Photo: Robert J. Saferstein

RECOMMENDED

In the climax of the Steppenwolf revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” a polyester-clad, red-faced Tracy Letts tears up the stage, literally, by trashing the contents of a Chicago antique store circa 1975 so violently that audience members actually duck. But Letts’ current work as an actor, however intense and convincing, is nothing compared to the way that he is currently tearing up stages around town as a playwright.

Where else but in Chicago can you see the work of a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright in no less than three fascinatingly different guises during the same week of a dreary February?  There’s the Mamet Steppenwolf revival where you can experience Letts “in the flesh,” as it were, in the work of another playwright who has profoundly influenced him; an explosive performance of Letts’ first play “Killer Joe” in a no-holds barred production at the intimate Profiles Theatre; and the national touring production of Letts’ epic masterpiece, “August: Osage County,” the work that has brought him such unprecedented and award-winning attention and acclaim.

For those of us who missed the original Steppenwolf premiere back during the summer of 2007—which is when the play is set—or in its later incarnations on Broadway and on London’s West End and who therefore may wonder what all of the fuss was about and whether or not a play could possibly live up to all of the hype, the answer is a resounding “yes.” 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 »

By Emily Torem

Jesse Weaver’s “The Artist Needs a Wife,” slated for its world premiere at the side project theatre this week, is not a play to see if you’re feeling low. It’s about “trying to imagine what life would be like if you were a complete and utter failure,” says the Virginia-born playwright whose career is anything but—his last production at the side project, where he is an ensemble member, “On My Parents’ One Hundredth Wedding Anniversary,” drew critical raves. The plot of “Artist” centers on “fairly fucking old” washed-up artists: Mott, a DJ and Freud, a painter, along with Freud’s discarded muse, known only as “Whore.” The characters live in a futuristic world of Weaver’s imagination. “When I started writing it, I didn’t know much about DJing. It looked so cool and so hip. I was wondering: this art form seems so new and so uniquely of our time, what is it going to be like in 50 years? Are these guys going to be mixing in old folks homes in 2070?” We chatted with Weaver over the phone and via email from Virginia—he’s currently living in Ireland, where an earlier version of this play appeared at the Dublin Fringe Fest—to get some insight into his work.

What inspired you to write a play about failure?
I was in my mid-twenties [when I started writing it]. Living in my friend’s basement apartment—especially when you’re working in Chicago theater where everyone has to have a day job—there’s this feeling of, “Oh my god, I’m going to be 50 and doing [this] the rest of my life. In your mid-twenties, you’ve been sort of written a blank check. [You’ve been told] you’re very talented and you’re very cool and the world’s going to fall at your feet, and then you [learn] it’s not going to and you start to feel sorry for yourself and are going to end up this crusty old man in the basement—that was a personal feeling that sort of stoked the play. I started sharing these thoughts and found I wasn’t the only one with those feelings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Addams Family at The Oriental/Photo: Samuel Adams

By Brian Hieggelke

As the wind blows the snow sideways this December evening, the weatherman is telling Chicagoans to stay bunkered; the deserted downtown streets reflect their obedience. All save the sidewalk near the intersection of State and Randolph, as TV crews jockey for faces on the red carpet in front of the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre, where more than 2,000 patrons, including a who’s who of backstage Broadway, are gathering for the world premiere of a new musical featuring a AAA list of talent, onstage and off. “The Addams Family,” with multiple Tony winners Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in its leads, a book from the librettists of “Jersey Boys” and so on, is certainly Broadway bound, but tonight—tonight—Chicago is the center of theater in the world.

