By Valerie Jean Johnson

It was 1920 when Eugene O’Neill was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize for “Beyond the Horizon,” forecasting his place in theater history as one of America’s most important playwrights. Nearly a hundred years later, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre honors and examines the legacy of the “father of American drama” with “A GLOBAL EXPLORATION: Eugene O’Neill in the 21st Century,” a three-month festival (curated by Artistic Director Robert Falls) showcasing productions by some of today’s most innovative and exciting theater companies. At the top of the lineup is the New York City-based Wooster Group, itself a legend of the contemporary American stage, presenting their groundbreaking interpretation of “The Emperor Jones.”

For over three decades, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, the company has been constructing its powerfully unique multimedia performances, including radical reworkings of plays by some of the most lauded playwrights of the historical and contemporary canon: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill. Their highly stylized productions have earned critical acclaim and drawn passionate controversy, perhaps none more so than “Jones,” the rarely produced, controversial, expressionistic tale of Brutus Jones, the tyrannical emperor of an island in the West Indies, on the run from natives in revolt, haunted by the ghosts of both his criminal past and the scars of America’s nefarious racial history. The nucleus of the Group’s explosive production, which premiered in 1993, is Kate Valk, a white woman who takes the stage with her face caked in thick black makeup, assuming the title role. It is a performance that has been praised by critics as “riveting, haunting and altogether astonishing,” a “tour de force” that has challenged racial and gender stereotypes while dazzling, disturbing and defying expectations of audiences around the globe.

Valk’s relationship with O’Neill’s play goes back to her childhood: “I certainly grew up with [it]…Paul Robeson [the stage and screen legend who played Jones in the 1924 revival] was one of my idols and I had seen the film…I had even, as a young girl, seen a ballet version of ‘The Emperor Jones’ so I certainly knew about it, although I hadn’t ever read the actual play.” It wasn’t until much later that Valk encountered the play on the page, when LeCompte presented the idea of producing the play to the Group. “When I first started working with the company they were doing ‘Port Judith,’ and Spalding’s [Gray] party piece was kind of a mad dance… he and Liz had taken and edited a section from ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night,’ so O’Neill was around…we read [‘Jones’], and she [LeCompte] thought that I could play it.”

The Wooster Group’s process draws from a variety of sources—music, film, traditional global theater practices, pop culture—and for this production, the company found a great deal of inspiration in the presentational style of Japanese Noh theater. “We began working with the text from O’Neill and the movement that we loved from the Asian theater forms—not that we studied it at all, it was more a kind of very modern, fast synthesis of all those materials, but it came very intuitively. And it’s all there on the page, like music… It’s written phonetically.”

And on a first reading, O’Neill’s writing style is nearly as startling in its appearance on the page as the story itself—the diction and language immediately and disturbingly evoke the ghosts of American minstrelsy characters. Confronted with the apparition of a prison guard he killed before fleeing to the island, Jones cries out to the dark walls of the surrounding forest “I kills you, you white debil, if it’s de last thing I evah does! Ghost or debil, I kill you agin!” Valk’s Brutus Jones is presented with such magnetic and unrelenting precision that each performance, she admits, is extremely exhausting, and preparing for each remount of the show is a challenge to both mind and body for this seasoned and accomplished actress. “I don’t quite have the same energy I had when I was 35,” Valk says with a chuckle, “but maybe there’s something else I look for. I would say what I lose in youthful robustness I maybe make up for just by experience of all the other kind of performance I’ve done with Liz and the group since then. [The performance] takes a lot of energy and I was a little worried about that until… Scott [Shepard] and Ari [Fliakos], the people that I play with on stage, and I just watched the tape. I’m really looking forward to doing it again.”

Those recordings of past performances are invaluable tools for the Group when remounting works from their thirty-plus year history. “We just watched the tape of the last time we performed it, in Philadelphia a little over a year ago. It’s scored out, and it doesn’t change radically in terms of structure. The singing of the song, of the text, my style, is still very much the same.” But this tour of “Jones” will be the company’s last, says Valk, explaining simply that “there are certain roles you play at certain times of your life.”

But Valk seems more than pleased at the prospect of launching the first of the final performances here in Chicago, a fitting culmination of the fifteen-year journey of “Jones.” “It’s an honor to be part of the O’Neill festival—are you kidding? To have the work seen in that context, I’m thrilled. To be considered part of the modern canon of O’Neill’s work, I’m deeply honored.”

At Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn, (312)443.3800, January 7-11

By Valerie Jean Johnson

“In the puppet theater, the text is important, but not as important as the performance itself,” says Blair Thomas, founder and artistic director of the eponymous Blair Thomas & Company, the puppet theater he established in 2002. For six years, the Chicago-based company has focused primarily on touring shows, traveling the globe with their highly unique, multi-dimensional productions. 2008, however, marks the year that Thomas and company have decided to establish new roots in Chicago, launching their premiere season in the city. Following their inaugural show at DCA Theatre this fall, “Cabaret of Desire,” a comedic look at poet Frederico Garcia Lorca (directed by Hypocrites’ Sean Graney), Thomas moves his crew to the Museum of Contemporary Art this week with the Zen Buddhist parable, “The Ox-Herder’s Tale.”

The decision to initiate a home-city season, Thomas explains, “is to establish a regular presence in the city, and to participate in the dialogue that exists in the creation of new work in Chicago.” Founder of the lauded Chicago spectacle theater, Redmoon, Thomas left the company in 1998 to follow other artistic pursuits, including teaching at the School of the Art Institute and co-curating the Chicago International Puppet Festival. Interested in puppet theater from a young age, Thomas is a self-taught puppeteer and puppet maker, combining his background in the traditional actors’ theater with his interest in visual art and performance to explore the unique possibilities of a staged world where puppets are hardly pawns, they are the stars of the show.

“[Most important] is what is said by the presence of the puppets onstage, what gets said by the other visual elements that are incorporated. So the language that is being used in the puppet theater is innately more collaborative because its got the elements of actors’ theater—dramaturgy, story—that are going on, but you also have the physical properties of the kind of puppet you’re working with and the fabricated environment that its functioning under. And then I choose to incorporate music as a primary component as well. I want to find text that allows these other forms to come to fruition.”

And so Thomas was drawn to the story of “The Ox-Herder,” a fable told through a series of ten paintings, each accompanied by a short verse that, while not well-known in the general Western culture, has inspired various interpretations and distinctive depictions from a slew of visual artists throughout its history. While the texts that correspond to the images, which are not attributed to a single author, certainly play their part in Thomas’ world of “The Ox-Herder’s Tale,” the story is primarily based in the visual images. “The script for ‘The Ox-Herder’s Tale’ is only about fifteen pages long, so it’s a very short  piece of text—though that’s actually a lot of text for the puppet theater. It’s a lot to contend with. For me the source of the primary material for creating work has ranged from musical compositions to poems to, in this case, a collection of paintings. I’m also interested in things that have some sort of resonance in our culture,” says Thomas.

In “The Ox-Herder’s Tale,” music is unquestionably a central element, driven by a continuous live percussion score performed by renowned musicians Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake. But it is, of course, the puppets who take center stage. Utilizing the traditional Japanese puppet style bunraku, which uses life-sized human-doll puppets manipulated by performers masked all in black, as well as a a towering bull, guided by a stilt-walking performer, Thomas’ elaborate creations require the skills and commitment of extremely well-rounded artists to bring them to life. “I look for performers who can deliver lines like an actor, but can also think conceptually like a director in the process as well as have physical skills like a dancer, in some cases be a musician as well,” he explains. “The nexus point of interest in the contemporary puppetry movement is the relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet—it’s a defining characteristic of what’s going on today. The reality is that you can kind of conceive some ideas, but you’ve got to get the puppet in the room, and you’ve got to get the actors in the room, and then the text if there’s text and the music, and you’ve got to find out what kind of convention is going to be believable. It’s a process of discovery.  The puppets are easily cast, then we have to find out who are we in relation to them, rather than who are they in relation to us.”

At Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, Through November 30.

By Sharon Hoyer

In a grungy back office of indeterminate use, one employee is having computer troubles. To kill time, he picks up a copy of “The Great Gatsby,” opens to the first page and starts to read aloud. Thus begins a theatrical experiment and monumental dramatic contract: an epic journey through what many consider to be the great American novel, read cover-to-cover by New York-based experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service.

Comedian Andy Kaufman was notorious for pulling the same stunt to drive audiences out of his stand-up shows, whipping out the book and reading aloud until he’d cleared the room. ERS asks the opposite of their audience, using the full text of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece not as a prank but, in the words of director John Collins, an act of “radical commitment.”  “GATZ” is a feat of theater that could have been pulled straight from a Borges story: an adaptation so accurate, it perfectly replicates the original.

