A pair of estranged sisters glare at each other across the dusty lawn of their childhood home in Texas, a cagey reunion that plays out in silent looks and blunt conversation. They are two sides of a coin, fraternal twins with a long, jealous history between them. They press each other’s buttons out of habit. And anyway, when someone gets under your skin—even if she is your twin goddamn sister—why fake at playing nice?

Killer scene, but you have to wade through nearly three hours of “Ten Cent Night” to get there. Stuffed with eccentric characters and interlocking stories, Marisa Wegrzyn’s newest play could use a good-old-fashioned edit. Too many random ideas are never fully developed. (Richard Shavzin is the director.)

The play defies easy plot summary—not necessarily a bad thing—but in this specific case, there’s a wandering, aimless quality to the narrative. The aforementioned sisters are the surviving children of a country-music star who recently blew his head off. Dee (Maura Kidwell) is the repressed one, Roby (Anna Carini) the hellion.

There are other things going on, but Carini is the one to watch—she is just out-of-control enough to make it halfway interesting. (A nuanced Morgan McCabe, as an elegantly aging prostitute—don’t ask—is also quite good.) But the play doesn’t ignite until Roby comes face-to-face with Dee. Everything that comes before feels like too much filler. (Nina Metz)

At Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, (312)633-0630 or chicagodramatists.org. Thur-Sat 8p, Sun 3p. $25-$35. Through October 26.

“It is like opening up a present you have no idea what is inside,” says Hallie Gordon, artistic director of Theater on the Lake. “It is a surprise and sometimes you can absolutely love it.”

The Chicago Park District is currently producing its fifty-sixth season at the charismatic waterfront locale. It is the second year under the artistic leadership of Gordon, who previously served as general manager, and once again it has a little something for everyone.

“The great thing about the people that come here is if they don’t like one show they always like the other show,” Gordon shares. That is her methodology. Over the year she sees upwards of a hundred shows to arrive at the eight that will represent the best of Chicago’s off-Loop theater in week-long engagements at the space.

“We take the best of the season and recreate it on our stage,” Gordon continues, “and a lot of patrons come to us because they don’t have the opportunity, or ability, to go out during the rest of the year and see theater. They know that when they come here they will have a taste for everything that is going on.”

Comedy, drama, musical, sketch—it is all ripe to end up on the Theater on the Lake stage. “People think that the shows that are loud and big and have a lot of spectacle do well down here because they compete with the lakefront, but there are a lot of dramas that do really well,” Gordon has discovered. If the show is of quality and the difficult scheduling of remounting live theater performances can be worked out, Gordon is glad to offer any type of production a space in her season. The opportunity to bring in new work like the forthcoming Chicago Dramatists production of Bill Jepsen’s “Cadillac” is particularly exciting to her.

“It is an opportunity for the director and the writers and the actors to revisit that work,” she says. “You very rarely get a chance to redo things that you think you made a mistake on. It is never finished so now is that opportunity.” (William Scott)

This week, Neo-Futurists present “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind.” The Theater on the Lake series runs through August 3 at 2400 North Lake Shore Drive. See the entire schedule at chicagoparkdistrict.com.

Keith Huff has been developing plays since the 1980s at Chicago Dramatists and has long been admired by Chicago theater-scene insiders, but with “A Steady Rain,” a noir tour de force about two South Side Chicago cops’ harrowing experience on the front lines, he may well become a household name. “A Steady Rain” presents, in the form Huff has perfected that he calls the “duologue,” the occasionally conflicting accounts of the cops’ domestic disturbance call turned nightmare. The relationship between the police officers, friends since childhood, reveals itself to be increasingly complex as they come to terms with what they’ve seen, eventually reaching the scale of Greek tragedy. 

Critics have noted the pitch-perfect dialogue, impeccable acting and humanity of the Chicago Dramatists’ production. In fact, the play’s Midwest premiere has met with fervent and sweeping positive reviews, many critics going so far as to wonder aloud how someone who doesn’t walk the thin blue line, could, as it were, write such lines. It turns out that Huff, in addition to being the son-in-law of a police officer, is also a veteran of the South Side Chicago bar scene, where as a child he joined his father and “just listened,” as he explained in an interview. Clearly a born writer, Huff is also a particularly ruminative playwright, constantly calling assumptions about memory and reality into question. His ability to infuse such philosophical inquiry into what appears at first blush to be a good-cop, bad-cop story bespeaks his undeniable talent.