That’s the story of Chicago theater in the zeroes: the decade in which it grew up and got big. Whether it’s the launch and monumental success of Broadway In Chicago, the maturation and astonishing quality of a remarkable number of small and mid-sized companies or the increasing demand for Chicago product and Chicago talent on Broadway, Chicago theater has fully come into its own. Read the rest of this entry »

Francis Guinan and Tracy Letts/Photo: Michael Brosilow

This is one of those groundbreaking plays—not just for Chicago, but American theater—that makes a remount particularly anxiety-provoking. Chicago native David Mamet wrote “American Buffalo” in 1975, and it premiered at The Goodman in a production that helped put both on the map. Mamet has gone on to an illustrious stage and film career, and “American Buffalo” has what are now his unmistakable calling cards: strikingly vulgar dialogue, usually in the form of long tragi-comic tirades, circling around questions of masculinity, power and identity. The plot is a simple, tight three-actor format centering around the ill-fated heist of a rare American Buffalo nickel by three generations of white male American losers. Amy Morton’s direction is astute but conservative; she’s clearly trying to hit all the original notes. But while Tracy Letts carries the show as the desperate misanthropic Teach, the way Francis Guinan and Patrick Andrews play their parts—the bumbling junk-shop owner and dependent young ex-junkie he’s adopted—feel one-dimensional. (Andrews takes on a strange stilted monotone that’s especially distracting.) Their limited performances mirror the play as a whole, which feels more like a fossil than a relevant work of art. (Monica Westin)

At Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1650 N. Halsted, (312)335-1650. Through February 7.

Ricky Jay/Photo: Jesse Dylan

RECOMMENDED

Ricky Jay opened “A Rogue’s Gallery” by reciting a poem that his friend Shel Silverstein wrote for him, in which Jay defends himself against a gun-wielding sore loser with only his playing cards. By the end of the evening, the idea of Jay fighting crime with cards seemed not only entirely possible, but paled in comparison to some of his other feats. Through random and sometimes haphazard processes, Jay selected audience members to join him on stage for various mesmerizing sleight-of-hand effects (he doesn’t call them tricks) in which he somehow managed to inscribe a book to someone before knowing her name, made cards seemingly teleport from one place to another, and blindly charted the course of a knight across a chess board without ever landing in the same space twice, while reciting Shakespeare and spontaneously calculating square roots. He also shared clips from some of the many films he’s been in and consulted on, and generally made people laugh tears with his remarkable stagecraft and wit. It sounds strange, and it was; but the kind of strange that causes every part of you all the way down to the cellular level to wonder how? Read the rest of this entry »

By Damien James

Ricky Jay is a master of deception, and chances are good that you’ve seen his work even if you have no idea who he is. With his company Deceptive Practices (motto: “Arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis”), Jay has consulted and served as technical advisor for stage and screen alike, working on such films as “Forrest Gump” (he designed the wheelchair that made Gary Sinese look legless), David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” (he also acted in the latter two films), among others. Beyond that, Jay may be the world’s foremost sleight-of-hand artist, its greatest historian of magic and the art of the con, and the preeminent archivist and academic of human oddities, as explored in his quarterly, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies. He can also, by the way, throw a playing card so hard and fast as to pierce the rind of a watermelon, “that most prodigious of all household fruits,” as he refers to it.

For five nights at the beginning of December, Jay holds court in the Mamet-directed one-man show “A Rogue’s Gallery,” billed as a more personal and improvisational performance, at the Royal George. Jay was good enough to share some of his time after a long day on the set of the TV show “Flash Forward,” whose cast he recently joined. He plays, in his words, “a menacing character.” I’ve heard stories of how gruff and elusive Jay can be and what subjects he famously avoids; so, expecting gruff, I asked how he was doing. “Honestly, I’m thoroughly and completely exhausted, meaning that I will be like putty in your hands.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Liz Lauren

By Brian Hieggelke

Here’s how Mattie Hawkinson’s spending her summer in Chicago: babysitting for her friends, playing with their dogs, showing her extended family around the sites of Chicago—”I’ve been to the Art Institute so many times I almost bought a membership”—going for ice cream, taking walks in the park. “Anything innocent,” she says. Kind of a mother’s dream, when your twentysomething daughter’s living thousands of miles away in the big city.

