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 »

Andrew Jessop, Jacqueline Grandt/Photo: Jan Ellen Graves

RECOMMENDED

This is black box theater at its best: gripping, claustrophobic and all too real. Tracy Letts’ play famously debuted at A Red Orchid with Michael Shannon ten years before being adapted into a film, but Redtwist completely owns this production. When a hard-living, lonely waitress (Jacqueline Grandt in yet another extraordinary performance) living in a seedy hotel finds something like love in an itinerant who claims to have been a victim of military testing, what begins as atmospheric naturalism quickly becomes a descent into suffocating paranoia and Grand Guignol horror. But what makes Letts’ play so remarkable is that all the moments of skin-crawling creepiness are second only to the real terror of how desperate people can be for intimacy. Directors Kimberly Senior and Jack Magaw expertly balance psychological realism with madness and drug-addled self-destruction. The technical theater deserves a special mention, with Redtwist’s tiny black box transformed into the suffocating space of the hotel room, and an elaborate soundscape that never once lets up its immersive grip. (Monica Westin)

Redtwist Theatre, 1044 West Bryn Mawr, (773)728-7529. Through July 31.

Chuck Spencer, Marssie Mencotti, Jan Ellen Graves/Photo: Andrew Jessop

RECOMMENDED

Our routines are our havens; they’re also our prisons. Redtwist’s latest explores what happens when a man crosses from one to the other and desperately tries to fix his life.

Ken (Chuck Spencer) suffers a crisis of faith and leaves wife Nancy (Jan Ellen Graves) and his comfortable Nebraska life for a pastor-recommended change in routine-in London. He seeks and finds deeply needed enlightenment.

Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts’ script captures the somnolent, day-to-day wordlessness that spurs Ken’s quest. Director Andrew Jessop’s staging, along with Christopher Kriz’s music and sound design and Christopher Burpee’s lighting design, astutely punctuate the journey. Spencer is genuine as a man shaken by this body shot to his foundation; Graves is heart-wrenching as a floundering solo spouse; her quiet breakdown as her mother-in-law’s caregiver is breathtaking. Together both actors gracefully illustrate a couple’s awkward switch hit to a devastating curve ball. (Lisa Buscani)

Redtwist Theatre, 1044 West Bryn Mawr, (773)728-7529. Through May 8.

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 »

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 »

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

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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 »