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 »

By Brian Hieggelke

The first thing you notice when you meet Martha Lavey is her hair. She’s a very petite woman, but you realize that later. Her hair is epic, a nest of swirling, curling grays and blacks that give her visage an otherworldliness, a sense of supernatural wisdom, like Mother Earth. Mother Steppenwolf. She’s been artistic director since 1995, far longer than anyone else in that role, and she’s presided over the maturation of the company from a troubled, supremely talented teenager into an institution likely to outlive its founders. She’s one of the most powerful people in Chicago theater, yet she’s as gentle a spirit as you’re likely to meet. One of the powers she wields, or at least holds the secret to, is ensemble membership, the Holy Grail of Chicago theater for many.

There are forty-three ensemble members, many of them dating back to the early days of the company. Since Steppenwolf’s formal inception in 1975, the cumulative total, including those (rarely) lost to attrition, is forty-eight. Lavey says there’s no formulaic way in choosing ensemble members, no set number of engagements required. “It’s more that the desire to have an individual in the ensemble is generated out of—this person brings something unique to the ensemble,” she says, “be that a casting niche—age, type, etcetera. Then there’s the feeling of whether this person is a good community member. Do we feel like that person has an ensemble sensibility? And it’s fairly easy to pick up on that.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Dave Rentauskas

By Benjamin Rossi

The premiere of The New Colony’s “So Many Days,” the young theater company’s first short film, feels unmistakably like a gathering of friends. A live band made up of company members croons bluegrass tunes about Oriental lovers and drinking till you die; everyone seems to know the words. Someone in the company had sent out an email encouraging people to wear flannel shirts in homage to the short’s early sixties Deep South setting, but it’s difficult to distinguish those who complied from the rest of the hipster crowd.

A makeshift bar set off in a corner of host Collaboraction’s small space serves whiskey and PBR in Solo cups as company members greet people in the Flat Iron Arts Building’s third floor landing, asking, “So who’s your friend in the company?”

With “So Many Days,” the barely three-year-old New Colony is taking a novel, if not entirely unprecedented, step towards filmmaking. It’s just one more in a series of remarkable moves for the theater group. And while it is a modest beginning, New Colony members say its latest effort is a harbinger for things to come. But as its projects become more ambitious, the company may come up against obstacles that bedeviled other attempts by Chicago theaters to jump from stage to screen. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A depressed, pregnant housewife in Ypsilanti reads “Hedda Gabler” and cleans her Beretta; she’s later kidnapped by robots and forced to perform the play in an Ecuadorian robot forest before being rescued by her husband, her 10-year-old daughter Nugget, who’s doing a school report on Ibsen, and her small-arms-dealing brother-in-law. And that’s only part of the plot—the competing story pits Ibsen and his slatternly maid against Ibsen’s dominating wife and his oddly filthy, strung-out archrival Strindberg. The play, while thematically somewhat cohesive (women’s lib = robot revolution?), is disorganized and incoherent as a whole—but joyfully and contagiously so in Sideshow’s production. Elizabeth Meriwether’s “Heddatron” is an oddly paced, disorderedly plotted, “badly made play” (as, we learn from Nugget’s school report, “Hedda Gabler” is), and this show is as successful as one can imagine a staging of “Heddatron” to be, with exuberant performances, gorgeous technical theater and, yes, mesmerizing remote-controlled robots made for the performance that make the spectacle more important than the illogical, disjointed, occasionally completely garbled story. When the entire cast bursts into a delirious song-and-dance rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” it’s impossible not to be charmed. (Monica Westin)

Sideshow Theatre Company at Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 North Halsted, (312)335-1650. Through April 24.

Here’s the press release from Steppenwolf:

Steppenwolf Theatre Company Announces 2011/12 Subscription Season

CHICAGO (March 2, 2011) – Steppenwolf Theatre Company is pleased to announce its 2011/12 Subscription Season.  Season subscriptions go on-sale to the public on Wednesday, March 2 at 11 am.   Read the rest of this entry »

Sally Murphy, Stephen Louis Grush/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

The playwright strives to create work for the ages, but Laura Eason’s “Sex With Strangers” is so topical it should have an expiration date.

