Here’s the press release from Mary-Arrchie:

Mary-Arrchie’s 2009-2010 Season

Dear Friend,

We are pleased to announce our 24th Season of edgy, exciting, and risk-taking theatre. Our 2009-2010 season is teeming with new works, we are proud to bring you THREE Midwest Premieres, each uniquely compelling pieces of theater that reflect the decisions we face and the pursuit of what it means to live fully in the 21st Century! So without further ado, meet the plays! Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release announcing the Jeff noms for Equity:

Chicago Theatres Shine in Outstanding Jeff Nominated Productions of 2008-2009 Season

Goodman Theatre and Drury Lane Oakbrook
Top List of Award Nominees

50 Years of The Second City to be Spotlighted
at The Jeff Awards

Thursday, August 27, 2009 – Chicago, IL.   The Jeff Awards today announced 179 nominations in 35 categories for Chicago Equity theatrical productions which opened between August 1, 2008, and July 31, 2009. The Jeff Awards sent judges to the opening nights of 141 productions offered by 57 producing organizations. From these openings, 98 Equity productions were “Jeff Recommended,” which made them eligible for award nominations.

The 41st Annual Jeff Awards ceremony, honoring excellence in professional theatre produced within the immediate Chicago area, will be held on Monday, October 19, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. A pre-show Appetizer Buffet will run from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., and the Awards Ceremony, directed by Michael Weber, will begin at 7:30 p.m. The Second City, celebrating 50 years as a producer, will play a featured role at the Jeff Awards ceremony. Advance purchase tickets, which include the ceremony and the pre-show buffet, are $75 ($55 for members of Actors’ Equity Association, United Scenic Artists, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, and The Dramatists Guild of America). The evening is black tie optional and the public is cordially invited to attend. To purchase tickets, visit the Jeff Awards website at www.jeffawards.org. For more information, contact Equity Chair Diane Hires at equitywing@jeffawards.org. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from the Jeff Awards:

JEFF AWARDS COMMITTEE PRESENTS NON-EQUITY AWARDS FOR THE 2008 – 2009 SEASON

Theo Ubique Receives Highest Number of Awards;
“Evita” and “Our Town” Garner Outstanding Production Awards

Chicago, IL.     Chicago’s nationally-renowned storefront and black box theatre community gathered at the Park West today for its annual celebration as the Jeff Awards Committee gave out 26 Non-Equity Jeff Awards in 24 categories. In addition, a Special Award was given to Pegasus Players’ founder Arlene Crewdson for her lifelong contributions to Chicago theatre. The festive event was emceed by actor-composer Jon Steinhagen, appearing in that role for the third time.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from the Jeff Awards:

The Jeff Awards
Announces 2009 Non-Equity Nominations

Lifeline (14) and Theo Ubique (13) Are Top-Nominated Companies;
“Evita,” “Mariette in Ecstasy,” and “Rose and the Rime”
Garner 7 Nominations Each

Chicago, IL.  The Jeff Awards today announced 114 nominations in 24 categories for Non-Equity Jeff Awards, which honor excellence in Chicago theatres not under a union contract, for productions that opened between April 1, 2008, and March 31, 2009.  The Jeff Awards judged the opening nights of 130 productions offered by 57 non-Equity producing organizations and recommended 54 of them for further judging, making those 54 eligible for Non-Equity Jeff Award nominations in all categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Writers’:

Writers’ Theatre announces 2009/10 season, to feature works by Tom Stoppard, Noel Coward,  Tennessee Williams and John Henry Redwood with directors Michael Halberstam, David Cromer, Ron OJ Parson and Jim Corti

Glencoe, IL-Writers’ Theatre Artistic Director Michael Halberstam and Executive Director Kathryn M. Lipuma announce the company’s 18th season, which includes Tom Stoppard’s comedic masterpiece Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, directed by Michael Halberstam; Noel Coward’s musical revue, Oh Coward! to be performed in Writers’ most intimate venue; The Old Settler by John Henry Redwood, directed by Ron OJ Parson; and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by David Cromer. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

Relaxing backstage on a break between rehearsals, you barely have a chance to ask if the Lookingglass production of “Our Town” coming on the heels of the much-acclaimed David Cromer production that began at the Hypocrites last year and is opening next week in New York is a coincidence before co-directors Anna D. Shapiro, 2008 Tony Award winner for “August: Osage County,” and Jessica Thebus, both nod their heads in unison.

