Larry Adams as Harold Hill and Alicia Berneche as Marian Paroo

RECOMMENDED
A onetime flute player for John Philip Sousa and Arturo Toscanini who went on to write operas, symphonies, band music, standards and score radio programs, Meredith Wilson is best remembered these days for his 1957 show “The Music Man.” Inspired by his small-town boyhood in early twentieth-century rural Iowa, Wilson worked on “The Music Man” for eight years and wrote over forty songs for it, less than half of which made it into the show itself. One of these, “Till There Was You,” was the only cover song from a musical ever recorded by the Beatles and became a huge hit for the Fab Four in 1964, having been the second song that the group performed on its initial Ed Sullivan appearance that launched the British Invasion.

Ever since its inception, the role of conman and would-be boys’ band director “Professor” Harold Hill has been the domain of actors rather than singers, with the main musical qualification being the ability to crisply articulate or “speak” most of the sung sections with precise and punchy rhythmic syncopation. That Light Opera Works chose a singer, Larry Adams, to play the role suggested the intriguing possibility that the usually spoken sections of the songs might actually be sung, but Adams flabbily speaks his way through most of the songs yet does not have the acting chops to credibly seduce even the town librarian, let alone the entire town. Marian the librarian has the best singing moments, and Alicia Berneche tosses these off with such flair and style that in this production, it is she, not Hill, who comes off as the charismatic and colorful one of the pair and he, the dullard in need of a makeover.

Thankfully, there is enough else right in this production and full-blown, uncut revivals of the show are rare enough to make seeing this elaborate staging well worthwhile. The townspeople character parts are a hoot, particularly Jo Ann Minds as the eccentric mayor’s wife and Barbara Clear as Marian’s mother, who nearly stole the show at the opening. And with a full orchestra and Kevin Bellie’s imaginative and energetic choreography—some of the best seen at Light Opera Works—along with wonderful performances of Wilson’s score and remarkable counterpoint that, for instance, musically layers cackling gossips with smooth as silk barbershop quartet music, the experience is a welcome and timely look back while we pause to look ahead. (Dennis Polkow)

“The Music Man” plays through January 4, 2009 (including New Year’s Eve) at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson, Evanston, (847)869-6300. $29-$87.

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

Michael Halberstam as Scrooge at Writers

By Dennis Polkow

When Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” back in 1843, he reportedly did it merely to pay off a debt.  His “little Christmas book,” as he liked to describe it, became the first in series of six Christmas books, but none ever attained the same popularity as that first effort.  A less clever man might have been annoyed by the success of what he clearly considered a lesser work, but not Dickens.  He was enough of a populist to recognize, as Jean-Paul Sartre would later explicitly state it, that the public always completes every work of art.  So unlike Tchaikovsky, who had nightmares about the fact that he would be best remembered for the “1812” Overture and “The Nutcracker,” Dickens shrewdly saw the dramatic and commercial opportunities for “A Christmas Carol” early on.  Nine years after writing it, Dickens read the novella publicly to a literary society in Birmingham and three days later to a working-class audience.  Both groups were mesmerized, according to newspaper accounts.

That same tradition continued on with stage actors for decades well into the radio era although, curiously, the thought of actually dramatizing the story gained more popularity when silent movies came in, allowing for dissolves and such that could make the ghosts described in the story actually appear via camera tricks.  In the case of the Goodman Theatre, one of the oldest attempts to literalize the story on a live stage, the earliest adaptation thirty-one years ago opened with Dickens himself writing the story on stage at his desk with a quill pen and serving as a pseudo-narrator, although he became gradually less relevant as the action progressed.  Much was made about the first time that various ghosts took flight on stage in the early 1980s, and long before falling chandeliers and helicopter landings became commonplace in mega-musicals of the later 1980s, plenty of folks were coming to the Goodman “A Christmas Carol” for the stagecraft more than the story.  There were times when the production became so behemoth and so stripped to the bone narratively that Dickens seemed to fade away from the proceedings almost as mysteriously as Marley’s face on Scrooge’s knocker.

In this year’s production, a small Greek chorus of jovial carolers endeavor to tell the story, right from “Marley is dead” and like that first Goodman adaptation some three decades ago, they fade away from the proceedings but do appear now and then when a jolt of Dickensian language is needed.  After all, when the narrative is stripped bare apart from its social commentary and wry humor and eloquent storytelling, even Mister Magoo can play Ebenezer Scrooge.