Except that every day at 7:30pm, she steps onto the stage at the Biograph Theatre and steps into the role of Una, the victim of a pedophile more than a decade earlier when she was twelve. And that pedophile, who she spends the next ninety or so minutes locked into a confrontation with, is played by none other than Chicago theater’s reigning leading man, William Petersen, who famously deserted top billing in television’s top show, “CSI,” so that he could return to the town of his formative years, and play roles like that of the onetime child molester in David Harrower’s harrowing drama, “Blackbird.” Innocent daytime pursuits for Hawkinson are not youthful frivolity, but rather a necessary counterbalance to the darkly damaged soul she inhabits each night.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Steppenwolf:

Steppenwolf Theatre Company Announces
2009-2010 Subscription Season:

Fake
a new play written and directed by ensemble member Eric Simonson
featuring ensemble members Kate Arrington, Francis Guinan and Alan Wilder

American Buffalo
by David Mamet, directed by ensemble member Amy Morton
featuring ensemble members Francis Guinan and Tracy Letts Read the rest of this entry »

Quick, how many lesbian dramas can you name off the top of your head?  And no, ”The L Word” doesn’t count. That’s a tough one, isn’t it?  After all, if you asked me to do the same with gay drama—as in male homosexual drama—I wouldn’t have to think hard at all.  There are the classics (“The Boys in the Band,” “As Is”), the epic (“Angels in America”), polemic (“The Normal Heart”), Chekhovian (“My Night with Reg”), tragic (“Torch Song Trilogy”), wistful (“The Dying Gaul”), coming-of-age (“Beautiful Thing”) and even puerile (“Party”).  And that’s just a start.  But lesbian stage dramas?  There’s Lillian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour,” but that’s more about the corrosive effects of gossip than it is about lesbianism.  How about David Mamet’s “Boston Marriage,” probably more enjoyable for its dialogue (it is, after all, written by Mamet) than for any great insights into the lesbian experience.

Perhaps this paucity of “lesbian drama” is the reason attention, plaudits and awards were hurled at playwright Diana Son’s “Stop, Kiss” when it first premiered Off-Broadway in the late 1990s, and now being revived by The Gift Theatre as their 2009 season opener.  At its bare bones it’s about two people who unexpectedly fall in love with one another.  Their love is a nascent yet strong love, and one that ultimately sees them through an unexpectedly violent tragedy.  No more, no less.  And although these characters happen to be women, there’s little in the script that explores or justifies how and why these two women—fresh from long-term heterosexual relationships—fall in love.  Quite surprisingly, given that the author is female, I’m apt to think that the play’s believability rests upon an audience’s patriarchal prejudices or chauvinistic fantasies:  since women can easily fall in love with one another emotionally, it must follow that they could take up cunnilingus just as easily.  In fact, the play says so little about the psychology of female-female or lesbian unions that I think you could almost recast the parts heterosexually and have the same play, just make them first cousins or something to equal all the surface “edge” found in this play’s Sapphic situations.  To be fair, I think Son is more interested in exploring the nooks and crannies of how people come together, and certainly it is impossible to deny her shrewd eye for life’s little moments.  Indeed, the play lives in its minutiae, whether it’s the mundane questions we ask potential lovers when courting them, or the pleasure-delaying restraint we savor before that first inevitable kiss.  But these moments, beautifully observed by director Michael Patrick Thornton and his fine ensemble, can only go so far.  And if the play’s dozen or more scenes, some no longer than a few lines, weren’t scattered about flashing forwards and backwards in non-chronological order—a shopworn structural device even ten years ago—I think more people would realize just how average this piece and its writing truly is—almost devoid of subtext and intelligence.  (I wasn’t surprised, by the way, to read in the program that Son is a writer for ”Law and Order,” which helps explain the play’s structure, more appropriate for celluloid or television than for The Gift’s storefront playing area with limited light and depth capabilities to handle the cinematic cutaways).

The production’s only saving grace is its performances, and since this is The Gift, a group of actors who could wring pathos from a greeting card, they imbue the piece with a lot more than is actually there.  Anna Carini and Amy Speckien are superb in the lead roles and Paul D’Addario and James D. Farruggio do more with their one-dimensional supporting characters that could be expected of anyone. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

 At The Gift Theatre, 4802 N. Milwaukee, (773)283-7071. Thu–Fri 7:30/Sat 2:30 pm & 7:30pm. $20-$25.  Through March 14.