Shapiro offers that two productions so close together may only seem odd to “those of us who live and breathe theater rather than for ordinary people with a life who may like theater, but who probably have one theater that they principally go to.” Did either of them see the Hypocrites’ production? “Oh, sure,” says Thebus, “we went together. It was a beautiful production and very inspiring.” Did it confirm anything that the pair might—or might not—do in their own production? Long pause, broken by Shapiro: “Yes, and yes, though we would never tell you what those might be.” “Ditto,” shoots back Thebus. “Keep in mind,” says Shapiro, “we are all good friends. David and I went to school together back to high school and we cheer one another on. This is not competitive like sports: David texted the day we began rehearsals and wished us well, and I said, ‘Gee, it’s going so well, is it really this easy?’ and he’s like, ‘That’s the secret, it’s like singing “Danny Boy,” you really can’t screw it up.’”

Contrary to the notion that the pair are bringing “new life to an old chestnut,” Shapiro and Thebus say they have always been fascinated with “Our Town,” ever since they first read it back in high school. “I never thought this was anything less than a great play,” says Shapiro. “Even seeing a high-school production reduces me to crippled weeping. I have been trying to get my students to direct it forever, but they didn’t know how great it is. Now, they are all going to want to do it.” “It is iconic,” agrees Thebus, “like the Bible or Shakespeare.”

So why do “Our Town” at Lookingglass and not Steppenwolf, where Shapiro is ensemble member and where Thebus is artistic associate? “It’s not what people might think, namely that no one at Steppenwolf wanted to do it,” offers Shapiro. “The fact is, everyone wanted to do it, and there were three people with their hands up ahead of me who haven’t gotten it together yet, so it would be a long, long wait there. I’m not big enough.” Even with a shiny new Tony Award? “I’m not big enough physically,” Shapiro jokes.

And why do it together? “We are both huge devotees of the play,” says Shapiro, and both teach it at Northwestern and have always loved it. “We have a common vision,” says Thebus, Shapiro cutting in, “and mutual respect and friendship. Together, there is more dynamism and because there are two of us, everything is an external conversation, which is great. Usually, directing a show is a very solitary and lonely experience, but the chance to do this together makes this very special. We will probably write a book on the process of putting this together,  it has been that fascinating.”

“You read it one way when you’re very young,” muses Thebus, “but as you’re older, another layer of meaning emerges and you think, ‘Ah, that’s what that line means.’” “There is a power there, in coming back to something familiar from when we are young and revisiting it in a whole new way,” says Shapiro. “And here is this company [Lookingglass] that is now 20 years old and the folks all went to college together so are already a close community and all of us, including David [Cromer], are exactly the same age now and at the same point in the arc of our lives where life and death are on our minds and we are seeing that from the prism of this play.”

Does casting David Schwimmer of “Friends” fame as George Gibbs, though, carry a risk of pop-culture recognition, something akin to Daniel Radcliffe of “Harry Potter” fame doing “Equus”? “Let me tell you,” scolds Shapiro, “that kid [Radcliffe] was amazing. This is Chicago, and I think most people know, or should know, that David was a theater actor here long before television found him. We should all be so multi-talented.”

Shapiro’s own success with “August: Osage County,” which won her the 2008 Tony Award for Best Director and which is still running on Broadway and in London, and will begin a national tour in July, is no less impressive, but she feels that it is time to move on to other things. “The rhythm of the life of a theater director is such that you start a project and you end a project, but this keeps sprouting elsewhere,” Shapiro says. “Don’t get me wrong: I am enormously grateful for this association and for what this show has achieved and really do think that every actor involved with it should get a house and a car. But it is tough to keep coming back again and again to the rehearsal room and refresh the show and I’ve had my say with it.  If I wanted a Starbucks franchise, I’d have bought a Starbucks franchise.”