Yet “GATZ” cannot in fairness be called an adaptation; while a play-like staging, with actors delivering lines of dialogue in character, it is still a reading of novel—Scott Shepherd, the narrator/Nick, has the book in his hand the entire show. However, adaptation was the original intent when the seeds of the project were sewn ten years ago. ERS had planned to do a more conventional production, but Collins became frustrated with the editing process immediately.

“Here was a novel I loved, written in a way that made every single word seem necessary—you could say that of many great works of literature, but moreso of ‘Gatsby’ because it’s so spare. Then the idea came up—maybe thinking a little about Andy Kaufman—well, what if we do that? What if we do everything? What if we don’t cut a single word?”

What if? In an age of goldfish-like attention spans, inviting an audience to sit six-plus hours (with a dinner break) to listen to a novel start to finish is a pretty gutsy move; it gives Collins the jitters at each new venue. “It’s scary, taking this thing to a new city,” he says. “But I’ve watched every performance. Not much happens for the first 20 minutes—the scene is being set…Gatsby doesn’t even show up until chapter three—and there’s a sense of concern. Do they think we’re just going to read to them for six hours? But after those first twenty minutes, everyone settles in. Your clock sort of slows down; you adapt to the rhythm of it.”

And, in this way, “GATZ” is not so much a play, wherein a group of actors stage a story for a passive audience to absorb, but more an act of collective reading. Most of us know whether or not we’ll finish a book after the first ten or twenty pages. When we make the commitment, when we keep reading and find ourselves becoming engrossed, when a story creeps into the depths of our imagination, a fictional tale can start to color our perception of the real world. The beauty of the ERS staging is that it allows “Gatsby” to unfold much in the same way we would experience it as engaged readers. Shepherd’s character starts out aligned with the audience—just a guy reading out loud—but as the book unfolds, parallels between his co-workers and the characters in “Gatsby” emerge. By the end, the narrator becomes Nick. The book remains in his hand till the final word, but he ceases reading, reciting the text from memory (Shepherd is rumored to have the entire novel in his head), his transformation complete.

“The character goes through a similar awakening,” Collins states. “He starts out a guy who enjoys hearing everyone’s secrets but doesn’t like to get involved. Yet, by the end, he feels responsible. The book is ultimately about him.”

And about us: disinterested voyeurs of a decadent world who become (if Fitzgerald and ERS have done their job well) personally invested, inserting ourselves into the story alongside the narrator/reader. It’s a complex layering of identifications and the anonymous office setting leaves plenty of space for the venn diagram to overlap legibly.

“The story of somebody who leaves home and goes off to try to make a life in a more exciting place and then returns home is a universal story that everyone can relate to,” Collins observes. Because of an ongoing battle with the Fitzgerald estate, “GATZ” has yet to be performed in New York. Hopefully, ERS will enjoy a similar homecoming soon.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. (312)397-4010 Fri-Sun 3pm. $32-40. Boxed dinners from Puck’s Café $12. Presented as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Most famous for harshly accusing regional theater of betraying its local actors (in his typically blunt monologue “How Theater Failed America”), Mike Daisey is one of the most visible monologuists around—and one of the most provocative. The New York Times called him “one of the finest solo performers of his generation,” a sweet if vague tribute that speaks both to his appeal with intelligentsia and to the difficulty of defining exactly what his focus is. (Other monologues have covered monopoly, the cold war and great men of genius.)

In addition to the many monologues he’s performed at rep theaters across the country, Daisey is also a frequent radio commentator and writes for a gamut of magazines from Wired to Vanity Fair. And he’s working on his second book, which covers, among other topics, the lives of Bertolt Brecht and L. Ron Hubbard. So is Daisey a true Renaissance man or simply another self-described maverick and gadfly on the necks of greedy theater managers everywhere? At this point it’s probably only fair to bring up how funny almost everyone finds him. Sarah Wambold of the MCA, where Daisey is bringing his latest monologue this weekend, describes him as a “cross between David Sedaris and Lewis Black.” It seems to be a consistent description given Daisey’s propensity to take on absurdity as a general theme.