Larry Yando as Goodman's Scrooge

The problem that poor Larry Yando, a terrifically talented actor who is playing Goodman’s Scrooge for a second year, has is to flesh out a character via dialogue that does not benefit from Dickens’ own insertive language.  Invariably, this means that Yando, like most Scrooge portrayals, ends up coming across at the beginning more cranky and mean than the book and more joyous and childlike in the end as a literal contrast has to be drawn.

The huge advantage that Michael Halberstam has in his solo performance of “A Christmas Carol” at Writers’ Theatre is that his own portrayal of Scrooge can be far more subtle because he can play up Dickens’ own descriptions.  His Scrooge is more indifferent than mean, very matter of fact.  I haven’t heard the recordings of our state’s governor, for instance, allegedly refusing to pay children’s hospital funds without a kickback, but I would be quite surprised if he were hissing or screaming as he is doing so.  Usually such “requests” are calm and cool.  People can often be polite when they utter the casually brutal equivalent of “Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?”  If Scrooge is angry, he is less interesting.  It is indifference that is responsible for his isolation, not a temper.

By the same time, the transformation that Scrooge goes through during “A Christmas Carol” is one of self-discovery through his life’s journey.  We see him become indifferent when his father leaves him at school over the holidays because the alternative is to fall apart.  As an older man, he can recognize the cruelty of this in a way that psychological self-defense would never permit when he is a teenager.  Scrooge has become his father in his dealings with his clerk and others, but only by recalling the pain that the indifference of his father towards him does he come to see this.  And so it goes, encounter by encounter, Scrooge even assuming that the point of his visitations is for self improvement, which is why he cannot bring himself to even consider the possibility that the first death portrayed during the Ghost of Christmas Future visitation could be his own.

The other detail made so clear in Halberstam’s performance that is lost at Goodman is that Scrooge has learned to stop feeling much of anything at all, good or bad.  So when he does start to feel some things once again with the Spirits, he wants to dismiss these in Dickens’ language.  And he cynically jokes with the ghosts as much as he is afraid of them, realizing it could be indigestion, or even senility, since these visitations were supposed to happen over three nights so he could have well missed Christmas entirely.

And what of the transformation at the end?  How radical is it?  Dickens gives Scrooge enough of a heart at the beginning—after all, the clerk does end up with the day off—and enough impatience at the end as he is watching himself try to be polite to a boy that he condescendingly finds can actually converse and quip, that there is more ambiguity here than Goodman or other literal adaptations can allow.

Halberstam and Writers Theatre are on to something very important in their rediscovery of “A Christmas Carol” as a solo performance work: the power of great storytelling itself in communicating the soul of a story vs. stringing together a host of scenes portrayed literally and hoping that the end result will be more than the sum of its parts.

This difference can best be seen in the response of young children to both approaches: children love Goodman’s “A Christmas Carol,” perhaps especially the “scary” parts, much like an amusement-park ride.  And adults love to bring children to watch them watch the experience.  The few young children who were brought to Writers’ Theatre “A Christmas Carol” however, barely made it through the first scene.  Some were just bored, to be sure, but others were struck down with primordial terror by the intensity and power of a single storyteller baring and focusing his all.  Children tend to have far more developed imaginations than most of us do as we get older, and Dickens’ eloquence is such that each of us in our own way conjures up in our mind’s eye something far more terrifying than anything the most literal staging of “A Christmas Carol” could possibly convey.

“A Christmas Carol” runs at the Goodman Theatre, (312)443-3820, through December 31; and at Writers’ Theatre, (847)242-6000, through December 23.

Alan Wilder (Ivan), John Mahoney (Richard) and Francis Guinan (Sharky). Photo by Michael Brosilow.

RECOMMENDED

Booze and religion have always made strange bedfellows. In Christianity, you have a founder who goes to a party and changes water into wine, and reportedly not the cheap stuff, either. Even the gospels have Jesus being directly accused of being a glutton and a drunkard by his detractors. And that was in a sunny, warm and dry country. In an Irish winter, where the long, cold dark nights howl and days are gray and short, drinking becomes a national pastime. Add Christmas into the mix, and well, you get the idea.

In Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” five guys are sitting around and drinking on Christmas Eve having the same kind of dull and meaningless conversations that come up when that happens (if this all sounds familiar, much the same scenario—right down to a dilapidated drunk Christmas in Dublin—occurs in McPherson’s “A Dublin Carol,” which Steppenwolf is presenting upstairs concurrently with McPherson’s “The Seafarer”). One of the guys, however, reveals himself as the Devil to one of the characters in a private moment, and lets the guy know that he would be in hell right now if he hadn’t been able to beat the Devil at a card game when they were in jail together years ago. They’ll be playing again tonight, but the results will be different and the two will enter the netherworld through a hole in the wall. Of course, this all seems quite reasonable when you’re drunk, but the problem for an audience that is sober is how literally this all appears to go down, making you think that you’re suddenly spending the holidays with Mel Gibson.

For my taste, McPherson wants to have the sophistication and metaphor of “The Seventh Seal” with the religious sensibility of “The Omen,” but like booze and religion, these make for strange companions. Perhaps when the brain is booze-soaked, people need more radical wake-up calls, and for those of a fundamentalist disposition who like to get drunk, this is your holiday play. For the rest of us, thankfully, there is enough of McPherson’s eloquent writing and a first-class Steppenwolf ensemble who act the shit out of this material—including Steppenwolf founding member John Mahoney back at the company—enough to make this a worthwhile experience, even sober. (Dennis Polkow)

Through February 22, 2009 at Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, (773)335-1650; $20-$70.

Shelly Gossman, Michael Patrick O'Brien (Photo by Knuth)

The short version of this review: If you’re planning to see one show at Second City, bypass the mainstage.

In fact the two shows currently running at Second City—“America: All Better” on the mainstage and “Brother, Can You Spare Some Change?” on the e.t.c. stage (see my review here)—are a case study in comedy formatics. In other words, the format of each show is the same but the results lie on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Break down most sketch comedy at Second City and what you’ll find is an initial premise repeated over and over. The joke is not really advanced or deconstructed or developed. The trick is to keep the audience engaged anyway, and the folks over at e.t.c. do this with considerable ease. It takes inspired ideas to make such a gambit work.

Alas, the same cannot be said of the 96^th revue on the mainstage. Hell, just look at the title—call your show “America: All Better!” and you’re just advertising a lack of wit and better instincts.

Three new cast members join the ensemble, with Lauren Ash as the standout. She brings to mind the loud sarcastic girl at the pep rally, and she’s a natural fit here. Tellingly, she doesn’t have to fight (i.e. resort to overblown performances) to be noticed. (Veteran Emily Wilson, on the other hand, does an awful lot of screaming with very little payoff.) In a sketch where Ash could easily be the harpy—complaining about her boyfriend’s emotional reticence—she is funny, but she also taps into something authentic: frustration and hurt.

Anthony LeBlanc (also new) needs to create more of a defined presence for himself, though his song about interracial love (sung to a white women in the front row) contains priceless, tasteless lyrics, including: “I want to plow your snow.”  Clever raunch is a delicate thing, and LeBlanc has a knack for it.

Michael Patrick O’Brien is new to the mainstage, as well. Over the summer I went nuts for his Andy Kaufmanesque solo show called “Shatter” (when he was billed merely as “Pat O’Brien”). His strength as a performer is that you’re never sure if he’s fucking with you—this comes to the fore just once in the show, when his “love life” takes center stage.

It’s a good bit, and I wish there were more of them. The best sketch features Shelly Gossman as a Russian gymnast performing a balance beam routine on the rail separating the front of the house from the back. Stepping over drinks (and imbibing them at various points), she is accompanied by her effusively bearded coach (a very funny Brad Morris) and color commentary provided by O’Brien and Joe Canale. It’s the one bit that feels absolutely right. It’s a surprise and it manages to be both lightly transgressive (I’ve never seen any Second City cast member venture this deep into audience territory) and strangely hilarious.

Ultimately, though, there is something missing in the creative drive. (Matt Hovde is the show’s director). If “Impress These Apes” has shown us anything, it’s that funny people—given the right motivation and freedom to play—will generate unique and indelible material. Second City can’t accommodate the freeform structure of “Apes” (nor should it) but I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Second City has always had impeccable taste when it comes to hiring talent, but shows like this suggest there has to be a better way to take advantage of what these folks have to offer.

“America: All Better” certainly has enough good actors in it—I’ve come to really appreciate what Brad Morris is doing as a performer—and it’s not quite a colossal failure. Then again, it is so mediocre as to be insignificant. (Nina Metz)

At Second City Mainstage Theatre, 1616 N. Wells St., 312-337-3992 or www.secondcity.com. Tues-Thur 8p, Fri-Sat 8p & 11p, Sun 7p. $20-$25. Open run.

