,” which was created for the company by Jorma Elo in the fall of 2009. The evening will close out with the return Toru Shimazaki’s “Bardo,” and exhaustingly athletic journey to the underworld that demands the full dexterity of the dancers.  This program may not be a bottle of accessible pills, but it will do what HSDC does so best: new work, challenging work and work that rattles your bones a little bit.  (William Scott)

At the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph (312)334-7777. June 3-6; Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. $25-$90.

Kate Buddeke, Carmen Roman and Suzanne Petri

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The 1933 play “Tobacco Road” is heavy on the dirt and depression. It’s relentlessly bleak, the occasional gallows humor notwithstanding. And the last fifteen minutes are as grueling to watch as a Greek tragedy. It’s nonetheless so well done in a ferociously relevant and revelatory production by American Blues Theater—the direction, design and acting are very well damn near perfect—that the evening is a triumph and carries with it that rare quality of being an experience at once unbearable and uplifting. Read the rest of this entry »

Tracey Kaplan/Photo: Kyle Buchanan

The best thing about playwright Brooke Berman’s “Hunting and Gathering,” a trivial and sometimes idiotic piece of writing, is that it’s been given a snappy and decently acted production by Theatre Seven, which means that the experience—if you must go—isn’t as painful as it might have been. Otherwise, “Hunting and Gathering” is one of those neurotic, self-consciously idiosyncratic New York comedies that thinks it’s smart because it can fold references to Woody Allen films, Rothko and Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” into diarrhea-of-the-mouth dissertations on Craigslist, IKEA and the arcade hunting game “Big Buck Hunter.”

It’s a Chicago premiere, but I’m perplexed as to why it arrives here courtesy of Theatre Seven, whose mission it is to “…produce work that speaks directly to the diverse Chicago community.”  “Hunting and Gathering,” with its insular New York references and elitist attitudes, has little to impart to down-to-earth Chicago theatergoers.  Observations about WASPy New Englanders such as “She’s not cold; she’s just from Maine” would mean nothing to a Midwesterner unless they had schooled on the East Coast or read Bret Easton Ellis. I attended Amherst and love my eighties literary Brat Packers, so I get the tired joke. But a ten-minute opening monologue about one character’s transient life through dozens and dozens of New York apartments—apparently the play is Berman’s semi-autobiographical tale of her nomadic urban existence and inability to find a real home—falls flat, with lines about Greek bakeries in Queens and the liberal enclave that is Park Slope making little impact. I lived and worked in Manhattan for five years in the early 2000s—Upper West Side on 76th between Broadway and West End Avenue—and I still quickly found Berman’s real estate recital tedious. If anything, the peripatetic lives of the play’s characters, and their inability to lay down roots, serves as one big obvious metaphor for the homelessness in their heart and inability to connect. Big fucking deal. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Imagine if NPR—in particular, perhaps, the “Planet Money” show—were a theater company, and “Casanova Takes a Bath” might be something they would produce. In this one-person show, writer/performer David Isaacson takes a topic as dry as the recent American financial crisis, and overlays it with the lens of eighteenth-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, suddenly making the narrative of the financial crisis as saucy as a Harlequin romance. As Isaacson bounces between his portrayal of Casanova (building his costume from his wife’s closet) and a “heightened, theatrical” version of himself, reading memoir excerpts from a lectern on the one hand and pulling headlines from a tall stack of newspapers and arguing with math on a chalkboard on the other, you have to marvel at the kind of mind that could see the parallels between two such seemingly disparate worlds. Yet, while you may not come away with any deeper understanding of economics, Isaacson’s insightful antics are nothing short of a revelation. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Theater Oobleck at Prop Thtr, 3502 North Elston, (773)347-1041. Through June 13.