This time, taking on the rhetoric of paranoia and politics, he’ll be waxing on the Department of Homeland Security through a monologue called, appropriately, “If You See Something Say Something.” Where the material might seem a little 2005, the MCA is counting on Daisey’s masterful storytelling and extemporaneous performance style (unique for a monologuist of his stature) to keep the unscripted, unrehearsed narrative fresh. Perhaps the most timely aspect of the show will be the kind of authenticity that derives from such an immediate performance—a kind of “reality monologue” in real time. It’s also rare to see a performer who’s married to his director, as Daisey is (to Jean-Michele Gregory). I’m personally sold by the promise of “for mature audiences only.” (Monica Westin)

At the MCA Stage, 220 East Chicago, (312)397-4010 or mcachicago.org. October 10-12, 7:30pm.

If you go to see “The Yellow Wallpaper” out of a love for the groundbreaking short story about postpartum depression (as I did and suspect many audience members will), at least do yourself a favor and arrive half an hour late during intermission, so that you will miss the warm-up: truly cringe-worthy poetry (by a woman who inexplicably takes off her shoes and plays with her scarf while reading lines like “those were the days of cornbread”) and physical theater (a trash-clad woman offers cookies to audience members out of a garbage can lid while singing “fancy” over and over). That said, the relationship between Chicago Danztheatre’s adaptation and the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story is parasitic at best, and a travesty most of the time. Any sense of narrative coherence is one of the many casualties of this production, which mostly consists of a chorus of young women breathing heavily, rubbing themselves against strips of fabric hanging from the ceiling, and crawling around the stage and aisle in their most feline manners (my baffled neighbor wondered if one woman did so to keep us from being able to escape), while the protagonist goes mad Sideshow-Bob style, but without the funny red hair. Overacting and underperforming all around. Not recommended. (Monica Westin)

At Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 N Milwaukee, (773)-598-4549. Through October 12.

By Monica Westin

Angeline Gragasin is the creator of “Angelus Novus,” a new physical theater piece by National Headquarters investigating American archetypes, consumer culture, and history that’s also a traveling show visiting under-served neighborhoods in Chicago. Its collaborative artists, trained in performance traditions from Commedia dell’Arte to miming, use circus and spectacle, clown and dance, original live and electronic music, and large-object acrobatics to depict power struggle, truth-telling and social activism in an ailing urban community. We discussed the work with  Gragasin just a few days before its debut.

“Angelus Novus” combines such diverse theatrical forms as pageantry and historical reenactments. Could you start by describing it as a performance? What is the relationship between the show, originally inspired by the Klee painting “Angelus Novus,” and its namesake?

First of all, “Angelus Novus” is a theater piece—it is a play—in that there is text. The story was commissioned for the piece, with the original inspiration being the Klee painting “Angelus Novus” and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the angel of history. The pageantry and historical reenactments fit the material, and in fact the different theatrical elements came together quite naturally. It’s not an adaptation of the painting, or some kind of attempt to bring a painting to life. Instead we’re trying to create contemporary scenario and archetypes that evoke these images and concepts. To describe the play in a sentence: the angel of history lands in a fictional, corrupt small town in Illinois in 2008. If anything, I would describe “Angelus Novus” as futuristic.

The process for the show was very collaborative between you, the writer, and the input and improvisations of actors, over the course of the year. How did that work?

I knew as early as May of 2007 that I was going to make a piece through a residency I was awarded just out of college, and I didn’t want to make a halfhearted piece—I wanted to use it as an opportunity to make a full production, an independent production. So first of all I had to consider how to finance it—I was thinking, how can I spin the project so that it can allow me to get this grant, for example? Of course finance was only one factor, but the project kept expanding once I realized the more opportunity to create and involve more people. The writer, director, composer and I spent all this time reading things and looking at images, sending YouTube videos back and forth, and in February the scenic and costume designer got involved. A lot of this was remote collaboration, and I think that issues of distance, proximity and internet communication are very much reflected in both the process and production itself—both fragmented but related experiences. The actors were the last to come into play, and when they started all I knew was which archetypes I wanted to work with—I’m very fascinated with tyrannical dictators, for example, and I wanted an angel of history, we knew we wanted a chorus, and it’s just kept evolving.

Will it keep developing through production?

