The pipe-smoking, Bhagavad Gita-quoting, McCarthy-defying figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer occupies a place in the popular mythography of physics dwarfed only by the likes of Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Carson Kreitzer’s play, currently at the Next Theatre, sets out to disturb our view of the man behind the Manhattan Project. Foregrounding more obscure aspects of Oppenheimer’s biography, like his complicated romantic attachments and anxiety over his Judaism and tailor father, “Love Song” traces out the mosaic of this exemplary twentieth-century life, but ends up more studied than inhabited. David Cromer’s Oppenheimer remains mannered and remote, a cipher to his wife, himself, and us. And the vaudeville antics of Oppenheimer’s supporting scientists feel forced, a familiar solution to the problem of dramatizing the play’s intellectual heavy lifting. The revelation in this production is Wendy Robie’s astonishing performance as Lilith (that’s right, Lilith as in Adam’s legendary first bride). Hissing and spitting her lyrical visions of apocalypse, Lilith haunts the play’s action from the rafters. Her charged debates with Oppenheimer bring to a fiery life a play that otherwise remains, like its central character, an intricate and mandarin puzzle. (John Beer)

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We’ve always known we were a town for theater. But this year perhaps we needed outsiders to remind us of just how great Chicago’s theater community is compared not only with New York, but with the rest of the world. Venerable London theater critic Michael Billington went so far as to herald our city as the “current theatre capital of America” after a recent visit, citing not only the three big S’s (Chicago Shakespeare, Second City and Steppenwolf), but also Victory Gardens and the Goodman. Other critics from New York and Toronto sent similar, although not quite as superlative, love letters this year. So it seems fitting this year that  our Players issue, in the past reserved for members of the theater community who wield the most power, focus on the artists—those both on stage and behind-the-scenes who make out-of-towners go home and drool. Read the rest of this entry »