Leah Karpel, Ryan Heindl, JJ Phillips and Jess Berry/Photo:Michael Brosilow

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Lest one be confused by the title of this 2009 Simon Stephens play, Griffin opens the show with the image of British schoolchildren rocking out to Big Black’s “Kerosene,” a mean thrasher whose lines ”Probably come to die in this town, lived here my whole life” encapsulate the very palpable fears of the play’s protagonists. Ever the mouthpiece for disenfranchised youths, the punk ethos pervades the show, if not the aesthetic. Set in a suburb of Manchester, England, and inspired by the 1999 Columbine shootings, “Punk Rock” creates a portrait of teenage violence that seems to come from a modern disdain for small-town, middle-class monotony. Read the rest of this entry »

Teagle Bougere/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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There’s a certain advantage to adapting a masterpiece of literature to the stage: the story and the characters are proven entities, not likely to elicit complaints about plausibility or development. But there is an even bigger disadvantage: not only will audiences inevitably make comparisons, usually unfavorable, to the primary work, but the distillation of a novel the length of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” into a three-hour stage play (including two intermissions) will necessitate vast edits that might threaten clarity even if, as is the case here, the dialogue is drawn strictly from Ellison’s text. Contrarily, the risk is equally great that careful adherence to the text will result in a work that, while unquestioned genius on the page, is plodding on the stage.

Fortunately, most of these potential problems have been avoided with Oren Jacoby’s world-premiere adaptation of “Invisible Man,” now playing at Court. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Cesar Moza

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“Dark Play or Stories for Boys” is a cautionary tale about teenagers’ willingness to avoid face-to-face conversations and retreat to the worldwide web in order to feel what they want to feel. The omnipresence of the internet today, and the resulting confusion about what’s real and what’s not real, perpetuates cruelty that only shows through their stifled cries. Director Anthony Moseley’s intimate staging and the undeniable rawness of the actors render “Dark Play” a deeply felt Chicago premiere. Read the rest of this entry »

E. Faye Butler and Susie McMonagle/Photo: Starbelly Studios

During the Depression, as America experienced a drastic disillusionment with the idea of progress, a nostalgia set in for the pre-industrial past. The embodiment of that is Susannah (Susie McMonagle), an ambitious and tightly wound ethnomusicologist working for the Library of Congress, who encounters the gruff and skeptical Pearl (E. Faye Butler), an African-American prisoner originally from the Sea Islands who contains within herself a treasury of antebellum songs. She may even possess Susannah’s Holy Grail: pre-slavery songs brought over from Africa. Pearl is initially unimpressed by Susannah’s quest—“You be a white woman, and this is your dream?” Replies Susannah: “When a person dies, a library is lost.” Her primitive recording equipment is an attempt to stave off extinction and create a kind of immortality for herself and her informants. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Peter Coombs

Playwright Mark Saltzman (“Sesame Street”) may have numerous Emmys under his belt, but this story (sold as a comedic mystery) often feels more pedagogical and over-explanatory than action-packed. This could be due to director Wayne Mell’s indecision on whether to fully embrace the more slapstick aspects of the script or the heavier themes of brotherhood; not only are the titular Collyers brothers with issues, so are the NYPD cops assigned to the case when one Collyer turns up dead and another goes missing. Additionally, the success of the reality show “Hoarders” means that set designer Andrei Onegin is challenged with presenting the audience with an overflowing mansion (more than 130 tons recovered!) that outdoes what we’ve seen on television. Read the rest of this entry »

Erin Myers, Rob Fagin, Laura Shatkus and Niall McGinty/Photo: Anthony Aicardi

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Before the opening-night performance, 16th Street artistic director Ann Filmer shared with the audience the genesis of her bringing Eric Pfeffinger’s “Accidental Rapture” back to the stage nine years after she’d seen it performed by a tiny theater company in Chicago. She could think of no better time, she said, for a play about the Rapture than in 2012, the year the Mayan calendar predicted the world would meet its apocalypse. And, although she did not mention it, there’s another strong reason to stage this play now: its narrative about the challenges that two groups of Americans—fundamentalist Christians and secular humanists—have in getting along seems more relevant than ever in this election year.

After years of growing farther apart, onetime college partners-in-mischief are reunited when Paul (Niall McGinty) and his wife Amy (Laura Shatkus)—now pretentious professors in Chicago—travel to Philadelphia for the baby shower of  Richard (Rob Fagin) and his wife Kim (Erin Myers), the latter being the only member of this cohort who did not attend college together and, to make it worse, is an evangelical Christian who has brought Richard firmly back into the flock he’d deserted in his youth. Read the rest of this entry »

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Money can’t buy love, but it can buy the security that makes love a bit easier. Dennis Kelly’s latest traces the decline of a relationship in reverse; his dense, unflinching monologues capture a couple’s struggle to survive.

Burdened by credit card debt, David (Peter Moore) leaves teaching to take a stressful job in sales as his wife Jess (Julia Siple) succumbs slowly to the painful world around her. Their hardship devastates her parents (Molly Reynolds and Jason Michael Lindner) and makes them a target for David’s venal ex (Darci Nalepa). Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Lambert/Photo: Lucas Gerard

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“I do love the office at Christmastime,” exclaims the portly, oppressively exuberant Mr. Bahnson (Rob Grabowski), surveying his bleak cubicular kingdom. He is addressing his subordinate Martin (Kevin Lambert), a corporate Everynerd who manages his repressed anger and boredom by watching horror movies at his desk and secretly writing his own fantasy novel, with himself as swashbuckling hero. Tonight is Martin’s moment of truth, as he learns that he has been accepted into business school and must decide his future.

The Ruckus’ world-premiere presentation of Daniel Caffrey’s “Little Triggers” is a sharp, well-executed and provocative blend of comedy and horror. Combining equal parts Charles Dickens and Rod Serling, Caffrey captures the compartmentalized mentality of middle-class urbanites of a certain age. It is the point when the tug-of-war between dreams and economic realities, imagination and survival, can become so painful that the drab routines and paltry rewards of the day job make it seem like an ongoing Creature Feature. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Flemming III/Photo: Sean Williams

RECOMMENDED

Playing out in real time, this ninety-minute show captures an imagined closed-door meeting called by Branch Rickey, the Dodger’s General Manager (played with cigar-chomping gusto by Larry Neumann, Jr.), on the eve of the historic signing of Jackie Robinson (Javon Johnson) to the Dodgers in 1947. Read the rest of this entry »

Don Hall and Gabe Garza/Photo: Bob Fisher

Right up front, the main character (Dennis Frymire) of “Devils Don’t Forget” will tell you he’s not entirely sure how this will all end. He’s riffing on the film noir trope of the unreliable narrator, a genre the Mammals have been playing with for years. Standing there at the top of the show in his underwear and with two conspicuous bandages on his forehead, you wonder though more about what’s already happened than what’s to come. Read the rest of this entry »