It certainly won’t be a different show every night, but it will be dynamic because it’s so action-based. This is why we can call it physical theater—it’s not just that we’re training physically, although we’re doing that, too, working very very hard… Here’s an example: when we’re working with cues, the music isn’t going off of verbal cue—it’s going off of action. And timing of action could go a little differently every night. The action cues are all interrelated. One person does one action, which cues another action…

Almost like a Rube Goldberg kind of experience—

—and that will change every night. It’s not choreography per se, that’s important to know. Some scenes have no text at all, just movement… The text of the play is very much is heightened but not esoteric—it’s meant to be understood.

The show contains influences from Walter Benjamin to television commercials. Tell me more about high and low culture in this performance.

Something that makes these juxtapositions different is that we’re doing it in a way that is not meant to give insight, it’s not about representation and meaning-making—it’s that we put these elements of say, Paul Bunyan and Sacagawea together, and that action is the kind of commercial action you see everyday, on television or on the internet. The experience of having all of these images, simultaneously, makes it difficult to maintain clarity. I almost would have liked to have gone further, and done more with commercials, internet, new media…

When you started your research for this project, what were you hoping to address? Did you have a driving message, or hypothesis, about the performance?

Yes, and it didn’t have to do so much with the content of the play as the process. I want to address the theater-making process, the performance process. I want to show that it can be done independently, that it can be done with very little money. Most resources for “Angelus Novus” are donations, or borrowed… I wanted to show that it can be original, entirely original. I wrote a really angry essay once—maybe you shouldn’t reference this—about how in Chicago people think that contemporary adaptations of classic plays count as original. I want to tell people: make something from scratch. That’s very important.

You’ve said before that you don’t believe in side projects.

That’s right. Production-wise, everyone who was involved are—I would venture to say—precocious masters of our craft. We’re not dilettantes—we’re not dabbling in forms. We’re highly trained—in clowning, miming, acting, acrobatics, Commedia dell’Arte, and so forth—and we can and will be more trained… But its not like we’re doing Suzuki; I’m not training people in Commedia dell’Arte. We use the training in order to find our own style and our own process and methods. I have too much respect for the forms we’re borrowing from to bastardize them… that sort of thing really offends me. If people understand that everyone off the street can’t just start performing Shakespeare, why isn’t there that respect for other kinds of performances? To make any kind of artistic statement takes a lot of consideration.

“Angelus Novus” opens October 2 at AV-aerie, 2000 West Fulton, #310, (312)850-9729, info@nationalheadquarters.org.

What began eight years ago as a pre-season attempt to offer a free preview of the upcoming Lyric Opera season with the same stars who would be singing the roles appearing has evolved into a general “greatest hits” concept where only a handful of mostly Ryan Center artists and alumni who will appear during the season actually take part. This year’s “big catch” for this free concert is French soprano Natalie Dessay, who wowed us a few seasons back in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and has been taking the world by storm since and who will open the season on September 27 in Massenet’s “Manon.” To hear Dessay offer a free preview of what she will do with “Manon” will alone make this a worthwhile experience. Oddly, though, of the nine operas being presented this season, only two will be represented on this concert: “Manon” and Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana.” Other featured artists include Nicole Cabell, Jonas Kaufmann, Gordon Hawkins, Raymond Aceto, Elizabeth De Shong, Amber Wagner, Dimitri Pittas and, of course, music director Sir Andrew Davis and the Lyric Opera Orchestra. If you can’t make it to the park itself, WFMT FM (98.7) will be broadcasting the concert live, as it will all of the opening nights of the upcoming Lyric Opera season. (Dennis Polkow)

7:30pm September 6, Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion, (312)332-2244. Free.

RECOMMENDED
When it comes to the French-Canadian “Cirque du Soleil” franchise, there are two groups of people: those who drool and give an imprimatur to everything that the ultra chic “Cirque” does, and those who wonder what all the fuss is about, who don’t “get it,” as a “Cirque” lover likes to say. Having seen a couple of early shows, I definitely was a major and rather bored detractor early on, but the last “Cirque” show, “Corteo,” was so compelling a concept that I got hooked. I wondered if “Cirque,” or me, or both, had changed coming into “Kooza,” the latest “Cirque” show. Well, a bit of both. The early “Cirque” shows done here were done in theaters, and “Cirque” loses far too much in that environment. The tent idea really works, and amazingly, it is a tent more comfortable and climate-controlled than most theaters but more to the point, it showcases the acts in spectacular and sharp relief where no one is ever far away from the proceedings. This not only greatly enhances audience involvement—brought to a new level with “Kooza” where members actually become part of the show in some hysterically clever ways—but also means that the performers and the acts themselves are shown to their spatial and three-dimensional advantage. The constant Eurocentric perspective of earlier shows has given way to a looser, often more improvised “jazzy” quality, including the music itself, which has gone from trendy Europop to live cutting-edge jazz-rock that is allowed to dynamically explode during the climax of acts. But most importantly, “Kooza” is continuing the tradition of setting the “Cirque” acts against some sort of overall dramaturgy, which is a healthy development even if at nearly three hours, this show could be more tightly focused a la “Corteo,” which was shorter, but more breathtaking. And while popcorn is a great traditional American circus treat, where’s the cotton candy? (Dennis Polkow)

