Graham Jenkins and Kirby Brown

Considering what went down at Chicago Shakes last spring, it’s difficult to understand why a Chicago theater company would want to produce a Neil LaBute play. That aside, “Bash” is not necessarily one of his more nuanced works, and the production by Brikenbrak Theatre Project does little to elevate it beyond its basic manipulativeness.

Three short works comprise the evening. “Iphigenia in Orem” finds a mid-level businessman confessing to the suffocation of his infant child in a Las Vegas hotel room; in “A Gaggle of Saints,” a college-aged couple attend a fancy dress party in New York; and in “Medea Redux” a woman relates the complicated relationship she has with her son’s father.

April Taylor as the Woman in the final piece deserves credit for creating the only sympathetic character who has committed a monstrous deed. If the rest of the production had been handled with such care, it might have been more than a moral freak show. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Brikenbrak Theatre Project at the Viaduct Theatre, 3111 North Western, (773)296-6024. Through October 31.

Anna Carini

RECOMMENDED

An “adaptation of an adaptation of a re-translation” of “Antigone,” “Too Much Memory” retains all the quandaries of the original: moral sister demands burial of brother, clashes with conformist uncle, falls in love with cousin, tragic ending. Ah, the classics.

Anna Carini’s Antigone occasionally comes off as bratty instead of principled; she’s most effective when her character realizes what she’ll lose. We buy her relationships with lover Haemon (Brett Schneider) and sister Ismene (Cyd Blakewell). All three capture the pain of the consequences.

Kudos to Howie Johnson; his Creon is a leader you can sympathize with. But he lacks the compassion Antigone demands and therefore loses everything.

Director Anna Bahow doesn’t have to work too hard to apply the text to contemporary scenarios. Societal conformity shackles us then as now. Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson’s script blends the contemporary and the classic seamlessly. Big themes never die. (Lisa Buscani)

SiNNERMAN Ensemble at the Side Project Theatre, 1439 West Jarvis, (773)728-3361. Through November 13.

Nadja Michael/Photo: Robert Kusel

By Dennis Polkow

When outgoing Lyric Opera general director Bill Mason first announced that Chicago Shakespeare founder Barbara Gaines would be making her operatic directorial debut with Verdi’s “Macbeth,” I was skeptical. Not that there wasn’t much to admire in Gaines’ imaginative stagings of more than thirty classics by the Bard at CST; it was the fact that she admitted that her previous opera exposure had been being “dragged” to the old Met as a young girl by her grandmother, that she didn’t know Italian, couldn’t read a score and would be learning the work off of CDs, and had not even known that Verdi had written an operatic adaptation of “Macbeth” before being asked to direct it. As artistic director of CST, would Gaines be willing to hire a director who barely knew the Bard and was illiterate and couldn’t read Shakespeare, I wondered?

Yet as Gaines’ new production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” that premiered at last weekend’s black-tie Lyric Opera Opening Night Gala overwhelmingly demonstrated, it doesn’t matter how you get there—Gaines even admitted having read “Opera for Dummies”—what matters is the end result. And in this case, the end result is something quite extraordinary. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Cameron Wittig

By Sharon Hoyer

Alaska-born, Minneapolis-based artist Emily Johnson choreographs in a sense more all-encompassing than physical movement alone. Her intimate performances orchestrate storytelling, dance, live music, local history and an acute sense of connectivity that invites audiences to perceive their surroundings with fresh eyes. Her most recent work, a collaboration with musicians Joel Pickard and James Everest entitled “The Thank-You Bar,” explores conceptions of displacement, myth, longing and home.

Why did you decide on such an intimate seating arrangement for The Thank-You Bar?

As I was making this dance about displacement and home, I was thinking about how we construct our home structures. So if my current home is in Minneapolis, I build my relationships, my work, my bus route—we create everything we need to consider someplace home. I was doing research with animal behaviorists. I asked them about displacement—like when we build a new building in an area where a certain kind of bird nests and it’s detrimental to these birds. Researchers talk about the capacity for adaptation that so many animals have developed. That humans and animals can, to varying degrees of difficulty, pick up and move our homes and build them again. This idea is so interesting to me that I tried building things. I tried building a beaver lodge. It isn’t used, but I tried creating a structure like a beaver lodge. I had a few seating arrangements in mind in terms of building a home for this dance, for the audience and the performers.

Why did you abandon the beaver lodge?

Well, I didn’t all the way. It’s adapted into one point in the dance. I did use it in one of the first informal showings. I brought a small group of friends into the beaver lodge and told them the story there. The beaver lodge is still under my friend’s front porch. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

The works of Stephen Sondheim have been a Porchlight Theatre staple over the years, though thus far, the company has presented mostly Sondheim’s linear works with clear narrative and straight-ahead musical numbers; “Sunday in the Park with George,” the 1984 far more abstract and, at times, virtually operatic Sondheim work about the genesis and contemporary significance of a major work of art that is a Chicago institution, namely, Georges Seurat’s “Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte” (“A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”), is an immense undertaking for the company that, happily, is paying off handsomely. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Pomeroy, Jon Stutzman, David Amaral and Leah Urzendowski/Photo: Blake Montgomery

RECOMMENDED

It’s a bit of a stretch, but you could almost call The Building Stage’s new show “The Frankenstein Expedition,” as much as it assembles multiple versions of a man into one, each performer contributing a separate aspect of this rough-hewn characterization of Sir John Franklin. In signature company fashion, the myth of Franklin is torn down to its essentials only to be put back together refreshingly new. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Set in a Garfield Park barbershop amidst the now-infamous riot of 1966, Terry Abrahamson’s “Doo Lister’s Blues”—originally produced as a workshop at the DuSable Museum of African American History in 1999—is Chicago-centric theater that tackles national themes of race, free speech and governmental oppression. Abrahamson, a Grammy winner with numerous impressive credits to his name, posits here that music can elicit social change. As the titular Doo—a barber-cum-songwriter—Warren Levon (an actor reminiscent of rapper Cee-Lo Green both vocally and physically) sits in his shop with his friend Catfish (Kenneth Johnson) and pens saccharine doo-wop odes in his spare time. After a personal tragedy (which director Victor Cole stages expertly) and much urging from a Jewish hippie (Victoria Abram-Copenhaver), Doo changes his tune (and tunes) and sets about writing socially relevant lyrics. This quickly lands him and those around him in hot water with Uncle Sam. As with good song lyrics, the message is clear without being ham-fisted. (Zach Freeman)

National Pastime Theater, 4139 North Broadway, (773)327-7077, through November 28. $30.