Brian Parry, Elizabeth Stenholt, Susan Monts Bologna/Photo: Scott Cooper

RECOMMENDED

If you didn’t already know that playwright Naomi Wallace is from Kentucky, you might assume the writer of this play set in seventeenth-century London during the plague is a natural-born Englishwoman. Not that it matters too much; well-researched historical dramas about experiences far-removed from a writer’s own are hardly a new thing. Yet beyond the gory details of highly stratified English life, maintained even during the plague, there’s a sense that the nobles, beggars and thieves in “One Flea Spare” could exist in any time or place, for that matter, here and now.

Independently of each other, Bunce, a sailor, and Morse, a young girl, seek shelter from the plague in the home of the Snelgraves, just days before they had expected to be able to reopen their doors. Only Kabe, a guard, declares they’ll have to stay shut in another twenty-eight days. Now all four are stuck with each other.

Eclipse’s revival of the play uses the Greenhouse’s studio space remarkably well, encouraging feelings of claustrophobia. Brian Parry and Susan Monts-Bologna are terrific as the Snelgraves, a bitter couple whose marriage went sour too early. J.P. Pierson’s Bunce has a sensitivity and romantic streak you wouldn’t expect of a sailor, and Elizabeth Stenholt owns the stage as street-smart Morse. Zach Bloomfield as Kabe, a shameless profiteer, compels laughter via discomfort. Anish Jethmalani’s direction is, as the Donne poem goes, “cruel and sudden.” (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Eclipse Theatre Company at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln, (773)404-7336. Through May 22.

RECOMMENDED

In 2003, twin sisters Lynx and Lamb Gaede formed a pop group, recording the ballads and anthems of the white power movement. Their crude warbling received major coverage; they espoused their ideology on “Good Morning America.” “White Noise” is the thinly veiled dramatization of the Gaedes’ story that explores media manipulation with uneven results.

Morally bankrupt producer Max (Douglas Sills) manages Neo-Nazi sisters Eden (Emily Padgett)  and Eva (Mackenzie Mauzy) and skinhead boyfriend Duke (Patrick Murney). Max recruits Jake (Eric William Morris) to code their music and take it mainstream.  All goes well until Duke demands that they get their real message across.

Matte O’Brien’s book is dark and sharply funny, but the show’s “Broadway big” numbers and voices bog it down as it builds to a cliché climax. “White Noise” is loud and super-slick but that’s the point: It shows us how effective hate with six layers of shellac can be. (Lisa Buscani)

At The Royal George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted, (312)988-9000. Through May 15.

Here’s the press release from Next Theatre Company:

NEXT THEATRE COMPANY ANNOUNCES 31st ANNIVERSARY SEASON
The Main Stage Season Includes a United States Premiere, a Chicago Premiere and the Hit of the 2011 Humana Festival.

EVANSTON, IL – Next Theatre Company is proud to announce their 31st anniversary season main stage productions. The season includes one of the most talked about productions at the 2011 Humana Festival, Maple and Vine by Jordan Harrison and directed by Damon Kiely, the United States premiere of The Girl in the Yellow Dress by South African playwright Craig Higginson and directed by Joanie Schultz and the Midwest premiere of After the Revolution by Amy Herzog and directed by Kimberly Senior. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Piccolo Theatre:

Piccolo Theatre Announces:
2011-2012 Season

Evanston – Piccolo Theatre announces a hilarious and exciting line-up for their 2011-2012 season.  Following a triumphant and laughter-filled 10th Anniversary Season, Piccolo Theatre Artistic Director John Szostek has the Piccolo Ensemble back on the boards for two brilliantly funny classics and an original Holiday Panto. Piccolo Theatre welcomes back playwright Jessica Puller who has penned her third crazier-than-ever Panto, now in its eighth year as a family holiday tradition.  Read the rest of this entry »

Adolescence is a time of rapid, often confusing and, for some, painful change—identities come into question, rebellions flare, bones quite literally ache. Atalee Judy finds herself experiencing such restlessness as her company, formerly known as Breakbone Dance Co, enters its teenage years. “The change of the name is very symbolic of the change in people’s lives and my own desire not to be categorized or pegged,” she says. “I have an aversion to stagnation and being seen as one thing. That’s probably from the punk scene: messing around with different identities.”

Judy, a lifelong punk, is the creator of bodyslam technique: a strength-intensive, gravity-embracing movement approach forged from the kinesis of mosh pits, dojos and dance studios. Breakbone Dance Co was the name synonymous with the technique; audiences could expect a Breakbone show to be aggressive and political—a fist raised in defiance rather than an evening of refined aesthetics or cerebral abstraction. When Judy announced she was changing the company name to BONEdanse, there was more to the moniker than a new label on the same product. “It was a personal change and a company change. It’s not that I won’t do bodyslam anymore, I’m just tired of making my company do it all the time. I was getting the sense that they weren’t into it and I decided that was okay; I honed the company down to collaborators. I’m allowing a lot more elements into the work—before I would have set tunnel vision about what I would want to see on stage and wouldn’t allow for happy accidents. Now I’m opening it up to ‘let’s let this dance piece make itself.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Eric Y. Exit

RECOMMENDED

The United States’ long-troubled relationship with its southern border state tends to paint much of our perception of Mexico in simple black-and-white tones. Tanya Saracho’s reworking of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” as “El Nogalar” (The Pecan Orchard) crafts a more complex and colorful picture of a nation not only in a constant struggle to come to terms with its neighbor to the north, for sure, but also with its own troubled past and present. A clever idea, this, taking such a familiar work, so European in its themes of class and family, and setting it in Latin America where European colonizers long ago exported their notions of landed gentry, class discrimination and violent conquest.

