Randall Newsome, Sally Murphy, Kristina Valada-Viars and Francis Guinan/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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War photographer Sarah, played with a sense of psychic damage to match her physically wrecked state by Sally Murphy, is home in New York with her long-term companion James, a freelance war journalist, who Randall Newsome injects with just enough emotionalism to complement Sarah’s internal struggle. She’s just barely survived a horrible injury while on assignment. Addicted to excitement, they’re the “Sid and Nancy” of journalism, as their pal Richard (Francis Guinan, brilliant as always) describes them in exasperation. But when Richard introduces his young and bright and naive new girlfriend, Mandy Bloom (Kristina Valada-Viars, charmingly bathetic), Sarah and James come to question the decisions they’ve made about life and love. Read the rest of this entry »

Meredith Alvarez and Philip Winston/Photo: Johnny Knight

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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 »

Bret Tuomi as Jeffrey Skilling/Photo: Lara Goetsch

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Jeffrey Skilling (Bret Tuomi) comes to Enron with new ideas: mark-to-market accounting, electricity trading. The company makes fistfuls of cash and causes fatal, rolling blackouts in California. But it’s not just Skilling’s ideas that are scandalous; it’s that everyone (Enron lawyers and accountants, the financial industry) lets him get away with it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Calling itself the “metropolitan” version of “A Prairie Home Companion,” this monthly live radio-show-cum-podcast takes what Garrison Keillor has been doing for decades and adapts it for a younger, hipper crowd, throwing in more laughs (and more swearing). Led with a mix of wide-eyed earnestness and subtle cynicism by artistic director and head writer Matt Lyle, “The City Life Supplement” even has its very own Lake Wobegone: the fictional north Chicago neighborhood of Ravens Park, where you can get a five-dollar haircut from a Serbian named Milos or listen to your favorite hipster soap opera “As the World Sighs” (set in Wicker Park, natch). 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

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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 »

Tamberla Perry, Geoffrey Owens, Marc Grapey, Patrick Clear/Photo: Eric Y. Exit

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When David Mamet was on Charlie Rose promoting the New York premiere of his new play “Race” last year, he was naturally enough asked what he thought of President Obama. “I would rather not answer that question,” he said after a long silence, “as it might influence how people approach this play.” Since then, Mamet has released his infamous liberal-to-conservative manifesto, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” a kind of upside-down Augustine’s “Confessions” where he describes Obama’s “Change” that was so “accepted by a drugged populace and a supine press” as “the unfortunate descent of a productive nation into socialism” where “racial tensions have devolved to acrimony unknown in this country for decades.” Of Obama’s declaration that “Selma belongs to me, too,” Mamet assesses, “but the credit does not.”

No wonder in promoting the Chicago premiere of “Race” that Goodman Theatre, Mamet’s old stomping ground, has by and large turned the production over to its African-American director Chuck Smith. Also no wonder that, while Goodman’s gift shop had plenty of copies of “Race” on hand and virtually any other Mamet play for sale during intermission opening night as well as his book of theater essays, “The Secret Knowledge,” Mamet’s latest and most controversial opus, was nowhere to be found. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Katie Petrunich, Shannon McGuire, Madelyn Doyle, Julie Brannen and Kaitlin Bishop.

“I’m pretty committed to doing solos every year,” Margi Cole tells me. “It’s important to me as a director and leader to put myself in a position where I’m learning.”

Taking that position this year involved a trip across the pond to work with American choreographer Deborah Hay. Hay—a Merce Cunningham alum—has made herself a nexus of artist development with the Solo Performance Commissioning Project, in which twenty dancers apply to learn a single solo piece created by Hay. After a week and a half of intensive study and coaching, participants disperse to their homes around the globe, continuing to work independently for at least three months before performing the piece in public. Read the rest of this entry »

Former Bolshoi principal dancer Mikhail Lavrovsky places new choreography on Prokofiev’s famous score in this staging by the State Ballet Theatre of Russia. The Voronezh-based (south of Moscow, some 300 miles from the Ukraine border) company has been around since 1961, but is a somewhat new import to the States. Read the rest of this entry »