Scott Jaeck, Alex Weisman, Eddie Bennett, Barbara Garrick, Myra Lucretia Taylor/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

It took me a while to decide if I loved or hated Thomas Bradshaw’s “Mary,” in its world-premiere production at the Goodman Theatre. I decided on the former, in large part because of the very fact that it created this quandary for me—I like plays that provoke—but if you go with the latter, I won’t argue with you. It is, I suspect, that polarizing. Plato must be spinning in his cave.

On its surface, it’s a whimsical campy sendup of racism and homophobia, set mostly in the about-to-be-AIDS-plagued eighties, when a Wham!-loving young music student brings his flamboyant boyfriend home to meet his clueless parents who live on the remnants of a plantation that’s been in the family since long before “The War of Northern Aggression” and retain, to an absurd degree, a racial attitude circa 1835. Mary is the family’s virtual house slave, an illiterate, content and virtually uncompensated servant cut from the “mammy” mold. Take this ludicrous situation, and add in penis enlargers, Cabbage Patch dolls and a disco-fied dance scene—yes, they vogue to Madonna—and you’ll start to wonder why you’re not catching this show in the back room of a Boys Town club. It won’t be long, right, before racism and homophobia give way to one big we-are-the-world family, as if Charles Busch made an after-school special.

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RECOMMENDED

“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless,” according to sci-fi maestro Orson Scott Card. WNEP makes a stab at understanding the worth of the recently departed in their remount of “Postmortem,” the improv-generated “living” obituary.

The format’s intriguing; each performance centers on a different obituary. The show’s construction staggers vignettes from the subject’s life with monologues about the period, complemented by an eclectic sound design. Humor isn’t the only goal here; drama has as much weight as the funny, which is refreshing.

Sunday’s crowd was small and the show was a tad subdued; the characters and stories could have been more fleshed out. But the ensemble’s efforts were still impressive. Matt Ulrich played a believable everyman as the evening’s subject (a veteran day trader); Regan Davis and Henri Dugas offered up some intriguing character work. It’ll be interesting to see where these lives go. (Lisa Buscani)

WNEP Theater at the Viaduct Theater, 3111 North Western, (773)296-6024. Through March 6.

Photo: Erica Jaree

RECOMMENDED

Sometimes returning home can be hard. Especially when your siblings greet you by bashing your knees with a crowbar. After three years away in LA, Rick (Christopher Chmelik) arrives at a trashed vacant office in his hometown for a violent game with his two brothers: the stoic Peter (Walter Briggs) and the goofily vacuous Kent (Ryan Bourque). Gory action viscerally personifies familial struggles, replacing subtle emotional sniping with a knee to the face. And the blood does flow. Especially after Rick’s employer, an aging Chuck Norris-type (Danny Goldring in a tour de force), shows up to join the melee. Much of Brett Neveu’s uber-dark, fast-paced script seems like a collection of secret rules and inside jokes, but director Duncan Riddell, along with his dynamic cast, gives the show a loose, flowing feel that makes you feel like you’re in on the jokes, even when you’re not quite sure what they are. (Zach Freeman)

The Inconvenience at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 North Wells, (773)658-4438. Through March 2.

Kelly Owens, Armand Fields

Alice Childress’ Obie Award-winning 1955 play looks at racial conflict in front of and behind the curtain of a new Broadway play. White and African-American actors bond and clash, with mixed results.

Wiletta (Velma Austin) lands a role in an “edgy” play that purports to confront racism. She takes young John (Armand Fields) under her wing, teaching him the tricks that veteran actors like Millie (Kelly Owens) and Sheldon (Cola Needham) use to survive “the man,” dismissive director Al (John Mossman).

The subject matter’s important but director Vaun Monroe doesn’t catch the show’s disconnects. Character transformations of John and ingénue Judy (Kimberly Chelf) are never explained; responses to prejudice start big and stay that way. Mossman’s condescension is so obvious that the third-act reveal of his racism is no surprise to anyone. The show has its highlights; Austin and Owens’ commiseration is fun to watch. But they can’t rise above the show’s head-scratching misses. (Lisa Buscani)

The Artistic Home, 3914 North Clark, (866)811-4111. Through March 20.

Lance Hill, Adrienne Matzen/Photo: Tyler Cope

Inspired by a night of swapping CTA commuting stories with friends, director Thomas Murray interviewed and recorded dozens of Chicagoans’ transit tales, adapting them for the stage nearly verbatim. Played out in a style reminiscent of Funny or Die’s “Drunk History” shorts, the resulting compilation is an engaging hour-long trip on the Red Line from Jackson to Howard with a vignette representing each stop. In a risky move that paid off when I saw it, the final leg of the journey is supplied by a volunteering audience member’s story immediately reenacted by the troupe. There’s a heavy emphasis on “crazies,” which is understandable considering how memorable those episodes can be, but this focus simplifies the EL experience; the few stories about random connections with other riders work best. The language patterns used point to storytellers with similar viewpoints and reminded me that this Red Line doesn’t go south of Jackson. (Zach Freeman)

Waltzing Mechanics at the Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, (773)293-3682. Through February 23.