Huff’s ear for parable and poetry—one could easily compare him to an even grittier David Mamet—combined with his other uncommon writing virtues, could easily land him a spot among hot playwrights, but he’s already proven he has staying power. In fact, he’s anything but an instant success, having written and directed dozens of plays for Chicago’s most prestigious theater companies as well as nationally. He’s won three Illinois Arts Council Playwriting Fellowships and awards including the Drama-Logue Award, the Cunningham Prize, the John Gassner Award and the Berrilla Kerr Award. It’s well worth keeping an eye on his theater while he’s still a playwright with a day job. (Monica Westin)

“At Steady Rain” at the Royal George Theatre, 1641 N. Halsted, (312)988-9000. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

A used car salesman’s ethical dilemmas leave him teetering between sealing a money-making end-of-the-month deal and getting the sack in network playwright Bill Jepsen’s sharp new comedy, “Cadillac,” now playing at Chicago Dramatists. Smartly directed by Edward Sobel, this is a solid portrait of workplace realism, with crisp dialogue and fleshed-out, believable characters. Craig Spidle is wonderful as the conflicted nice-guy finance manager, Howard, struggling to make good on his reputation as the go-to guy everybody can count on, whose past comes back to haunt him when an slick young cutthroat co-worker (Ian Forester) provokes his simmering temper. Forester and Rob Riley as Art, the seasoned pro with sage advice for every situation, may be responsible for most of the laugh-out-loud moments, but Jepsen has created a true ensemble piece—Kathy Logelin charms as Robin, the sole saleswoman struggling to make her quota, and Gene Cordon is well cast as Fred, the man desperate to finally own his dream car. Steve Ratcliff and Laurie Larson round out the tightly knit cast. (Valerie Jean Johnson)

At Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, (312)633-0630. This production is now closed. 

RECOMMENDED

A pair of Chicago beat cops sit in an empty room—somewhere in a precinct, judging by Tom Burch’s excellent set design—and tell of a rainy summer when all hell broke loose. The police story—of men felled by crimes they seek to thwart—is a well-worn genre, but rare is the play so purely intelligent and entertaining. Denny is the family man, an alpha male as politically incorrect as he is self-righteous. He is a teddy bear. He is an irrational prick. He is a stand-up guy about to fall to his knees. Playwright Keith Huff has an ear for the way men like this talk, the old-style Chicago sound, the bruising casualness (and hilarity) of their insults. You can’t fault Denny’s logic, which is what makes the character (cunningly played by Randy Steinmeyer) so much more than a cliché: “They want tolerance from me,” he says of the “gangbanging ethno-shit in the back seat” of the squad car, “they should start tolerating my intolerance.” His undoing is a hooker with a “heart-shaped pillow of a derrière” and an “upper frontal superstructure” of leaky tits, heavy with mother’s milk. This is language as music, and Steinmeyer’s face is a catalogue of emotions: seen-it-all indifference; squinty loquaciousness; something I’d call Chicago incredulous (surprised, but not); and, tucking his chin, a do-not-fuck-with-me glare that is intense and unyielding. The other cop is Joey, a sensitive loner from the neighborhood and Denny’s partner (Peter DeFaria, in a nicely shaded performance). He is a reformed “elbow-bender,” once so far gone down the bottle “you were spoon feedin’ yourself sterno for breakfast,” Denny says, and you can feel the shame in DeFaria’s entire demeanor. They’ve known each other “since kinnygarten.” Both have been passed over for promotions. They will test the boundaries of their friendship, protecting and betraying one another in a story that seems torn from the headlines it feels so true. As a night of theater, the production accomplishes what film can not—a narrative that requires your imagination as active participant. I have a very clear picture in my mind of the people and places and events described herein: Denny’s house, where his large-screen TV is splattered to pieces; the rainy night in an alley when a naked, sobbing Vietnamese teenager wrapped himself around Denny’s midsection; a prostitute’s bedroom, where her baby lies asleep in a sock drawer. Huff knows how to paint a picture, and his work here is vivid and special—you want to box up the script and take it home with you. He calls the play a “duologue,” a do-si-do of intersecting monologues traded off like hot potatoes, occasionally turning into full-fledged moments of dialogue. It is a clever storytelling technique. But what makes the show (under Russ Tutterow’s flawless direction for Chicago Dramatists) so addicting is Huff’s combination of Hollywood-style crime procedural (vaguely “Law & Order”-ish) and his insight into what makes people tick. Specifically, the shift in moral perspective that can take hold once you become a parent—sending you off the deep end if you’re not careful. (Nina Metz)

At Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, (312)633-0630. This production is now closed.

