Carrie Drapac/Photo: James Palmer

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As far as I can tell, last year saw the introduction to Chicago of the work of playwright Young Jean Lee, when her company took a touring production of her raucous play “The Shipment” to the MCA for a successful weekend run. It’s a shame that she hasn’t really been produced locally until now. Red Tape’s double bill of two of Lee’s one-acts bring out the irreverence, incisiveness and unironic jubilance of her writing.

In equal amounts of awkwardness, both plays present seemingly innocuous situations in which performers directly address the audience with at-times-shocking brutality. In “Pullman, WA,” three actors take turns conducting a sort of self-help seminar for emotionally unbalanced, angsty hipsters. In “Church,” a group of ministers preach to the humorlessly religious. Whether or not you belong to either of these groups doesn’t matter, as the mission of both plays is to make you alternately question and believe in the speakers’ moral tales.

As usual, the performer-audience relationship at St. Peter’s is rearranged to suit the show, and in this case that relationship is crucial. Moving from a row of tables with a chalkboard to a church rec room, the audience cannot help but feel completely immersed in the worlds the actors present. After this, Lee’s name ought to start showing up in more Chicago theaters’ seasons. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Red Tape Theatre at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 621 West Belmont, (847)738-6919. Through March 5.

Sally Murphy, Stephen Louis Grush/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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The playwright strives to create work for the ages, but Laura Eason’s “Sex With Strangers” is so topical it should have an expiration date.

Ethan, played with charismatic ferocity by Stephen Louis Grush,  chronicles his sexual conquests in masochistic detail on his popular blog, which he’s parlayed into a bestelling book and a movie deal. (Tucker Max, anyone?) He meets Olivia, a technophobic almost-forty literary novelist,  who’s trying to crank back up her long-stalled career. He repulses her with his story but charms her with praise of her story and before long he’s in her pants and in her business, helping her plug into the magical marketing power of the internet. The play, which I saw in a 2009 developmental incarnation as part of Steppenwolf’s “First Look Repertory of New Work,” is a study of the effects, both positive and negative, of the living-life-in-public phenomenon that the internet has fueled, through blogs, social media and so on. Ethan reads email and texts on his phone while in the middle of an intensely personal conversation with Olivia, behavior so common nowadays it almost seems beyond parody. Read the rest of this entry »

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Will the recent release of Darren Aronofsky’s menacing ballet thriller slash horror film prompt audiences to, um, flock to see the ballet that served as the film’s narrative framework? Hard to say, but the State Ballet Theatre of Russia is certainly timely taking this one on the road. It’s the St. Petersburg-based company’s second time in Chicago (the last was their 2006 production of Cinderella), performing Russian ballet in the time-honored tradition. Meaning you won’t see a drop of blood or glimpse the guts of art-making so literally imagined in “Black Swan,” but you will see the gleaming product of a quest for perfection: ranks of weightless ballerinas slicing through footwork with surgeon-like precision, leg extensions high enough to change a light bulb and a cast of sixty-five moving with one mind. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Auditorium Theatre, 50 East Congress (800)982-2787, February 4 at 7:30pm and February 5 at 2pm and 8pm. $30-$87.

Don Bender/Photo: Johnny Knight

With Bernie Madoff in jail and Americans chomping at the bit to tar and feather the rest of the Wall Street hoodlums who put the country in its current economic mess, Ben Jonson’s fable about the pitfalls of greed proves timely. Making City Lit’s take on the play clear is its 1920s Art Deco production design, no doubt intended to echo the era leading up to America’s first financial crisis. Never mind that the play is set in Venice.

Don Bender plays the wily fox of the title, who with the assistance of his servant Mosca dupes Venice’s greediest citizens into believing he is deathly ill and giving him bribes in return for the top spot in his will. Bender proves a competent master of the language, but his deliberateness with the text encapsulates a show-wide easygoing pace that tends to undermine the comedy. Eric Damon Smith stands out as the slimy Mosca, and original music by Kingsley Day reinterprets Jonson’s songs as pleasant jazz interludes throughout this production that simply forgets to be a satire. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

City Lit Theater at the Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, (773)293-3682. Through February 27.

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What what! Don Pedro, Benedick, Claudio and Don John are in the hizouse! Leonato’s house that is. Having just wrapped up a successful nationwide tour slaying whack MCs left and right, these hip-hop soldiers are laying up in their old friend Leo’s crib for some R&R when Claudio falls for Leo’s fine but ditzy daughter Hero. A dope wedding is planned until that ol’ dirty bastard Don John decides to funk it up. Meanwhile Benedick and Hero’s sassy cousin Beatrice drop pun-filled disses on each other in a rap battle of the sexes. Co-creators and directors The Q Brothers call it a “hip-hoptation”—“mixing Big Pun with Shakespeare.” And though their lyrical rhythms are more reminiscent of the Beastie Boys or Too Short, they know their way around the Bard’s tale and this cast knows how to keep it funky (and fresh) with a frenetic, infectious energy backed up by the wicked beats of DJ Adrienne Sanchez. Word. (Zach Freeman)

At Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 East Grand (Navy Pier), (312)595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, through February 13.

