Photo: Toni Gauthier

By Sharon Hoyer

Kids don’t know their family is unlike any other until they leave it. I wasn’t aware that adoption was anything but commonplace until the subject came up casually in first grade; I was suddenly surrounded, for the first time, by a small crowd of gaping 8 year olds who peppered me with questions that seemed either obvious or unimportant. (And though the approach is usually more delicate, I get most of the same questions from my adult peers: do you know who your “real” parents are? Have you ever wanted to find them?) One minute you’re you, flipping through storybooks and building snow forts in the front yard, and the next you’re in the position of explaining things about yourself of which you never gave a moment’s thought.

It is with thoughtfulness that Robert Moses addresses the complications our world imposes on nontraditional families (and, if you look closely enough, isn’t that most of them?) in his piece “The Cinderella Principle: try these on, see if they fit.” Moses collaborated with playwright Anne Galjour to collect and weave together stories from families that still exist outside the American imagination. Moses staged movement to further explore the emotion in the text, which is read from behind a translucent scrim upstage of the action. You hear from kids who were teased by their classmates and from parents trying to walk the line of tolerating the curiosity of strangers while shielding their children from the often hurtful ignorance of the outside world. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“That sure isn’t how I remember it,” remarked one theatergoer, “but wow!” No, this is not your Mom and Dad’s “Les Miserables,” this is an incarnation completely rethought and reworked for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Many diehard “Les Miz” fans may end up missing aspects of the original, but others—myself included—will find it a vast improvement on the original production.

The fundamental flaw of the work used to be that if you come to “Les Miz” cold, even at more than three hours in length, you didn’t have the slightest clue as to what was going on. Characters came and went so quickly—in those days, literally with a circular turn of its massive set—and character development was so weak that the audience was given little chance to know the characters, let alone care what happens to them. But then, why would you try to skim over the entire epic Victor Hugo story in Reader’s Digest terms? Why not just tell one segment of the story, but in three-dimensional terms?

In a sense, that is what this new streamlined production attempts to do by fleshing out the narrative with a staging and production design with enough variance that it is able to highlight what is going on rather than the cavernous blackbox approach of the original which counted on a Robert Rauschenberg-like jigsaw puzzle of stuff that would come and go and transform into various shapes and patterns, including a battlefield barricade. When the pieces weren’t moving, the circular stage was, characters whisking in and out of scenes as if they were on a pillory, every turn representing a passage of time from the next day to decades later. Visually, the current production is quite Hugo-esque, the set designs based on his actual artwork. And via sophisticated computer graphics, these scenes quickly morph from one scene to another often to eye-popping effect. Read the rest of this entry »

Christine Lin and Adam Dodds

Adapted from Euripides’ “Iphigenia at Aulis,” playwright Caridad Svich’s “Iphigenia…(a rave fable)” is a disorienting amalgam of plot points involving the title character, her (possibly?) incestuous relationship with her despotic general of a father, a hermaphroditic rock singer and a trio of dead drag queens. As Iphigenia wanders the streets of her unnamed country (well represented by the nicely stylized black and white of the set design by Steph Charaska), electronic and vaguely video-gamey music flows constantly through the inadequate sound system. There’s a multimedia aspect to the show that has promise but ultimately distracts from rather than enhances the clarity of the story. The blocking frequently feels lackadaisical and director Tony Adams would do well to pick up the pace throughout, as the stilted dialogue and unnecessarily lengthy pauses effectively kill any momentum the more exciting scenes might generate. Ultimately, though, it’s the disjointed script that does Iphigenia in. (Zach Freeman)

Halcyon Theatre at Greenhouse Theatre Center, 2257 North Lincoln, (773)404-7336. Through March 27.

