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.

RECOMMENDED

A production to root for, ambitious and timely—David Mamet’s play about three codependent would-be criminals in the mid-seventies era of recession, growing economic disparity and gas shortages has echoes of all kinds to our world now. “Knowing what the fuck you’re talking about,” one character mumbles to another as they plan their sabotage on a rich coin collector living around the corner, “it’s rare… it’s so rare.” And love him or hate him, Mamet creates characters and plots with a master’s touch. The writing is so strong that it’s easy to ignore the uneven acting—Will Cummings III as Donny, the moral center of the play, provides the only really admirable performance. Music from the era and the thoughtful set, a resale shop complete with trash and treasure of all kinds, helps augment the mood of entrapment in a desperate time, but “American Buffalo” remains a true vintage that transcends this earnest but at times watery production. (Monica Westin)

At Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N Southport, (312) 902-1500. Through November 1.

RECOMMENDED

In a time when corporate bailouts and shady business dealings feature prominently in our headlines, Remy Bumppo’s “The Voysey Inheritance” is a refreshing look at one man’s attempts to right his company’s grievous wrongs.

In David Mamet’s adaptation of Harley Granville-Barker’s script, Edward Voysey (Raymond Fox) discovers money missing from several clients’ accounts at the family bank. Voysey confronts his father/partner (David Darlow), and is told that the larceny is business as usual. When informed about the theft, his family is more concerned about the scandal and urges Edward not to go public.

A tight ensemble sharply captures business’ moral Gordian knot. Fox’s gently principled portrayal of a man burdened with his honesty stirs sympathy. Dan Kenney as Edward’s blowhard brother squeezes comic relief out of a serious situation. Rebecca Spence as Edward’s fiancée Alice shows us the importance of backing the man who defies corruption and craven self interest. (Lisa Buscani)

At the Greenhouse Theater, 2257 North Lincoln, (773)404-7336, remybumppo.org, through November 2.

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.

As one of the two marquee productions anchoring the Goodman’s David Mamet Festival, “Romance” was an obvious choice. It is his most recent play (it debuted in New York last year), and it hasn’t been seen in Chicago—two good arguments, I suppose, for staging it. These reasons, though, don’t hold up. This is dashed-off Mamet, a faux courtroom farce that is faux funny and faux offensive. If the guy’s name weren’t on the script, you’d think it was faux Mamet. A man stands trial accused of something relating to Hawaii and a leatherbound date planner, while opposing counsel, apropos of nothing, finds himself in the midst of a gayer-than-gay lovers’ quarrel with his buff-and-pretty boyfriend. Meanwhile, the judge is popping pills like they’re M&Ms, and outside the courthouse a Mideast peace rally toils in pointlessness. Though the script bears the trademarks of Mamet’s writerly melodies and in-your-faceness, the piece as a whole never gains any traction beyond its oblique point about eggshell-walking that passes for discourse today. The strongest and funniest scene comes early on, when the defendant (David Pasquesi, whose angular precision and hostility manages to be enormously entertaining despite the odds) trades outrageous, vitriolic race-and-religion epithets with his attorney. It’s a doozy, but as directed by Pam MacKinnon, the production has a hiccupping rhythm overall—lurching back and forth from warp speed to something akin to a dying battery. This just might be the slowest ninety-minutes in town. (Nina Metz)

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

The Goodman begins its David Mamet festival by reviving his early study of youth and age in the theater. Mamet’s deceptively slight play remains an awe-inspiring display of craft, suggesting layers of relationship in the sparest verbal touches. It’s also frequently hilarious, as he conjures up a lost world of hospital melodrama and lost-at-sea stories. Given the play’s delicacy, it lives or dies at the mercy of its performers. Luckily, Robert Falls’s production features the exceptional David Darlow as the older actor, Robert. Darlow’s expansive manner seems from the first to conceal depths of uncertainty and disappointment. He’s ably matched by Matt Schwader’s John, whose apparent lack of guile itself covers a fervent ambition. Both actors play Robert’s gradual eclipse by John with impeccable timing and pathos. Mark Wendland’s remarkable stage design thrusts us into a simultaneously claustrophobic and multidimensional backstage space, from which the only visible route to freedom is the occasional glimpse of the stage. If the rest of the Goodman’s festival sustains the quality of this production, it’ll be a major event indeed for Chicago’s theater. (John Beer)

“A Life in the Theatre” plays at Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn, (312)443-3400, through April 9.