Photo: Saverio Truglia

“Sixty Miles To Silver Lake,” billed as a coming-of-age depiction of Denny (Ethan Dubin) as his divorced father Ky (Sean Bolger) drives him from his soccer game to his dad’s home in Silver Lake, is actually only about the self-centered schmuck Ky; we don’t get the personality of the son. Dubin is a superb actor in reacting to his father’s clumsy attempts at hilarity and explaining sex. The play, with its fifties-era thinking; the meaningless work the father does and the father’s progressive disintegration, reminds me of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” But here, the father has no redeeming characteristics, and the gay- and women-bashing gets tiresome.  Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Cesar Moza

RECOMMENDED

“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 »

Darren Criss (#4) with Team StarKid

With our criteria shifted back to artistic accomplishment in theater, dance, comedy and opera this year, our task got infinitely tougher. Because while the number of performing venues grows at a steady rate, the increase in the number of noteworthy artists seems to grow exponentially. For everyone we name on the list below, we had to leave off five, an embarrassment of riches for Chicago. We made a conscious effort to introduce a meaningful number of new faces to the list this year; the necessary absences should not be construed as a loss of worthiness as a consequence. We often find trends when we do the research these lists require; this year we’re starting to see a more meaningful effort to redefine performance itself in the internet age, from the runaway success of StarKids, to the more calculated endeavors of Silk Road. So what defines a “player”? Consider it some complex stew of career achievement, recent “heat” and, in some cases, rising stardom.

Written by Zach Freeman, Brian Hieggelke, Sharon Hoyer and Dennis Polkow

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“No wimps at F.S.” reads one of many doodles on the wall of Free Street Theater’s rehearsal space in the attic of the Pulaski Park Field House. This bold, unofficial statement of intent summarizes Free Street Theater’s formal mission: to teach “acting and writing skills to youth so they can open their potential to be creative, active participants in their own lives.” Its latest production, “You Ain’t Seen This,” which the website calls an exploration of “reflection, identity and choice,” is soon coming to an end; after two months of writing, rehearsal and performances in spaces all over the city, they are re-blocking the show for its final indoor performances. These will take place today  and Wednesday in the new space of mixed-media theater company Collaboraction, whose creative director, Sam Porretta, co-directed the piece. “It’s becoming a new show,” says co-director Ashley Winston, former ensemble member and arts educator. They describe the whole Summer Intensive program as “down and dirty”; the ensemble auditioned the week before the writing began, and the “whole piece is generated from their work.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Saverio Truglia

Jason Grote’s postmodern revision of the “Arabian Nights” was a big hit for Collaboraction when they staged the play’s Chicago premiere last fall, and so the show returns, after a week at Theater on the Lake, for a month-long run at the company’s new digs in the Flat Iron Arts Building. It’s not difficult to figure out why the show was so popular—it’s a heady, fresh and intriguingly complicated piece of theater—both head-scratchingly dense and cheekily fleet.

Dahna, a Middle-Eastern American woman, and Alan, an American Jew, modern-day extrapolations of Scheherazade and Sultan Shahriyar, are a couple who form the core of  a play so willfully labyrinthine as to include Jorge Luis Borges (literary figure and maze obsessive) as a character. Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Krall (right) and James Zoccoli (left) with audience member Kim Lyle in “A Domestic Disturbance at Fat Little Charlie’s 7th Birthday Party”/Photo: Saverio Truglia

RECOMMENDED

Anyone who was ever curious but hesitant to check out Collaboraction’s annual Sketchbook festival because of the marathon-length run time or the hit-or-miss nature of the lineup, which normally spans two nights in rep, would do well to consider attending “Reverb,” a greatest-hits collection of Sketchbook pieces from the previous decade of the festival’s history. While the eight short plays on the bill aren’t all winners, despite apparently having risen about the chaff, the brisk direction by artistic director Anthony Moseley keeps the ninety-minute production moving along. The highlights include “Deep Blue Sea,” a suspenseful, underwater love story; “The Lurker Radio Hour,” in which a dejected old-timey horror-story radio host searches for his runaway wife through the airwaves; “The Untimely Death of Adolf Hitler,” a wickedly smart and funny science-fiction alternate history; and “A Domestic Disturbance at Fat Little Charlie’s 7th Birthday Party,” an interactive comedy that cleverly epitomizes Collaboraction’s vision of unique experiments in theatrical experience. Music, video and visual art round out the diverse multimedia experience. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Collaboraction at the Flat Iron Arts Building, 1575 North Milwaukee, (312)226-9633. Through May 28.