United Center Parking Lot K, 1901 Madison (at Damen), (800)678-5440. $55-$125. Through August 24.

RECOMMENDED
I concede: it is as impossible to describe with words as it is to believe with your own eyes the dizzying and dazzling acrobatic acts performed by the colorful and thrilling troupe that is Cirque Shanghai, now back in Chicago at Navy Pier for their third year in a row with “Cirque Shanghai: Gold.” Since this type of entertainment defies a critical act (and not that there’s anything to criticize given its universal appeal, high entertainment factor and perfect running time of sixty-five minutes), I instead offer the reader a random array of (hopefully entertaining) thoughts that struck me throughout the performance: 1) It is estimated that there are 450 million bicycles in China. So why twelve Chinese would have to share one of them is beyond me. But it is amazing to watch them try. 2) Throughout several of “Cirque Shanghai”’s unbelievable contorting, nerve-racking plate-spinning and gravity-defying balancing acts I thought ‘Why, what’s the point?’ After all, just because you can balance a dozen wine glasses filled with water on each limb doesn’t mean you have to. Show-offs. 3) Unlike the American and European circus aesthetic, the Chinese one seems closer to the Moscow State Circus of the Russians: beauty never sacrificed for the wow factor. You’ll see what I mean when two couples glide and slice through the Navy Pier sky suspended only by giant silk ribbons—as beautiful as it is breathtaking. 4) Following her controversial Chinese earthquake comments, actress Sharon Stone will probably lose her East Asia Dior contract and need a new project to endorse. So should a future installment of the Cirque series be subtitled “Shanghai of the Stars,” Stone should consider full participation, because nothing says “I’m sorry” to someone you’ve offended like allowing them to balance you precariously atop a twenty-foot tower of chairs. 5) Remember the glitzy show “Dynasty”? “Cirque Shanghai” featured more sequins than the entire run of that popular 1980s series. More dazzling, however, were the moves. 6) Who knows how much the cost of jet fuel will be by Olympics time. If the athletes here are any indication of what Americans will have to compete against in Beijing, we don’t stand a chance. Let’s concede and help the economy by staying home. You can gather that “Cirque Shanghai: Gold” comes highly recommended. And that you should take not just your family and friends, but a chiropractor you love. Top off the evening with dinner in Chinatown, and you have great dinner theater, not to mention the best summer family entertainment money can buy. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At Navy Pier, 600 East Grand, (312)595-7437. Thu-Fri 2pm & 8pm/Sat 2pm & 6pm & 8pm/Sun 2pm & 4pm. $14.50-$29.50. Through September 1.

Walkabout Theatre Company takes its mission to create location-specific theater into the great outdoors this summer, with a city-wide garden tour of “War Garden: An Experiment in Patriotic Agriculture,” produced in conjunction with Neighborspace, “an urban land trust dedicated to preserving community-managed gardens in Chicago,” Led by director/co-creator Seth Bockely, Walkabout’s ensemble has tapped city history for subject matter, exploring the WWI war garden movement through the efforts of a ladies auxiliary organization who find themselves at odds with the antics of real-life Chicago shanty-town confidence man, George W. Streeter. But while the historical backdrop and community-activist ties sound ripe for a rich cultural exploration, the short performance itself (which runs approx. fifty minutes) is fairly silly and juvenile. Perhaps I was misled by the pre-show press and literature, which had me expecting a more thoughtful portrait of communities uniting in peril and “today’s urban agricultural revival,” but I was disappointed by the broadly cartoonish characters and performances—overblown and uncomfortably heavy on the kind of demonstrative mugging one would expect from a children’s sketch-comedy show. (Valerie Jean Johnson)