Dan Krall (right) and James Zoccoli (left) with audience member Kim Lyle in “A Domestic Disturbance at Fat Little Charlie’s 7th Birthday Party”/Photo: Saverio Truglia

RECOMMENDED

Anyone who was ever curious but hesitant to check out Collaboraction’s annual Sketchbook festival because of the marathon-length run time or the hit-or-miss nature of the lineup, which normally spans two nights in rep, would do well to consider attending “Reverb,” a greatest-hits collection of Sketchbook pieces from the previous decade of the festival’s history. While the eight short plays on the bill aren’t all winners, despite apparently having risen about the chaff, the brisk direction by artistic director Anthony Moseley keeps the ninety-minute production moving along. The highlights include “Deep Blue Sea,” a suspenseful, underwater love story; “The Lurker Radio Hour,” in which a dejected old-timey horror-story radio host searches for his runaway wife through the airwaves; “The Untimely Death of Adolf Hitler,” a wickedly smart and funny science-fiction alternate history; and “A Domestic Disturbance at Fat Little Charlie’s 7th Birthday Party,” an interactive comedy that cleverly epitomizes Collaboraction’s vision of unique experiments in theatrical experience. Music, video and visual art round out the diverse multimedia experience. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Collaboraction at the Flat Iron Arts Building, 1575 North Milwaukee, (312)226-9633. Through May 28.

Photo: Cheryl Mann

RECOMMENDED

If you’re wondering what some of Chicago’s independent choreographers have been up to during the dark and quiet winter months, scoot over to the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Thursday or Friday. Lucky Plush is hosting two evenings of new and evolving works by a handful of frequent collaborators. Lisa Gonzales and Darrell Jones perform together their 2009 piece “Traitor” and present separately two premiere works, with Gonzales bringing in guest artists from New York and Darrell continuing his investigation of ritual feminized gestures. Peter Carpenter is also presenting a next chapter in his dance cycle on the subject of abundance in the face of economic scarcity. You’ll also have the chance to peek at Lucky Plush’s progress on a new work to be presented at the MCA in October. They promise a “trailer” version of the piece, which tells the story of a marriage dissolving in favor of other, more cinematic options. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse, 3035 North Hoyne, February 24 and 25, 7:30pm. For reservations, contact Julia@luckyplush.com. $20, $15 students.

RECOMMENDED

The four characters in Philip Stokes’ darkly minimalistic play begin stripping down within the opening minutes of the show. First comes literal stripping (down to underwear), shortly followed by emotional stripping, as each character gives a brief but disturbing account of their troubled life. Decidedly painful experiences are presented with an offhandedness bordering on glibness, but the cast, under the direction of Nathan Robbel, manages to uncover the torment hidden beneath the short language, even while evoking occasional laughter. The four have been somehow positively affected by a kind but shadowy figure named Marvin and there’s a sudden shift midway through from individual stories to a collective communication between the characters as they deal with the death of Marvin. This is a tough transition story-wise and I’m not convinced Stokes’ script is fully up to the task, but the actors make it work, finding honesty in the messy confusion of dealing with loss. (Zach Freeman)

At RBP Rorschach, 4001 North Ravenswood, (773)750-2033. Through March 19.

“Feet of Clay” is LASTmatch’s Southern Gothic response to “Three Sisters.” But that was then and this is now; Stephen Louis Grush’s script tries and fails to model Chekhov’s chronicle of loneliness.

Orah, Matty and Iris (Kimberly Logan, Jennifer Alexander, Leah Karpel) drink and bitch in their father’s house. Servicemen Vincent (Paul Dunckel), Sonny (Craig Cunningham) and Nick (Brandon Ford) moon over them in the booze-laced periphery.

The isolation doesn’t translate here; with social media, no one’s cut off from old loves or far-off places. Marriage isn’t the only option for today’s woman. Dying to live in New Orleans? Get on the bus, girl. The piece’s first half is weighed down with exposition, yet Sonny’s PTSD symptoms go unexplored, the family’s sense of privilege and its loss is undefined and a climactic murder goes undramatized. The truncated ending offers no real resolution. After all their heartache, those girls deserve one. (Lisa Buscani)

LASTmatch Theatre Company at the Royal George Gallery Theatre, 1641 North Halsted, (312)988-9000. Through March 19.