Krapp's Last Tape/Photo: Liz Lauren

Top 5 Shows
“The Brother/Sister Plays,” Steppenwolf
“August: Osage County,” Broadway In Chicago
“Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
“1001,” Collaboraction
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
—Brian Hieggelke

Top 5 Play Revivals
“A Streetcar Named Desire,” Writers’ Theatre
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Steppenwolf Young Adult
“Private Lives,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater
“After the Fall,” Eclipse Theatre
—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Performances
Brian Dennehy, “Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
Karen Janes Woditsch, “To Master the Art,” TimeLine
Tracy Letts, “American Buffalo,” Steppenwolf
Amy Morton, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
Mary Beth Fisher, “Seagull,” Goodman
—Brian Hieggelke

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Edgar Miguel Sanchez and Mouzam Makkar/Photo: Saverio Truglia

This isn’t just a smart production—it’s a brilliant postmodern adaptation of the “Arabian Nights,” where Scheherazade’s famous interlocking stories, with the cliffhanger endings that kept King Shahriyar so enraptured in ancient Persia, are interwoven with a contemporary story of an Arab-Jewish interracial relationship against a backdrop of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan saturated with anti-Arab paranoia. It’s almost impossible to overstate the wit, fluidity and complexity with which writer Jason Grote and director Seth Bockley send the commanding, hyper-articulate cast through a labyrinth of character quick-changes, transitions from slapstick comedy to sincere political messages, and appearances from Osama bin Laden performing “Thriller” to Flaubert describing Egyptian courtesans. It’s also an incredibly hip production, with deconstructive metatheater, a strong Hitchcock influence, and striking stage pictures (including a Beckett-esque genie in a shopping cart and the most creative use of a strobe light I’ve seen in theater). Read the rest of this entry »

Beth Stelling, Maari Suorsa, Mary Hollis Inboden and Meg Johns in The New Colony Ensemble’s “Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche”/Photo: Saverio Truglia

RECOMMENDED

There are many similarities between “Sketchbook” and IML, the International Mr. Leather celebration.

“Sketchbook” is, of course, Collaboraction’s annual festival of mixed-media theater, music and performance art, a Chicago-flavored and smaller version of the Edinburgh or New York Fringe Festivals. IML is one of the biggest gatherings of leather, fetish and kink lovers from around the world, also a Windy City tradition. “Sketchbook” is celebrating its tenth anniversary in style and has taken over the upstairs theater and lobby of the Chopin Theatre for the next three weeks. IML just celebrated its thirty-second subversive year and commandeered the entire Hyatt Regency Hotel this past Memorial Day weekend. Both events are a peculiar mix of sexy, strange, funny, clever, physically mind-boggling, gross-out and consistently surprising entertainment gathered under one roof. Some sequences are painfully long and awkward to watch:  at IML they involve whips and chains; at Sketchbook it’s the cumbersome and time-draining scene changes. The smell of beer permeates the air at both events, indeed, both experiences become exponentially better the more inebriated you become (for the record, this critic never drinks on the job). There’s a lot of techno and trance music blaring at both events (I’ll be forever thankful to Sketchbook for bringing to my attention a wicked good house version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”).  At both Sketchbook and IML, you’re guaranteed to see things you have never seen before, things you will never see again, and things you hope you never see again. There’s tons of experimentation although the creativity at IML could get you arrested and thrown in jail in some states while at Sketchbook it wins you an NEA grant. You can see people make incredible fools out of themselves at both:  at IML the performers do it for sexual kicks; at Sketchbook they do it for artistic fulfillment. At both, there are some things that make no sense brilliantly; there are some things that just make no sense. Sketchbook has better lighting. IML has better men. Both are terrifically entertaining. Both have moments that are terribly boring. Read the rest of this entry »

Tara DeFrancisco, No. 36

In this town of performers—theater makers, dancers, comedy creators—you’d think it’d be pretty easy to assemble a list of artistic influencers and innovators. And it is. The challenge is paring that list down to a mere fifty. It’s a testament to the wonders of the performing-arts culture in Chicago that we easily came up with about 200 names when we set out to create this year’s version of The Players. Unfortunately, we’re only listing a fraction of those worthy of your attention, but that’s the problem with an abundance of riches. Hopefully you’ll see a handful of recognizable names and a whole lot more you’ll start noticing from this point on. We’ve retooled the criteria for this year, focusing on onstage artistic achievement, rather than the backstage influence of artistic directors, executive directors and the like—who will get their day again next year. Let the arguments begin. Read the rest of this entry »