Film noir is neither blithe nor bombastic, which makes it one of the least likely of American forms. Consider: The hardboiled private eye; the reliable secretary; the femme fatale. The sidelong glances. The cigarettes. The music—from the wah-wah to the low rumble of orchestral anxiety. The cruelty and ambiguous motivations (sex plays a key role, usually as a means to an end). All of it captured on black-and-white celluloid, stylish and moody. With “Noir,” creator-director Blake Montgomery—whose rehabbed industrial space on the near West Side is a bona fide theater destination (called The Building Stage)—deconstructs and distills the clichés into a work that is just this side of sketch comedy. A collage that blends everything from “The Maltese Falcon” to “The Big Sleep,” the show is both witty and reverential about its source material. It skids across the surface details, though, without actually penetrating too deep. That, I think, is what distinguishes it from the best noir films, which can leave you feeling boths smacked around and engaged by the deceptions and depressions that make up the human existence. (An entirely different sort of theater noir—about two modern-day cops—can be found across town in “A Steady Rain” at Chicago Dramatists.) But in terms of aesthetics, Montgomery knows what he is doing. Lee Keenan’s lighting design is crucial—the long, husky shadows; the muted glow creeping through the slats of an unseen window blind, tattooing the wall. (Keenan also designed the set, a soaring space defined by pivoting walls that suggests the slipperiness of truth as it reveals itself in film noir.) The script is a showcase of jargon, each utterance layered on top of the last so that nothing makes sense—but of course it does, in some hard to define way. “Good morning, angel,” says the man in a trench coat. “I’m Doll,” replies the young woman, and points to another woman on stage: “That’s Angel.” Good stuff. (The cast, which includes a pert Sarah Goeden, with a period-perfect face and sexy-secretary routine, are also credited as the show’s creators.)  I’m not entirely sure why Montgomery has situated the audience so far from the action—the first row is set back and raised a good five-feet above the stage. Sometimes it feels like you are spying on the proceedings from a rooftop perch. Too often, things are happening in the distance. There is a specific you-are-there joy of off-Loop theater—seeing the veins on an actor’s neck; heck, seeing the pores on an actor’s face—that is missing here, as if swallowed up by so much Hollywood-generated fog. (Nina Metz) The Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter, (312)419-1369. Fri-Sat 8pm/Sun 7pm. $10-$20. Through November 3.

At the Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter, (312)491-1369. This production is now closed.

A homeless man begs for money, an elderly woman struggles down the street and you wrestle with questions. Shouldn’t you help? Can you help?

This everyday dilemma drives playwright Mia McCullough’s “Spare Change,” which opens its world-premiere production in previews at Stage Left this week. In a nuanced, witty text, McCullough explores what happens when one of her characters feels compelled to step in and try to help a battered mother who seems to be prostituting herself to get by.

“Spare Change” deftly weaves themes of race, class and the universal challenges of marriage around its central question about social responsibility. All themes that, to varying degrees, find origins in McCullough’s own life. McCullough grew up in New York, then came to Northwestern for college, where she met her future husband, and they decided to stay here. After a frustrating attempt at breaking into screenwriting (”the assistants all said they really liked my work, but had no power to make anything happen”), she committed herself to writing for the stage. Her talent eventually brought her into the spotlight, when “Chagrin Falls,” a play set in an Oklahoma town against the backdrop of the death penalty, opened at Stage Left in the fall of 2001 to critical acclaim, going on to win numerous local and national awards, and marking McCullough as a playwright to watch. Around this time, McCullough became playwright-in-residence at Chicago Dramatists and joined the Stage Left ensemble. (9/11 was a turning point in the latter decision. Distraught by the images of her “hometown being bombed,” that day she “just came down to Stage Left and started doing stuff. ‘Oh, she knows how to use power tools; we should ask her to be in the ensemble,’” is how she describes the process.)

Like hundreds of others pursuing careers in theater, McCullough toiled in relative obscurity for several years between college and “Chagrin Falls,” working various temp jobs to get by. One of those temp jobs, one that stuck, was working the crisis line at the battered women’s shelter, Mary Lou’s Place, in Evanston. It was there that she found the inspiration for the plot of “Spare Change,” when a man called and described his encounters on the el with a battered woman, who he later saw prostituting herself. Due to confidentiality reasons, McCullough could not tell him that it did indeed sound like one of the clients at her shelter. Nevertheless, this man’s call fascinated her, as she pondered his motivations and expectations. Her experience at the crisis line, coupled with a stint as a temp at a police station, let her see the white knight phenomenon play out repeatedly, where men decide to help women whether they want it or not. In this particular case, race also might have played a part: would the man have been equally engaged in this client’s plight if she had not been an attractive, light-skinned mixed-race woman and instead have been cast from a darker hue?

In person, McCullough offers little in her appearance to suggest authority on matters of race. With dark hair, light features and an easygoing manner, McCullough easily blends into the mainstream of Chicago’s population. But she developed sensitivity for the issues of race early on: “growing up, everyone was white, Catholic and Irish or Italian and I was neither.” Her mother was Jewish and anti-Semitism was no stranger to a school that also had only one black student. But racial justice was a family avocation: her parents had been very active in the civil-rights movement, even living in Harlem in the late sixties and seventies. McCullough’s background, combined with her experience working at the shelter where she saw even more variations of racial politics play out, equipped her to construct an especially sensitive subtext for “Spare Change.”

Always prone to rewrite her work repeatedly until she gets it right, McCullough faced a challenging road bringing “Spare Change” to the stage. Pleased with her work on “Taking Care,” which it produced in 2003, Steppenwolf originally commissioned “Spare Change,” then selected it for its First Look festival, where it played in workshop. All along, McCullough worked on it. “After Steppenwolf let it go, I left it alone for six months. It just felt like this play is going to kill me.” Repeatedly reading the lines where her central character Brad question his life, “Why is this important?” haunted her with her own questions about the play: “Is it important enough?”

So how did it come out? “I am actually pretty pleased.”

“Spare Change” plays at Stage Left, 3408 North Sheffield, (773)883-8830, through November 3. Her one-act “The Play About the Squirrel” plays one final Monday, September 17, at the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, Prop Thtr, 3502 North Elston, (773)267-6660.