Sheila O'Connor and Linda Reiter/Photo: Kevin Viol

The British suffrage movement was marked by a violent urgency: a supporter died, throwing herself in front of the king’s horse during a race to draw attention to the cause. Unfortunately,  Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script detailing the struggle lacks that urgency and collapses in a somnolent mess.

Celia (Linda Reiter), a prominent suffrage veteran, endures short-term prison stays and suffers forced feedings during hunger strikes. She meets newbie suffragette Eve (Sheila O’Connor) and starts a relationship to escape a stagnant marriage with lawyer William (Tim Newell), who can’t face his failing relationship. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Liz Lauren

When it was first announced that Nathan Lane would be taking on the lead role of Hickey in “The Iceman Cometh” at Goodman Theatre, a New York Times reader wondered aloud if this was for real, or an Onion article. Could one of the great song-and-dance men in musical comedy successfully transfer that prowess to epic, angst-ridden drama? Performing comedy has always been serious business and this was a part that Lane lobbied for when he learned that his colleague and friend Brian Dennehy—who played the role of Hickey at Goodman twenty-two years ago—was interested in taking on the role of Larry in the show. Never having worked together, Lane saw this as an opportunity to take on a new challenge with the additional incentive of working with Dennehy’s longtime Eugene O’Neill collaborator, Goodman artistic director Robert Falls.

The play starts in darkness with only the slightest bit of light showing on Dennehy’s granite face and his other booze-soaked companions sprawled out at a bar. All is usual, at least in an O’Neill universe, as we learn of their various squashed pipe-dreams, those delusional hopes of the hopeless that keep them going but which have no basis in reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Liz Lauren

Money can’t buy friends. And as Eric Clapton sings, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” These are lessons wealthy financier Timon learns the hard way when his fortunes flounder and his requests for financial aid are rebuffed by his affluent associates. Considered an unfinished work by most scholars, the somewhat disorganized structure of Shakespeare’s rarely performed “Timon of Athens” (staged at Chicago Shakespeare only once before, in 1997) presents a number of problems. Thus artistic director (and director of this production) Barbara Gaines spent some time with actor Ian McDiarmid (who elegantly captures both the comedy and tragedy of the titular character’s experiences) adapting the story in an attempt to make things clearer. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Farabee and Mary Winn Heider/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

With the numerous struggling-to-move-forward “new economy” stories littering the cultural landscape currently, from HBO’s “Girls” to Tom Hanks in “Larry Crowne,” Theater Wit’s latest might have proved to be a teeth-clenching endurance exercise. But Kim Rosenstock’s off-kilter tale of people struggling to heal avoids clichés and displays true heart.

Sherry (Mary Winn Heider) returns home post-college with an art-therapy diploma and a case of deep depression. She’s joined by sister Grace (Kasey Foster), who endures a breakup by watching “Top Gun” on constant loop, and a mother who never leaves her bedroom. Fortune changes when Sherry begins teaching art at Joseph’s (Guy Massey) school and treating his grieving son Zack (Matt Farabee). Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Fernley in "Gospel Hour" (inspired by the song "State Trooper"), written by Dan and Drew Caffrey and directed by Aaron Henrickson/Photo: Paul E. Martinez

RECOMMENDED

While successfully evoking the deep isolation and suffering present in Bruce Springsteen’s legendary “Nebraska,” the newest production from Tympanic Theatre also adds doses of surreal imagery and humor. With eleven playwrights paired with ten Chicago directors each using a different song to draw inspiration, the plays run the gamut emotionally. The dim, intimate space at the Right Brain Project lends the impression that all the characters exist more or less “nowhere,” isolated and forced to live with their regrets and mistakes regardless of their present circumstances. Alongside their humane pathos lies an undercurrent of violence and menace, but it is not always clear whether the characters fear or court this danger, or both. The first play, “Man Will Meddle,” draws this ambiguity particularly clearly by giving us a glimpse into the life of a wife and mother (Sarah Mayhan) on the day her former lover (Kevin Murray), the serial killer of Springsteen’s song “Nebraska,” is to be executed. When she reads the paper announcing the execution, her husband (Jereme Rhodes) forces her to confront her past, revealing her persistent infatuation with the killer’s malt-shop fifties-era brand of machismo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lifeline Theatre’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” delivers a staid portrait of polite but cutthroat Victorian society. Actors offer strong character work that frames the race for Lizzy’s mother to find her daughter a husband in a pretty yet confined box of social restraint. Jane Austen died a single, poor woman of forty-one after being turned down by a suitor due to her own lack of dowry; you can’t but wonder what would happen if Lizzy told the repressed Mr. Darcy to take a hike and created her own possibilities.  Read the rest of this entry »

This Bailiwick Chicago/New Colony musical collaboration focuses on a dystopian future where every American family is limited to one child; every additional child is raised underground, ignored by the surface world. If you can’t remember that, it tells you so in the program. Five musical numbers reinforce the show’s thesis. We get it already. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Lee Miller

The Midwest premiere of Obie Award-winning Adam Bock’s play offers up many references to the lakes of Minnesota, fly-fishing and casting—and a sinister undertone, like a dark stain coming up through the water to engulf us. It’s about how we compartmentalize, as with a fishing-gear box; it’s about how we set the boundaries of our lives and ignore what we don’t want to acknowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Rachel Elizabeth

Coriolis Theater Company is launching a live sitcom “airing” in Chicago this summer. Written by four local comedians and directed by Grayson Vreeland (a.k.a.“Ketchup” from the Colbert segment on Occupy Wall Street), “Maggie and Coco Save The World” delves deep into the insecure hilarity of post-collegiate slacktactivist culture, conspiracy theories and nature documentaries. Vreeland explains: “After six months of confronting police and engaging in direct actions, Coco has to move back in with her longtime best friend and roommate, Maggie, and attempt to reintegrate herself back into her old life with her old friends, while still trying her best to save the world.” Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Goetten, John Taflan, Justin C. Turner, Kyle A. Gibson/Photo: Chris-Ocken

RECOMMENDED

John Webster’s 400-year-old Jacobean revenge tragedy is most famous now for its violent incestuous themes and high body count. This has come to overshadow the accomplishment of “The Duchess of Malfi”: Long before the concept of psychoanalysis had been created, Webster made a complex and penetrating study of  human nature’s self-destructive and pathological tendencies. The plot line—two brothers conspire, out of clearly psychopathic sexual perversions, to kill their widowed sister the duchess after she remarries secretly and below her station—is only the beginning of a story that ultimately finds its moral center on the double-crossing spy-murderer Bosola, who’s as close to a proto-existential character as Hamlet. Read the rest of this entry »