“Our Town” previews through February 20 and runs February 21-April 5 at Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, $30-$60; (312)337-0665.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

No theater company has transformed itself in the past year as completely and successfully as American Theater Company. Quality work aside, the company sometimes verged on irrelevancy. All that has changed under artistic director PJ Paparelli, whose savvy instincts have resulted in smart, modern plays that are wry and potent and incredibly entertaining. Check out the company’s current production of “Celebrity Row” (by Itamar Moses) and see for yourself.

But first, a lingering problem. Enough with the bush-league opening-night chaos. Time for ATC to grow up, stop papering the house and lose the twenty-minute delays. And please fix the nasty flood zone in the women’s loo. If ATC wants to be a major player, it better focus on the audience experience, as well.

That said, “Celebrity Row” (directed with sharp energy and a canny understanding of the issues by David Cromer) might be the most intellectually engaging show since Paparelli took over. Moses examines the well-thought-out criminal imperative—born of grievances both legitimate and not—in a political excavation that feels very of-the-moment. Moses understands the ways in which raging ideologies and unexpected comedy can exist side by side.

The play takes place in late 1990s at the Colorado Supermax prison—“the Alcatraz of the Rockies”—where four notorious criminals are housed. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh. World Trade Center Bomber Ramzi Yousef. Latin Kings gang leader Luis Felipe. Their block is dubbed celebrity row. This part is true.

The play itself is fictional—wholly imagined scenarios that never played out in reality—but it contains a larger truth about the notions that shape our identity as Americans. Who are we as a society—and more importantly, who do we want to be? It’s a hell of a question, election year or not.

The four men—all with hyper-articulated reasons for their crimes—battle and debate with a civil rights attorney (the effective Kelli Simpkins) who is working to improve conditions at supermax-type facilities. In other hands, her role might be grating—annoyingly righteous and sanctimonious—but Simpkins creates a woman who is more than a mouthpiece. With her lithe-jock body language and Southern twang (the character is from North Carolina but Simpkins is more Holly Hunter Texas), she is a no-nonsense pawn with some decent reasoning behind her actions.

The issues are nothing new—a fury born of frustrated impulses, directed squarely at America’s flaws—but Moses lays them out like a Frank Rich column. (My one complaint: A few heavy-handed poetic scenes at the top have a zone-out effect and add nothing to the play.) There is something comforting about the script, tense and violent as it is—something comforting in the idea that people can have real arguments over real dilemmas, instead of chasing a tail that doesn’t exist.

Cromer’s work here as a director is a serious bump to ATC’s game—a phone call actually sounds like a phone call (props to sound designers Andy Krumeich and Josh Schmidt)—and his cast of men physically resemble their real life counterparts. Larry Neumann, Jr., prone to actorly ticks, sheds all that baggage as Kaczynski. It’s his best performance to date. McVeigh, as played by Christopher McLinden, finds the three-dimensional human behind the notorious cold stare, and Joe Minoso’s Felipe is a wily crime boss from the mold of “The Wire’s” David Simon.

As the man who bombed the WTC in ’93, Usman Ally makes the strongest impression. Behold this rational thinker with untold pools of anger. In a flashback scene, he plays Simpkins’ mother—a performance that exists in an altered dimension, achieved with little more than a pair of earrings and an entirely different demeanor. Ally and his co-stars act the tar out of this thing. ATC has come to play, and they mean business. (Nina Metz)

At American Theater Company, 1909 W Byron, (773)409-4125 or atcweb.org. Thur-Fri 8p, Sat 3p and 8p, Sun 3p. $35-$40. Through Nov. 16.