The matriarch, Maité (played with vivacious abandon by Charín Alvarez), has returned from a self-imposed exile, along with her Americanized younger daughter Anita (energetically played by Christina Nieves), to her family’s ancestral home in northern Mexico, where her older daughter Valeria (earnestly played by Sandra Delgado) wages a losing battle to hold on in the face of an evaporating fortune and, more ominously, the violent threats of the Mexican “mafia.” Saracho’s innovations here,  in a crackling and funny script augmented by the creative direction of Cecilie D. Keenan, include a clever way of blending English, Spanish, Spanglish and Espanglés that in itself hints at the complexity of modern Mexican life. And Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set, an exquisite dollhouse in an orchard, establishes the unreal fantasy of the family’s notion of its place in the world before a word is spoken. Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Albrink/Photo: Paula Aguilera

RECOMMENDED

Combining all of the art forms as it does in a live setting,  opera is the ultimate human creation. A cursory look at the history of the genre reveals that, at its best, opera remains a step ahead of culture whether in the form of the cutting-edge eighteenth-century operas of Mozart, or the nineteenth-century “music dramas” of Wagner, which even managed to foresee much of what became twentieth-century cinema. Despite some notable exceptions, however, it was more common for opera productions to be more adventurous than the operas themselves during the twentieth century, largely a century of re-imagining new ways to stage old works.

Contemporary examples of opera where one or two elements are innovative are not uncommon, but new operas where every possible element pushes the envelope and which nonetheless manage to become much more than the sum of its parts are ultra rare. Tod Machover’s “Death and the Powers,” which is receiving its Midwest premiere by Chicago Opera Theater after premiering in Monaco last September and after having its American premiere last month in Boston, is such a work. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Sandys and Annabel Armour/Photo: Johnny Knight

Pick an Edward Albee play (a later one, say) and there’s bound to be at least one of the following: WASP-y, middle-aged elites, grudgeful bickering over ageless tiffs, steadily emptying bottles of booze. Over the years the playwright has fiendishly showcased a, to put it nicely, determined disregard for the silver-spoon set. Yet with this one, while many of these ingredients are present—except for, conspicuously, the booze—they end up in service toward one of his most irefully absurd attacks on the upper class.

A successful architect and newly fifty years old, Martin is a loving husband to Stevie and loving father to Billy to boot. Until his best friend, Ross, outs him as a goat lover. Naturally over the course of one night his whole world upends. The folks at Remy Bumppo have an erudite, funny, passionate show here, although it’s difficult to tell whether they simply gave the script a confident once-over or whether they still need to settle into it. It’s remarkable how everyone keeps their hold of their vocabularies and sense of irony even as the horror wears on. Nick Sandys’ Martin is a tormented cad, though he inconceivably retains the actor’s British accent. Annabel Armour is a roaring lioness as Stevie. If they only meant it a little more, the barbs might hurt better. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at the Greenhouse Theater Center Downstairs, 2257 North Lincoln, (773)404-7336. Through May 8.

Allison Torem, Jon Michael Hill/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

I’ve found it hard to avoid the fact that the timing of Steppenwolf’s production of “The Hot L Baltimore” is utterly bittersweet, with the death of its playwright Lanford Wilson arriving on the commencement of the show’s previews. But in a way, I suppose it can’t be helped. With the play’s themes of loss and the hauntings of the past in the present day, one sees the ghostly silent yet ever-present figure of The Man pacing the breadth and depth of the Hotel Baltimore and inevitably regards him as Wilson himself.

Regrettable as it is, though, the show is a perfect tribute from the company who owes so much to Wilson, Steppenwolf’s 1980 production of his “Balm in Gilead” having rocketed the ensemble into theatrical stardom when it transferred to Off-Broadway to become an instant sensation. And that show has much in common with this one, each featuring a sympathetic cast of misfits who stumble under the weight of their hardships and haunting pasts while clawing toward a seemingly unreachable future. Likewise, there is a blatant poetry to both plays, more subdued in Wilson’s later work, a lyrical theatricality that bursts the seams of American Realism. It’s that lyricism that director Tina Landau fully exploits in this production, and to a glorious advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Anne Sheridan Smith/Photo: Brandon Dahlquist

RECOMMENDED

Mae West was a pioneer, writing and producing her own work and pushing the sexual content envelope with an impact that still stands today. Claudia Shear’s smart script captures West’s influence then and now.

The piece shifts between the blonde goddess’ bio and a love story.  Jo (Anne Sheridan Smith) and Charlie (David Tibble) bond over their West obsession; common ground develops into attraction, which is complicated by secret desires.

Smith has the right amount of zaftig sass for the role; size zero ingénues won’t do here. Tibble is gentle and bookish in his primary role; his conflicts are plausible. Nicholas Bailey deftly fills in the narrative with numerous characters from West’s past. The ensemble’s versatile, but performances are a little tentative, as if the actors hadn’t settled into the show quite yet. Steve Genovese’s staging seems flat and is hampered by numerous costume changes. Time will tell. (Lisa Buscani)

Bohemian Theatre Ensemble at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont, (773)975-8150. Through May 1.