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Surprisingly, the biggest winner at this year’s Young Playwrights Festival, the annual dramatic writing competition cum educational outreach program, is not among the three lucky young writers whose plays were selected from nearly one thousand Chicago-area high-school student submissions. No, the real winner is Pegasus Players artistic director Alex Levy, who took the largest grant the Festival has ever seen and implemented, among other ambitious innovations, a mentorship program that paired this year’s young winners with three seasoned professional playwrights. As this year’s selection of funny, touching and imaginative plays prove—each one exuberantly staged on Tom Burch’s impressive unit set—it was money well spent. “Karma,” a “boy trying to get girl” urban romantic comedy by Northside College Prep High School graduate Enoch Abraham, crackles with good dialogue and is peppered with poetic-rich passages, a characteristic that easily reflects the first-rate playwriting language strengths of mentor Carlos Murillo. If Curie High School senior Scarlet May’s “In Your Dreams” (Lisa Dillman, mentor) isn’t quite as memorable, that’s probably because this coming-of-age tale involving two girls out on the town looks and sounds too similar to “Karma.” Wrapping things up is “Kid Kuisine,” a whimsical and entertaining comedy about a twentysomething’s coping mechanism—Star Wars lightsabers, Saturday morning cartoons and Nintendo included—for his childhood dysfunctional demons that fluidly alternates in narrative and tone between the naturalistic and the playfully absurd. Read the rest of this entry »

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Running five weeks and spanning twenty-six performances across ten programs and various genres including hip-hop, ballet, tap, contemporary, jazz and international styles, Dance Chicago is now in its twelfth season showcasing both new talent and established troupes—more than 2,500 artists in all—all seeking to spotlight innovative choreography. This opening weekend of this mammoth festival includes several premieres that will be performed on both programs featuring Cerqua/Rivera Dance Theatre, Chicago Dance Theatre, Joffrey Ballet, Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago and Thodos Dance Chicago. Other troupes performing include Madd Rhythms, Culture Shock Chicago and Trinity Irish Dance Company. (Dennis Polkow)

Sat/8pm, Sun/3pm. Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport; (773)935-6860. $5-$30.

It is a nice touch to have the budding writers of this year’s “20th Annual Young Playwright’s Festival” precede the performances of their plays with video testimonials about what winning a coveted slot has given them both intellectually and emotionally. Yet despite satisfying their literary curiosities and instilling in each of them a sense of personal accomplishment, a terrible disservice has been done to these young writers by the folks at Pegasus Players in allowing their dramaturgical efforts – at least in their currently anemic states – anywhere near a stage, let alone open to critical scrutiny. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s certainly the most dramatic way that I have ever been told to silence my cell-phone before a performance. Brown Couch Theatre’s third annual ten-minute play festival, “Tempting Fate,” begins with an effective parody of teen slasher-flick “Scream” in which a dim-witted blonde (frosted-blonde, no less) is terrorized into turning off her noisy gadget. This smart vignette grabs your attention, sets up a conflict (however absurd) and ultimately makes its point. And it’s entertaining. Sadly, it’s not one of the official ten plays, only one of which subsequently achieves a noticeable level of ingenuity, theatricality or resonance. That piece, “The Miraculous Day Quartet” by Los Angeles playwright Mary Steelsmith, about destiny and four plane-crash survivors, is the only festival offering that features a complex (and non-literal) exploration into the notion of superstition, the evening’s unifying theme. As directed by Marcus Kamie, it is an arresting piece of visual and verbal theatre that resonates with post-9/11 social and racial implications. During its short theatrical life of 600 seconds it nonetheless presents the full theatrical experience: compelling stories, memorable characters and important ideas. The remaining lot of plays is mostly comprised of cute, sentimental comedies, but seldom does the writing rise above the level of crowd-pleasing safe. But even if the festival is a disappointment, it’s an important one that gives a much-needed public platform for playwrights’ voices. I can only hope that next year they will be more inspired. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

Chicago Actors’ Studio, 1567 N. Milwaukee, (312)409-2010. Thu-Sat 7:30pm/Sun 3pm. $12-$15. Through Aug 13.

The Storefront and Prop Theatres present the fourth installment of this biennial celebration of women in Chicago theater. Organizationally, the festival represents a triumph, having quickly grown to include more than a hundred artists supporting two alternating bills of short performance pieces. As the second program, which I saw this Saturday, indicates, though, the festival may be growing too quickly to ensure consistent artistic quality. The program “We’re Still Here” features some first-rate work. Chicago performance veteran Nana Shineflug offers a witty meditation on chance, perspective and the meaning of life. Sean Graney’s short play “Fear of Scars” is a thoroughly chilling character study of the economic, physical and emotional burdens bound up with motherhood. And Cat Dean and Jill Heyser perform their dynamic “Tetsuo” on stilts, a bravura display of gracefulness and strength. But even the stronger pieces feel only tangentially connected with one another. The sharp shifts in style, tone, and subject matter, always tricky in an omnibus program like this, leave the audience continually off balance; in particular, it’s hard to square the starkness of Graney’s piece with the generally light and physical tone of the program, as if Flannery O’Connor had scripted one section of a seventies variety show. The stilted voice-over sections, attempting to stitch the work together, only compounded the tonal difficulties. With luck, the next installment of the Fest will keep the ambitious scale with a more coherent and consistent body of work. (John Beer)

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

It’s easy to take sketch comedy for granted here in the home of Second City and a seeming million other regular sketch shows. But the growing success of Sketchfest, now in its fourth year, belies that. Where else can you see 100 shows in eight days? Or how about fifteen shows in one night? With eighty-three groups performing this year (including twenty-two out-of-towners), you’d think they’d pretty much taken all comers—but about eighty groups got turned away. According to festival artistic director Brian Posen, the out-of-towners create an especially fertile environment for cross-pollination, since they do not come from the influential Chicago School of sketch. In opposition to usually spare and talky Chicago style, Posen points to The Third Floor from Portland, Oregon, where, in every show, “something will always blow up.” Also look out for local troupes Superpunk, the U of C’s Off Off Campus and New York’s Meat, Elephant Larry, and Fearsome. (Brian Hieggelke)

Chicago Sketchfest runs at the Theatre Building, 1225 West Belmont, (773)327-5252, through January 16.