Photo: Aleksandr Paskannoi

RECOMMENDED

I turned on the mayoral debates before heading over to the theater tonight, not as some premeditated act, though it proved more meaningful than I realized. For I followed this short sampling of what we call “political theater” with the real thing, making for a night that made me really appreciate our ability to wage a war of words over, say, parking-meter contracts. For if you want to see theater that really makes a difference, and that puts the lie to “art for art’s sake,” you will never have a better chance to do so. Belarus Free Theatre is—since a time of political unrest against the nation’s dictatorial regime erupting in December when two of its members were arrested in its home base of Minsk and the rest of the company went underground to avoid imprisonment—truly acting for its life. It managed to escape to New York, where it had been previously booked to perform “Being Harold Pinter” in a festival, but then what? To return home meant certain arrest. In an act of magnificent compassion, The Goodman Theatre, along with Northwestern University, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the League of Chicago Theatres, with the support of private donors, stepped up and offered to create a month-long home for them in Chicago in order that they might figure out what to do next.

Knowing this makes it pretty hard to offer an objective read on their production, frankly. It’s a bit like sending a food critic to the Last Supper; you’d have to be a pretty cold-hearted SOB to pan the show. With that caveat, however, it’s a really terrific piece of experimentally tinged theater. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: John Kane

Imitation is the foundation of childhood play. As soon as we humans gain mastery of our limbs we begin to mimic the movements of the other humans and animals we encounter. As imagination develops that mimicry becomes transformation (Mom! I’m not Sharon, I’m a sea otter. Watch this!); our heroes are people that have the physical capabilities of animals or are endowed with superhuman strength or the ability to change shape. The gymnasts, dancers and acrobats in Pilobolus seem to possess all of the above and use them to create eye-popping displays of transformation. Pilobolus isn’t all AP charades, but it’s the shadow theater and skeleton-defying transmogrifications that made them a household name; remember the 2007 Oscars, when they tumbled together behind a scrim to form waddling penguins, the James Bond gun and the shoe on the Devil Wears Prada poster? A higher-brow example is the TED performance of “Symbiosis” in which the dancers appear to locomote via pseudopodia, flowing together and apart like paramecium in courtship before evolving into more complex life forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Karen Aldridge, Jacqueline Williams, Jefferson A Russell, Christiana Clark/Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux

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Regina Taylor’s new “Trinity River Plays,” the Goodman co-production with the Dallas Theater Center, is a sprawling, ambitious piece of drama. Spanning seventeen years in the lives of two generations of four Dallas women and the men who, for better or for worse, help to define them, it is a story about home and its magnetic and repulsive qualities, escape, return and renewal.

The central character, Iris, begins in the first play as an awkward teenager with ambitions of living in New York and becoming a writer. On her seventeenth birthday, she loses her innocence in an event that will inform the rest of her life. The second play finds Iris returning home as a successful yet divorced 34-year-old writer to discover a secret held by her strong and independent mother. As foils, Iris’ Aunt Daisy and cousin Jasmine have problems that are both their own as well as intertwined with the rest. Painful secrets abound in these plays, and the confrontations with each of them snowball exhaustively. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Joan Marcus

As if the Dolly doppelganger in the form of American Idol runnerup Diana DeGarmo and the digitized projection of Dolly narrating the show within the face of a huge center stage clock weren’t enough, there was a third Dolly on hand at last Wednesday’s opening night of the national touring production of “9 to 5”: Dolly Parton herself.

Escorted by Governor Pat Quinn, who officially proclaimed the occasion—which just happened to be Parton’s sixty-fifth birthday—as “Dolly Day” in Chicago, Parton took the stage in a magenta fringed outfit and told anecdotes to the audience about everything from filming “9 to 5,” her first movie, to getting to know and love Chicago when she filmed “Straight Talk” here. The audience interrupted at one point with a spontaneous chorus of “Happy Birthday,” and Parton seemed genuinely touched and gushed with her signature Southern charm and said, “That’s just about the sweetest thing that ever happened to me!”

If only the rest of the evening had been as entertaining. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Human rights activists use the “Never Again” rally cry when it comes to genocide. But it has happened again: in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and now in the northern regions of the Sudan. Winter Miller’s “In Darfur” attempts to break down the conflict’s complicated politics and put a face on the tragedy.

Journalist Maryka (Kelli Simpkins) needs proof to put Darfur’s genocide on the front page. She finds it in Hawa (Mildred Marie Langford), a local who has been raped. Maryka publishes her story against the wishes of doctor Carlos (Gregory Isaac), creating violent repercussions.

Langford is a revelation; she nails her character’s humanity. Simpkins and Isaac show the longing and frustration of those forced to stand by and watch. But the star of the show is the multimedia set; Amanda Sweger’s set design and Mike Tutaj’s video and projection work give us the images we need to understand the unthinkable. (Lisa Buscani)

At TimeLine Theatre Company, 615 West Wellington, (773)281-8463. Through March 20.