RECOMMENDED

Workshopped at Northwestern in 1993, premiered at Bailiwick in 1995 and performed as an annual holiday tradition there until 2006, “The Christmas Schooner” has had more than a hundred productions across the country and abroad. Bailiwick had announced 2006 as the work’s final voyage for the company but is presenting the piece as a bittersweet swansong to its Belmont Avenue home with all of the trimmings, including a five-piece orchestra and new direction by Mary Beidler Gearen.

I had never seen a single production of this work at Bailiwick nor anywhere else, nor did the idea of a musical about transporting Christmas trees particularly entice me. “What is at stake?” as a colleague of mine always likes to ask in discussing shows. Well, quite a bit, as it turns out—the traditions and values that make us who we are. The songs do a wonderful job of conveying the emotions that the story needs to communicate and of giving us a sense of what a Chicago Christmas was like more than a century ago.

It’s so ironic that in a year where we are still debating having a smaller tabletop tree vs. the full boat experience, if you’ll forgive the pun, the presence of a nineteenth-century-style tree on stage with fruit and nuts as decorations along with the descriptions of the “magic” of a traditional Christmas tree becomes quite enticing. Long before electric lights, plastic Santas, balloon globes and the myriads of Christmas kitsch that make up the retail-centered holiday season as it exists today that climaxes well before Christmas itself, European immigrants of a century ago had only the Christmas tree as the focal point of their celebrations, mesmerizing all who experienced it. Advent was dark and dreary, but when Christmas Eve arrived and though Epiphany, January 6, or the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the Christmas tree warmed hearts at the darkest and coldest point of the year. Up north, as in Michigan, that is not a problem, but when a Chicago cousin writes to her Michigan relatives who are sailors by trade that “there are so many people, so few evergreens” in the city after sharing her searing memories of childhood Christmas trees back home in Germany, the family decides to make one last late November journey of the season. Three generations of the Stossel family all end up deeply impacted by these annual journeys to Clark Street harbor, where not only Germans but immigrants of varied backgrounds end up lining up to get the best pick of the trees.

Ultimately, this becomes a family love story crisscrossing generations as well as a tale of duty and honor and maintaining sea traditions as well as Christmas traditions, passing on what we have been given and as “Opa” (Jim Sherman) observes, that “If we accept our blessings, we accept our pain as well.” Tying up such a message in a Christmas package filled with music makes it all the more palatable, but no less important. (Dennis Polkow)

“The Christmas Schooner” plays through January 4 at Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. $20-$35.

RECOMMENDED

It was all too easy to identify with a pair of homicidal housemaids but such was the power of Writers’ Theatre’s riveting revival of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” (1947) that when two sister-servants laced their insensitive mistress’ cup of chamomile tea with barbiturates, I was ready to run onstage and serve her the drink myself! I suppose one can blame these tough economic times. After all, in November Crain’s Chicago Business published an article, derided by several readers in the weeks that followed, about how some Kenilworth residents were coping. Sure, you might be laid-off, lose your home and see your retirement savings disappear, but isn’t it reassuring to know that you’re not alone and that in Kenilworth some have had to scale back on the cleaning-lady visits, nix the private French lessons and “downgrade” to $500 winter coats? Tragic, indeed. I hope they’re being nice to their servants when requesting their nightly cup of tea.

Jean Genet, of course, was the poet laureate of the truly poor and oppressed and “The Maids” was his theatrical exploration of the power struggle between the haves and the have-nots—always raging, constantly shifting and all consuming. The play is challenging, to say the least. There is little in the way of action save for some ritualized role-playing such as when the maids try on their lady’s clothes and jewelry and recreate their mistress’ patronizing and humiliating verbal tirades. Emotions and feelings explode but don’t always seem to be motivated. And the psychology of the sisters—stubborn Solange and delicate Claire—demands that a performer vacillate between desperation and liberation.

Given Writers’ recent output, it’s not surprising that this revival has met all these challenges and surpassed them to amass a production of considerable intellect and artistry: director Jimmy McDermott’s staging is the epitome of finesse; Elizabeth Laidlaw’s Solange, Helen Sadler’s Claire and Niki Lindren’s Madame offer performances of psychological precision; and the design team has transformed the intimate, fifty-seat Books on Vernon venue into a gorgeous and claustrophobic French boudoir setting replete with ornate floral prints, black crystal lamps and pink velvet walls.

