Randall Newsome, Sally Murphy, Kristina Valada-Viars and Francis Guinan/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

War photographer Sarah, played with a sense of psychic damage to match her physically wrecked state by Sally Murphy, is home in New York with her long-term companion James, a freelance war journalist, who Randall Newsome injects with just enough emotionalism to complement Sarah’s internal struggle. She’s just barely survived a horrible injury while on assignment. Addicted to excitement, they’re the “Sid and Nancy” of journalism, as their pal Richard (Francis Guinan, brilliant as always) describes them in exasperation. But when Richard introduces his young and bright and naive new girlfriend, Mandy Bloom (Kristina Valada-Viars, charmingly bathetic), Sarah and James come to question the decisions they’ve made about life and love. 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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Logan Vaughn, Yasen Peyankov, Scott Jaeck and Tracy Letts/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

In Steppenwolf’s latest, playwright Enda Walsh paints a bleak picture of masculinity and what men must endure in today’s world: the cruelty of time, the savagery of economic survival, the political maneuverings of love.

Fitz (Tracy Letts), Quinn (Yasen Peyankov), Dunne (Scott Jaeck) and Burns (Ian Barford) are the remaining suitors vying for Penelope’s hand. They are running out of time; they’ve all dreamt of Odysseus’ return and their subsequent murders. The suitors work together to woo the queen. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Schleifer and Jessica Honor Carleton/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

The characters in Rebecca Gilman’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ classic novel, “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter,” suffer in quiet desperation in their small community until two strangers arrive, one from out-of-town, one from another part of town. Drunken labor activist Jake Blount (played with rabble-rousing rectitude by Loren Lazerine) tries with limited success to rally folks toward an uprising (some of his declarations could be straight out of the Occupy Wall Street manifesto). The other newcomer, the well-dressed deaf mute John Singer (played with silent charisma by the deaf actor Robert Schleifer), plays like the fabled gunslinger in a classic Western, only here his weapon is his generosity, and his stoicism even more pronounced. That the characters gravitate toward the voiceless Singer as a sort of would-be savior (without noticing his own inner turmoil) rather than the wanna-be savior Blount reveals the author’s belief in the inevitable futility in the human condition. Read the rest of this entry »

Karen Aldridge, Cliff Chamberlain and Stephanie Childers/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

A brilliant tribute to “A Raisin in the Sun,” Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning play consists of two acts that bookend Hansberry’s drama about a struggling black family’s poignant attempt to make a better life for themselves in the white enclave of 406 Clybourne Street. Norris sets “Clybourne Park” in this very house, where the first act portrays the previous owners’ tragic reasons for moving—and getting back at the neighborhood by selling the house to blacks. The second half jumps fifty years forward to the present day, where the neighborhood has become all-black, financially debilitated and ripe for gentrification in the form of a seemingly well-meaning white couple who would demolish the house, bringing with them new politically correct phrases that only partially cover the same old tensions and motivations. “You can’t live in a principle,” is the chorus of the play. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Robert Trachtenberg

RECOMMENDED

At some point in Jeff Garlin’s free-wheeling stand-up comedy routine, he announces, “I’m the world’s most comfortable comedian. Not the world’s funniest, which is what you want, but the most comfortable.” That’s about right. Garlin’s show is less “show” (as he makes pains to point out more than once), and more like hanging out with him, at a dinner party or something. He tells stories—vignettes drawn from his life as comedian, TV star and, most significantly, someone with an eating addiction. (He’s also diabetic and new medicine, on opening night, led to spontaneous burps that he managed with reasonable grace.) Most hinge, not on punch lines, but on ironic turns or, often, just in his way of telling, in his timing. He bounces from story to story, as if he’s making it all up as he goes along, starting a tale, getting distracted, telling another and circling back, occasionally consulting a “set list” he’s got stashed behind his plastic jack-o’-lantern filled with water. His stories are not political, or connected to current events at all, and he’s careful not to lean too heavily on his experiences on Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is smart, since I imagine most of the audience members, like me, are fans of the HBO show and in doing so he keeps us hungry for more. Read the rest of this entry »

Brenda Barrie and Michael Patrick Thornton/Photo: Michael Brosilow

Imagine if Friedrich Nietzsche had written Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” and you have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to spend an evening in Will Eno’s “Middletown.” It’s not that the play isn’t well-written or doesn’t have a myriad of interesting ideas. The problem is that there are so many interesting ideas and that its characters are always speaking in a self-conscious and existential manner that the play feels, well, groundless, sort of floating in air, like the astronaut from Middletown who is also portrayed floating in the air looking back at his hometown.