Ethan, played with charismatic ferocity by Stephen Louis Grush,  chronicles his sexual conquests in masochistic detail on his popular blog, which he’s parlayed into a bestelling book and a movie deal. (Tucker Max, anyone?) He meets Olivia, a technophobic almost-forty literary novelist,  who’s trying to crank back up her long-stalled career. He repulses her with his story but charms her with praise of her story and before long he’s in her pants and in her business, helping her plug into the magical marketing power of the internet. The play, which I saw in a 2009 developmental incarnation as part of Steppenwolf’s “First Look Repertory of New Work,” is a study of the effects, both positive and negative, of the living-life-in-public phenomenon that the internet has fueled, through blogs, social media and so on. Ethan reads email and texts on his phone while in the middle of an intensely personal conversation with Olivia, behavior so common nowadays it almost seems beyond parody. Read the rest of this entry »

As the economy slowly lifts us back to our feet and we look around, we see a remarkable sight: a performance industry in Chicago that survived the worst recession since the Great Depression wholly intact. Sure, we had a few brushes with death, and no doubt a few very small, very new theater companies threw in the towel, as they do even in good years, but unlike many other cities across the country, we’re in pretty good shape. How good? The League of Chicago Theatres issued a press release last week proclaiming our town as America’s theater leader, with more than 250 professional theaters, including four Regional Tony Award winners, and a combined annual budget of $250 million serving five million audience members. Add in our thriving dance community, a comedy scene that’s the envy of the nation and two world-class opera companies and you’d have to say we’re doing pretty damn good. But neither the economy nor any cultural organization is fully out of the water yet, and the dramatic uncertainty injected into the political sea by Mayor Daley’s decision to call it a day means Chicago’s performance community will need some steady hands at the wheel these next few years. Accordingly, for this edition of The Players, we’ve broadened our horizon and taken a closer-than-ever look at the individuals in charge of the financial fitness of our local institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Krapp's Last Tape/Photo: Liz Lauren

Top 5 Shows
“The Brother/Sister Plays,” Steppenwolf
“August: Osage County,” Broadway In Chicago
“Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
“1001,” Collaboraction
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
—Brian Hieggelke

Top 5 Play Revivals
“A Streetcar Named Desire,” Writers’ Theatre
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Steppenwolf Young Adult
“Private Lives,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater
“After the Fall,” Eclipse Theatre
—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Performances
Brian Dennehy, “Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
Karen Janes Woditsch, “To Master the Art,” TimeLine
Tracy Letts, “American Buffalo,” Steppenwolf
Amy Morton, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
Mary Beth Fisher, “Seagull,” Goodman
—Brian Hieggelke

Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Morton, Tracy Letts/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Edward Albee’s iconic play from 1962, which won the Tony Award for Best Play and soon after became an acclaimed movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and her frequent husband Richard Burton, is a boxing match for acting heavyweights, where the fighters spar with words.

George and Martha, just home from a faculty party, are engaged in playful but barbed repartee that at first recalls the likes of Tracy and Hepburn and other savage wits of Hollywood lore. A new young professor Nick and his wife Honey have been invited over for cocktails after the party, though they are really just prey for George and Martha. The entire play unfolds, as the war between George and Martha escalates into something far too ugly for the silver screen, in the increasingly claustrophobic confines of their home—designed with appropriate New England academic shagginess by Todd Rosenthal—in the wee wee hours of morning.

After two decades of marriage, Martha and George are despicable creatures, or as George tells Nick, who is alarmed by the unfettered hostility, “we’re merely walking what’s left of our wits.”

Tracy Letts’ George is a worn-out shell of a man, beaten down by the one-two punch of professional disappointments suffered in the face of a father-in-law who rules the kingdom as president of the university where George toils in the history department, and a wife who seems to define her existence by letting George know what a failure he is compared to her father. “A simp,” she calls him. George half-heartedly amuses himself with social swordplay,  slicing up anyone in his range with an effortless nonchalance. Letts skillfully gives his George an air of perpetual disengagement that suggests that even this verbal gamesmanship bores him, that he’s using a mere fraction of his wit. Read the rest of this entry »