These qualities would make any production worthy of professional admiration. What makes McDermott’s worthy of excitement is how much passion it ultimately oozes. From the crime passionnel of its story to a passion for subversivness—McDermott admirably doesn’t shy away from Genet’s hints at incestuous lesbianism—I doubt you’ll see a finer or more resonant production of “The Maids” in the Chicago area for some time to come. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At Writers’ Theatre, 664 Vernon Avenue, Glencoe, (847)242-6000. Mon 7:30pm/Tue 7:30pm/Wed 2pm & 7:30pm/Thu & Fri 8pm/Sat 4pm & 8pm/Sun 2pm & 6pm (performance schedule varies). $40-$65. Through April 5, 2009.

RECOMMENDED
A show that understands that language and love are just games we play, however seriously we take them. Director Libby Ford plays with us by presenting three farcical scenes tracing the stages of marriage, framed by the truly moving and poignant romance “Lady with a Lapdog,” so that the show ostensibly refuses to take humankind’s drama seriously but leaves a slight “what if” quality to that refusal. The three stories, respectively about a ridiculous and petty courtship, the unbearable life of a commuting family man and the monologue of an old man beaten down by a tyrannical wife, point sometimes a little obviously at the absurd and disheartening monotony and predictability of love and social life, but by placing “Lady with a Lapdog” at the center, the show frames all human encounters as kinds of illicit affairs, heightening the rest of the material. The acting isn’t always as controlled as it should be, sometimes approaching the mania of an improvised skit that’s gone on too long, but the overall effect is substantial and thoughtful. Chorus repetition during transitions feel repetitive during the show but reach a surprising cohesion and new meaning by the end of the show, which at the very least is proof that you can produce a show that’s both light and eloquent. (Monica Westin)

At Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, (773)404-7336. Through December 21.

RECOMMENDED

One of the most cohesive groups of ten-minute plays I’ve seen, with a thoughtful transition from exploration of romance to war so nuanced that the change of themes is almost imperceptible. The strongest of the plays are stunning, especially the first, “78,” in which a couple lives a lifetime together in a single, repeated day; “Yes to Everything,” a vague but compelling monologue about being stuck in love, unable to move on, that cleverly appropriates stand-up conventions, camera phones and Dictaphones as instruments of paralysis; and Brett Neveau’s chilling and subtle “Ethnic Cleansing Day” that stages a creepy rhetoric of silence about hate crimes in a very recognizable family. The plays aren’t all consistently effective, of course, but the range of quality is less dramatic than in most groupings of short plays, and there’s a well-chosen variety of formats as well as ideas so that visually and theatrically the series remains dynamic and creative. (Monica Westin)

At the side project, 1439 West Jarvis, (773)973-2150, Fr-Sat/7:30pm, Sun/2pm, through December 21. $20.

It’s hard to trace a coherent thread between these four short plays; Adam Webster, the curator of the “Cut to the Quick” festival, in which this series participates, argues that they share a common concern with the ways that we skew our perception of the world, but their strongest commonality seems to be a vague exploration of excess: in violence, confession and socially tabooed language and subjects. This isn’t to say that the show is always offensive, but it’s often hard to know how to take the plays; for example, in “Three Hymns of Apathy,” a couple perform alternating and hyperbolically dramatic monologues about terrible events in their past, centering somewhat vaguely around the crumbling of their relationship and September 11th, seeming to border on parody at moments (for example, what do we make of lines like “I was five years old for fuck’s sake! Why did he show me that dying pigeon?!”) but inconsistently so. “Dead Weight” marks the high point of the night, with Rebecca Buller and Catherine Price as hilarious and beautifully controlled cold-blooded teenagers who crack racial jokes as a war rages outside, but the rhetorical ends of the juxtaposition are unclear. “Little Green Man,” ostensibly about an alien held captive and forced to learn American culture from TV, has great potential that doesn’t quite pan out; and “Autophagy” fulfills the hipster-mocking and android quota of the evening in a well-timed and funny but fairly incoherent final show. Ultimately, an intense but uneven and confusing evening. (Monica Westin)

At the side project, 1439 W. Jarvis, (773)973-2150, Thu & Sun/7:30pm, through December 21.$15.