It struck me about a half an hour into this frustratingly episodic yet epic (as in overlong) play that this would likely be a far more interesting play to read than to watch. The language is carefully constructed and often has ironic, comic, poignant or even horrific overtones that are rarely in organic sync with what the characters are doing. After a prologue which spends more time delineating possible recipients of the play’s intentions than the play itself ever does delineating its own characters—the surgeon general warning label here seems to be “those who never tire of reading something into everything”—we see a quiet suburban street where a cop harasses “Mechanic,” a wheelchair-bound character, for littering and brutally chokes him with his nightstick for not thinking that their town is wonderful enough. That “Blue Velvet” moment suggests we’re heading into another kind of play altogether, but any other violence in Middletown is the normal course of life and death which, in this town, are gruesomely juxtaposed. Read the rest of this entry »

Francis Guinan, Kate Buddeke/Photo: Paul Marchese

RECOMMENDED

Who knew attempted suicide could be so funny? “Rantoul and Die” playwright Mark Roberts’ day job is scribbling TV sitcoms—”The Big Bang Theory,” “Two and a Half Men” and his own recent creation,  “Mike & Molly”—which explains the easy-flowing laughs that make the first act a hilarious if often insensitive romp. (You’ll be aghast at times at what you find funny.) Erin Quigley directs at a crackling pace that lets the actors shine; staging both acts  in ninety minutes without intermission.

American Blues is still rebuilding after leaving its long-term home a couple years back, but if you want to know what it stands for, you’ll see it on display here in this small but comfortable space: kick-ass acting by its ensemble and accomplished friends. Half the cast here is made up of two stalwarts of the Steppenwolf ensemble, Alan Wilder (the sniveling “pussy” Rallis, as Guinan’s Gary aptly calls him, in a role that shows him to be a hell of a trooper as an actor) and Francis Guinan (a personal favorite, here playing a working-class brute with zen); the other half equally stellar American Blues ensemble members Kate Buddeke (the unlikely object of romantic obsession, a hard-as-brick coquette) and Cheryl Graeff (the manically happy manager of the Dairy Queen with an unnatural fondness for cats and, of course, a dark secret).  Frankly, you could listen to these four read the newspaper and be riveted.  Which smooths over the fact that the second act loses comedic steam, playing off twists and “shocking” reveals that the seasoned playgoer will anticipate, having been too often fed a steady diet of journeys into the dark dark belly of the blue-collar beast. (Brian Hieggelke)

At Victory Gardens’ Richard Christiansen Theater, 2433 North Lincoln, (312)871-3000, through May 22.

Allison Torem, Jon Michael Hill/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

I’ve found it hard to avoid the fact that the timing of Steppenwolf’s production of “The Hot L Baltimore” is utterly bittersweet, with the death of its playwright Lanford Wilson arriving on the commencement of the show’s previews. But in a way, I suppose it can’t be helped. With the play’s themes of loss and the hauntings of the past in the present day, one sees the ghostly silent yet ever-present figure of The Man pacing the breadth and depth of the Hotel Baltimore and inevitably regards him as Wilson himself.

Regrettable as it is, though, the show is a perfect tribute from the company who owes so much to Wilson, Steppenwolf’s 1980 production of his “Balm in Gilead” having rocketed the ensemble into theatrical stardom when it transferred to Off-Broadway to become an instant sensation. And that show has much in common with this one, each featuring a sympathetic cast of misfits who stumble under the weight of their hardships and haunting pasts while clawing toward a seemingly unreachable future. Likewise, there is a blatant poetry to both plays, more subdued in Wilson’s later work, a lyrical theatricality that bursts the seams of American Realism. It’s that lyricism that director Tina Landau fully exploits in this production, and to a glorious advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Colleen Durkin

By Brian Hieggelke

Close your eyes and become a 21 year old, dreaming about your future. Maybe you want to be a lawyer, or a doctor, even an accountant. Or how about a real reverie, an actor? Now picture yourself, still finishing up college, sitting in the office of the leader of what you believe to be America’s premier theater company. “We’d like to have you join the ensemble,” Martha Lavey, the artistic director of Steppenwolf, tells you. This wakes you up. Too unreal. The Steppenwolf ensemble is an honor that just doesn’t get offered as a starting job. It’d be like a newly minted MBA joining Goldman Sachs—as a partner.

“I went back to school and over Christmas break is when Martha called me and I was supposed to do a reading with Tracy Letts and she said ‘meet me in my office beforehand’,” Jon Michael Hill recalls. “They said they were bringing in six new members and they wanted me to be one of them. I kind of had to pull myself together in the bathroom before going up and doing a play with the most intense person in theater, Tracy Letts.”

All of a sudden, Hill was, in 2007, the youngest ensemble member at Steppenwolf since its founders put it all together in the early seventies. He pulled together so well that Letts decided to write one of the main characters in “Superior Donuts,” his follow-up to his Tony and Pulitzer-winning “August: Osage County,” especially for him. Hill commanded the stage in “Donuts” as Franco Wicks. Audience members, including this one, fell in love with his ebullient, charming young character—and were devastated when Franco was beaten and broken, literally and spiritually, in the course of the play. Before long, “Donuts” hit Broadway. The New York Times singled him out for a profile and he earned a Tony Award nomination. Soon he was cast as one of the stars of ABC’s then-new police drama, “Detroit 1-8-7,” which aired its season finale this past Sunday. Now, at age 25, he’s back at Steppenwolf in a pivotal role in its upcoming revival of Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot L Baltimore.”

“Let me just say that I can’t conceive of a universe in which this guy doesn’t have a huge, giant career ahead of him,” Jason Richman, creator and executive producer of “Detroit 1-8-7″ says. “He is just such a talent.” Read the rest of this entry »