Here’s the press release from Hubris Theatre:

Season 5: LESSONS OF LUST AND GREED

CHICAGO, IL–Hubris Productions is proud to announce its 2011 season: Agnes of God by John Pielmeier, The Underpants by Steve Martin and the Chicago premier of All Childish Things by Joe Zettelmaier. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Victory Gardens:

Victory Gardens announces its 2011-2012 season
Season to include works by John Logan, Sarah Ruhl, Theresa Rebeck and Jackie Sibblies Drury

Chicago, IL— Artistic Director Dennis Zacek and Executive Director Jan Kallish announce the 2011-2012 Victory Gardens season.  The season will include In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl; What We’re Up Against by Teresa Rebeck; We Are Proud to Present …, a play developed as part of IGNITION by Jackie Sibblies Drury; and Goodman Theatre’s production of Red by Victory Gardens Ensemble Playwright John Logan. The final play of the season will be announced at a later date.   Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: John W Sisson, Jr.

By Valerie Jean Johnson

After twenty years collaborating in the internationally renowned performance ensemble Goat Island, one might expect the company’s co-founders Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish to take a break; perhaps a nice, long vacation. On the contrary—just as Goat Island was embarking on the tour of its final performance, “The Lastmaker,” Hixson and Goulish were birthing a new company, incorporated in the fall of 2008. “Matthew and I wanted to continue our creative practice of making performances and all the activities that surround this process (writing, drawing, filmmaking, symposiums, teaching) after Goat Island,” explains Hixson. “We wanted…[to work] on a project-by-project basis to minimize the commitment artists would need to make to our company; collaborating with international artists as well as working locally; and supporting younger artists.” Thus was born Every house has a door—inspired, energetic and incredibly ambitious. The company embarked on its practice by creating not one, but three new works, developed in tandem over two years and across the globe; in Rio de Janeiro, in Croatia, and here in the couple’s hometown of Chicago. One of these pieces, “Let us think of these things always, let us speak of them never,” is a “theatrical quartet” starring Goulish, Stephen Fiehn of Chicago-based performance duo Cupola Bobber, and two collaborators from Zagreb, Croatia—actor Mislav Cavajda and dancer/choreographer Selma Banich—debuting in Chicago this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Leahy, Philip Earl Johnson, Lia Mortensen, Noah Schwartz/Photo: Chris Plevin

RECOMMENDED

This new play by Dan LeFranc, which began life as a forty-minute one-act, runs like a time-lapse portrait of a multi-generational family over the course of a good half century or so. To put it another way, imagine the prologue from Pixar’s “Up,” the sweet couple seen at every high and low of their life together, but also imagine they had children, and their children had children, and so on. LeFranc packs an amazing number of scenes into the play’s seventy-five-minute runtime, and while this attempt to etch a grand narrative of the modern American family often feels cloyingly typical, and even exhaustive in its breadth, its depths are painfully and humorously familiar. An agile cast of four boy/girl pairs, at four stages of life, breathes life into Sam and Nicole, their parents and children and lovers, showcased well in Dexter Bullard’s effective, minimalist staging. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron, (773)409-4125. Through March 6.

Ronald Hynd with Fabrice Calmels & Valerie Robin in rehearsal/Photo: Herbert Migdoll

The first time a ballet company rehearses in costume, particularly if those costumes are lavish, late-nineteenth-century evening dress, is a great day to be a fly on the studio wall. While tugging at bustiers, flourishing capes, flashing garters to the mirror and general horsing around with top hats and canes, the dancers begin to truly inhabit their characters. And character provides the fluttering heartbeat of the Joffrey’s current production: Ronald Hynd’s 1975 comic ballet “The Merry Widow.” It’s a company premiere for the Joffrey, who have had the fortune to work with John Meehan, the principal dancer in the original production, and now the 80-year-old Hynd in the week before opening night.

The story originated as a turn-of-the-century operetta by Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehar. The action, comprised of intertwining romances, flirtations, infidelities and jealousy-fueled fisticuffs seems as ripe for adaptation into theater or a Jean Renoir film as an evening-length ballet. I sat in on a rehearsal of Act III, when the multiple storylines established in the first two acts intersect at a grand ball and comedic chaos ensues. Hynd’s translation of comedy of manners into formal choreography is remarkably nimble and spirited; he carries on a witty physical conversation with the score (adapted from the original by John Lanchbery), so the dancers move directly to the whims and moods of the music, performing their lighthearted farce like marionettes. Read the rest of this entry »