RECOMMENDED

It takes some real imagination to shed new light on a shopworn theatrical warhorse that you thought you knew inside-out, but David Cromer’s staging of Thornton Wild’s “Our Town” is able to achieve that rare and remarkable feat of making a classic so fresh as to seem as if you are experiencing it for the very first time.

A remount of the Hypocrites surprise spring hit that closed while shows were still selling out, the production is back for a second go-round. If, like me, you missed—or yes, even avoided—this the first time around, whatever you do, take advantage of this limited opportunity to rectify that situation.

Cromer himself plays the Stage Manager who tells you the story, straddling sensitivity with an almost ethereal detachment as he does so. The Hypocrites ensemble as the residents of Grover’s Corners make you believe that they are living out the ordinary lives of New England townspeople a century ago as they interact with each other and the audience. A bond is forged between us, and then, as a couple of kids begin to date and gradually fall in love and marry, we are there, as their honored guests and we experience their agonies and ecstasies right along with them.

All of this, of course, is done in the subtle style that Wilder specifies, with virtually no scenery or props, but unlike many past productions, the actors are so convincing here at creating their surrounding universe that we buy into Wilder’s convention completely. What an unexpected and splendid shock it is to our senses it is when, at the play’s climax, we leave the town cemetery to go back to a day in a character’s childhood that, like all memories that stay with us, is staged in such a way as to make it more vivid than the seemingly more banal world of the everyday here and now. That shattering effect is the theatrical equivalent of a black-and-white Kansas Dorothy opening the door to a Technicolor Oz, and it is so jarring that you end up transported: indeed, virtually teleported.

Yes, the morale of this play is something most of us have heard since we had to read it back in grade school. Yeah, little things matter. Life viewed from death means savor it, it doesn’t last. Sure. Yawn. The brilliance of this production is that it doesn’t tell you that, it supplies you with your own virtual experience of doing exactly that in such a profound way that I found myself taken back to a similar day in my own childhood that the character experiences (okay, it was her twelfth birthday, my tenth). I suddenly remembered things from that day that I had not thought about in decades. And judging from the transfigured faces of audience members surrounding the action, there were multiple and simultaneous epiphanies going on as well. Theater just doesn’t get any better than that. (Dennis Polkow)

Through October 26, Chopin Theatre Studio, 1543 West Division; $20-$25, (773)989-7352.

RECOMMENDED

William Inge’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, his follow-up to “Come Back, Little Sheba,” was a groundbreaking, cutting-edge work portraying the dark desperation of 1950s Midwest Americana that, in the right hands, still has the power to pack quite a wallop. Director David Cromer does not ignore the fact that this is the Eisenhower era, but the work is staged to remind us that the time and place could well be anytown, anytime, right down to a reconfigured Writers’ Theatre space where the audience is engulfed by realistic grass and dirt and are made to be porch ornaments between two houses in a Kansas neighborhood over a Labor Day weekend.

Kids are playing, arguing, making fun of one another, in short doing what kids usually do, until a hunky, charismatic guy (Boyd Harris) comes to town who with his charm and good looks manages to set the entire town on its ear. Old ladies start to feel young again as he works shirtless, kids want to play with him, old friends want to offer him jobs, middle-aged guys want to drink with him, middle-aged women are reminded of shattered male fantasies and girls and teenagers fall in love with him.

The guy awakens repressions in a community where repression is an art form and whether or not what transpires is of his own making or has been thrust upon him by the community is one of the fascinating issues of the play. Is this a drifting loser who is willfully seducing those around him to get by, or does judging a book by its cover manage to bring out people’s basest instincts? It is a sobering, sometimes terrifying reminder of how much all of us, whether we like it or not or believe it or not, make judgments based on appearances and how devastating such judgments can be for all concerned.

Although Harris steals the show by making audience members start to have the same varied reactions to him that the townspeople do, the entire cast is first-rate down to the smallest roles and interact as a first-rate ensemble with as much “familiarity breeds contempt” as so often occurs in real communities. This is one picnic that you come away with plenty of food for thought. (Dennis Polkow)

At Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe, (847)242-6000, through November 30. $50-$65.