Mat Smart in rehearsal for Steppenwolf for Young Adults’ "Samuel J. and K." Photo: Joel Moorman.

By Monica Westin

I first encountered Mat Smart’s theater at this year’s VisionFest, LiveWire Theatre’s short-play festival. Smart’s ten-minute play “A Sudden Fluke of Physics”—about a young couple in the moments following a bad car accident— was deceptively simple, and its raw thematic material of romantic love and its quiet heroisms could all too easily have become mawkish. But it didn’t. Instead, it was both funny and heartening: what romantic comedy so often tries but fails to be.

“When did romantic comedy become a dirty word?” Joel Ewing, managing director of LiveWire muses. LiveWire will be producing a full-length play of Smart’s, “The 13th of Paris,” at the Greenhouse Theater this spring, a big step for the company, which recently changed its mission to solely doing world or, in this case, Chicago/Midwest premieres. Ewing, who will appear in the play, describes it in many of the same terms I would use to describe “Sudden Fluke”: funny, touching, romantic, kind, but with a subtle arsenal of ideas packed in. The hardest part of Ewing’s job recently has been describing the play without making it not sound like a standard romantic comedy; “The 13th of Paris” is about a young Chicago man who leaves his long-term girlfriend to go to Paris with his grandparents’ love letters and try to discover what his stable relationship might be missing. Once again, Ewing finds that Smart “has navigated to write a very honest and genuine look at modern love… that manages to avoid ‘all of that’ entirely”… “all of that” being the usual platitudes of romantic comedy. Read the rest of this entry »

Johan Botha, Emily Magee/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

Clocking in at four-and-a-half-plus hours and taking thirty-plus years to get back to Lyric Opera, “Lohengrin” is once again riding in on a swan—or in this case, a projected swan silhouette—for a stunning evening of musical theater as only Wagner could provide it.

No, this is hardly the new production that was originally promised, but a truncated version of the colorless whitebox version seen here in 1980 with Eva Marton’s memorable Elsa and “staged” this time around in a static and at times, ridiculous manner. But no matter. Close your eyes and feast on the glorious sounds, a rare Chicago opportunity to savor Wagner’s sixth and last opera, per se, as the true Wagnerian revolution that would forever change music would commence in earnest with his next work, “Tristan und Isolde,” which would usher in the new art form that Wagner would dub music drama.

“Lohengrin” is a work with one foot each in opera and music drama: the characters are the most psychologically developed to that point, and the drama component is as important as the music, a rarity as of yet, and of course, the work has some of the finest choral singing of any opera. Pity that longtime Lyric chorus master Donald Palumbo never had a crack at “Lohengrin” in Chicago before the Met spirited him away from us, but current chorus master Donald Nally, who is retiring after this season, really pulled out all of the stops and had the Lyric Opera Chorus sounding their most glorious of his time here. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Johnny Knight

In 1969, Giuseppe Pinelli fell from the fourth story of a police station in Milan, Italy. An anarchist who was arrested in connection with a series of bombings, his death—or murder—inspired a wave of protest against an increasingly authoritarian government. Signal Ensemble stages a modern update of Dario Fo’s 1970 satire, which fictionalizes Pinelli’s death for its backstory. This cast of screwballs gives the lie to the inherent madness of a state struggling to retain power by any means necessary.

As the Madman who ends up impersonating the judge sent to investigate the death of the anarchist, Joseph Stearns deserves credit for never losing a beat in his character’s convoluted line of reasoning. Vincent Lonergan, Anthony Tournis and Eric Paskey are the police inspectors whose contorted attempts to avoid blame resemble Three Stooges bits. Simone Roos as a shrewd independent reporter and Elizabeth Bagby and Christopher M. Walsh as inept officers round out the cast. In the hands of director Anthony Ingram, Fo’s play often feels more like farce than satire, but, as with many great social commentaries, that difference is academic. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Signal Ensemble Theatre at 1802 West Berenice, (773)347-1350. Through March 19.