RECOMMENDED

Playwright and chess master Cándido Tirado’s rumination on the brutality of human beings uses the chess board as a jumping-off point for covering a range of cruel behavior—from genocide to racism to unfair eviction—as three seasoned chess hustlers bicker and collude with each other while working to lure in challengers (referred to as fish) and take their money at the board.

The action takes place in the round, with set designer Collette Pollard’s tables and benches perfectly capturing the comfortably worn feeling of New York’s Washington Square Park and Jesse Klug’s lighting design (including some glowing chess tables) adding a touch of the heightened abstract. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Mixing historical figures like General William Tecumseh Sherman along with fictional counterparts who expose a greater range of the impact of Sherman’s march across Georgia and the Carolinas that devastated the South and hastened the end of the Civil War, Frank Galati’s faithful adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s acclaimed novel “The March” manages to assemble twenty-six actors playing thirty-nine roles onto the stage, across dozens and dozens of days and places, all without driving the audience batty in the process, though it does take a couple of scenes to adjust to the pace of change. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Sean Williams

RECOMMENDED

By placing the audience around communal tables (loaded with purchasable wine and beer) in a setting that manages to feel like a restaurant with a theater in it rather than the other way around, this delectable mix of Cirque du Soleil and fine dining helps establish a relaxed sense of camaraderie between audience members well before the on-stage theatrics begin. The thirty minutes prior to showtime are spent marveling over margaritas and appetizers with fellow patrons rather than just settling into assigned seats. Read the rest of this entry »

Pat Whalen and Andrew Swanson

RECOMMENDED

Jackalope’s latest is a taut pas de deux that examines life’s banal cruelty. The piece’s central issue (do you know who you are?) transforms into the larger, more sinister question: Does anybody know anyone?

Royall (Andrew Burden Swanson) waits for the arrival of actor Gerry (Pat Whalen), who hopes to rent Royall’s lake house. The interview digresses to wide-ranging tangents concerning  survival and sacrifice. Read the rest of this entry »

Zainab Jah, LeRoy McClain and Pascale Armand/Photo: T Charles Erickson

RECOMMENDED

There is something decidedly conventional in the structure of playwright Danai Gurira’s “The Convert,” now in a three-way world-premiere production at the Goodman, the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton and Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. The historical drama, set in Southern Africa during the early days of Victorian British colonialism in what became Rhodesia and later Zimbabwe, centers around a devout Christian catechist and his cultivation of a “savage” into a highly effective protégé, sounds very much like something we’ve all seen before. And its three-act structure and three-hour-fifteen-minute running time are most definitively retrograde in an era of one-act eighty-minute shows. But something more is at work here. Especially novel for the audience of overwhelmingly white and white-haired patrons at the Goodman, I suspect, is the depiction of this world without any Brits (i.e. white characters): No colonialist with a heart of gold, for example, who perceives the true nobility of the savages she’s been sent to simultaneously save and subjugate. Read the rest of this entry »

Playing out like a cross between “Hellraiser” and “In My Skin,” Scott T. Barsotti’s seventy-minute psycho-horror follows the tortured Cam (Sasha Gioppo, haunted and haunting) after she awakens from a coma with the belief that she has lost the ability to die. Her controlling sister (Casey Cunningham) and worried lover (Michaela Petro) attempt to convince her otherwise, which, rather enigmatically, sends her into a bit of a suicide-attempting frenzy. Read the rest of this entry »

Usman Ally, Alana Arenas, Lee Stark, Benim Foster/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Amir is an American of Islamic heritage, his parents from the part of the world now known as Pakistan. He seems fully assimilated in all the ways mainstream America would want him to be: he’s disavowed the religion of his people, married a white woman and, most important of all, become an asshole corporate lawyer who wears $600 shirts. For what aspiration is more American than to be an asshole corporate lawyer?

But no one wants the assimilated Amir. Not his nephew who still clings to the Koran. Nor his wife, who’s using Islam in a  contemporary version of radical chic to establish her career as an artist. And in the ultimate act of identity suppression, he’s immersed himself, it seems, in a world of American Jews—at his law firm, among his social circle. Read the rest of this entry »

Meredith Alvarez and Philip Winston/Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

Signal Ensemble might be the 1968 New York Jets of Chicago theater: scrappy, undermanned and under-resourced, but quarterbacked by a leader with a knack for championship-level razzle dazzle. I’d write something like that, but Ronan Marra, Signal’s co-artistic director and the playwright of “Motion” is a Cleveland native and a Browns fan, so he might object. In any case, something pretty cool’s happening up at Signal, and “Motion” follows on the extraordinary success of 2010′s Rolling Stones bipolar “Aftermath,” with a re-teaming of playwright Marra and director Aaron Snook delivering similarly impressive results.

The small theater space has been transformed into a football field, with the cast sitting on “the bench” and about forty audience members surrounding the action in “the bleachers,” complete with cup holders and complimentary popcorn. Read the rest of this entry »

The cast of "Motion"/Photo: Johnny Knight

Ronan Marra, one of the founders of Signal Ensemble Theatre and playwright of their breakout hit “Aftermath,” is a huge football nerd. He’s been an NFL fan since he was a kid. He knows the ins and outs, not just of the game, but the behind-the-scenes, the draft, the politics—you name it.

“For the last several years I’ve been wanting to write a play about professional football somehow, but I really didn’t know how to. I kind of knew that it would have to be something about the behind-the-scenes, but I didn’t have an entry point for it yet.” Read the rest of this entry »

From left: Adrian Danzig, Samuel Taylor, John Judd/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

What if all the magical action in “The Tempest” happened inside the head of one bitter, wronged man? “The Feast” portrays a tormented Prospero (John Judd) commanding his slaves Ariel (Samuel Taylor) and Caliban (Adrian Danzig) to repeatedly act out an unfolding drama of his own creation using masks and puppets. Read the rest of this entry »