The plays of Richard Greenberg give good brain, and it’s a lively sort of intellectualism that is as accessibly entertaining as a really good issue of The New Yorker. Greenberg’s current offering, in a world premiere at the Steppenwolf, is none of these things. Smartly wrought, yes—worthy theater, no. Its two acts are divided into short plays that seem tangentially linked at best. Act One: A middle-aged couple (Tracy Letts and Amy Morton) engage in a passive aggressive repartee that becomes more patently hostile with every arch utterance. Or, put it another way, it plays like Greenberg trying his hand at Albee. Though a navel-gazing piece of work, it is swiftly executed (as directed by Terry Kinney) and it holds your attention. Act Two: A narrator (Josh Charles) tells of meeting his wife (Kate Arrington), and how their blissed-out existence ended when the events of 9/11 began to intrude on their collective subconscious. Early on, standing in the same sleek apartment as that of Act One, the narrator recounts a ridiculous, and self-referential, epilogue concerning the apartment’s previous tenant; it’s as if Greenberg is saying, “All that before—that was just nonsense; you really needn’t have taken it so seriously.” It’s a sucker’s game, though, because all that comes afterwards commands even less attention. Metaphor and metaphysics are jumbled into an uncomfortable, tedious whole. Even a title like “The Well-Appointed Room,” which firmly declares for a certain order of things, can’t mask the play’s thematic ADD, which endlessly circles around the aphorism that nothing means anything, and everything means nothing. (Nina Metz)

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Steven Dietz’s exploration of the Vietnam War’s lingering echoes, currently at Steppenwolf’s mainstage, seems at first glimpse firmly placed in Sam Shepard territory: a lone trailer somewhere in the Southwestern desert; a pair of aging veterans, Ben (Tracy Letts) and Jeeter (John Judd), with trouble connecting. The first hint that Dietz is out to play on our expectations comes with the revelation that Ben’s father was himself no ordinary soldier, but an aide of some sort to Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara. Dietz’s first act is stuffed with sudden twists like that, which I’ll refrain from revealing further. Dietz’s dramatic imagination, like Jeeter’s playful similes, shows some signs of strain; he walks a fine line between surprise and pure implausibility. But he offers an engaging, haunting reflection on the grip of old traumas, both personal and national, and the power of the play’s central images makes complaints that they might be overdetermined seem petty. Letts and Judd bring a finely honed interplay to their central roles; the play’s female characters have to bear heavier burdens of symbolic freight, but Amy Morton and Mariann Mayberry manage to imbue them with signs of real life. Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen’s sound design deserves special notice for the exceptional still and foreboding transitions between present reality and ghostly past. (John Beer)

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Down at the very bottom of the human sinkhole that is Gregory Burke’s 2001 play, you will find Eddie, a psychotic, sharp-minded bundle of sinew and boredom who has had it up to here with multinational corporations and their hypocrisy and social carelessness. In essence, he is Ted Kaczynski with a Scottish accent, stuck in a menial, boredom-inducing job that leads to some dastardly ideas about how to make a statement to the world about life’s inequities. Actor Michael Shannon has played this sort of character many times before (most recently Off-Broadway in Tracy Letts’ “Bug”), and he is the master of fucked-up brainiacs. If anyone in town is going to play this part, it might as well be Shannon, who does one hell of a job of it in this production from A Red Orchid Theatre. Under the smartly precise direction of Karen Kessler, the play is tension rendered in three dimensions. Read the rest of this entry »

Fresh from the New York success of his play “Bug,” Tracy Letts has taken on a formidable directorial challenge in Werner Schwab’s play “People Annihilation.” Schwab’s work is often described as untranslatable. It’s not just the bizarre abstraction, distortion, and violence that characterize his language, in which characters refer to themselves as “bodies” and paeans to fucking are juxtaposed with invocations of aesthetic truth. It’s not clear whether Schwab’s work makes clear sense outside of its Austrian context: how much of the power of his drive to explode convention survives the peculiar blend of artistic mastery and bourgeois self-loathing of the Viennese theatre scene in which Schwab first found an audience? Letts and the cast of this Trap Door Theatre production make a valiant effort to embody Schwab’s demented, savagely expressionist world. Particularly memorable is the long, awkward monologue by Mrs. Growlfire (Beata Pilch) as she surveys the poisoned corpses of her dinner-party guests—a monologue punctuated by an astonishing reversal. And Trap Door deserves kudos for making Schwab available to Chicago. In the end, though, the attraction of Schwab’s anti-theatre remains more theoretical than real. At the turn of the century, how much distance separates Schwab’s frantic bourgeois-epatering from the slicker anti-intellectualism of his fellow Graz native, the Governator? (John Beer)

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Of all the household names that populate the Steppenwolf ensemble, it is John Mahoney who seems most interested in returning to the stage on a regular basis. And Chicago theater is clearly the better for it. Just watch as Mahoney makes his entrance in “The Dresser,” Ron Hardwood’s World War II-era backstage drama about a troupe of third-rate Shakespearean actors led by the aging “Sir” (Mahoney). It is a so-so play, but the performances are worth seeing. Standing at his dressing-room door, Mahoney is thin, drawn and tired: Will he or won’t he be able to pull it together and perform that night as the title character in “King Lear?” Tracy Letts as his dresser, Norman, works double-time prodding and goading his employer on stage. It is a long, drawn-out process, not all of it particularly absorbing. But first, the makeup must be applied, and it is here that director Amy Morton’s production achieves its best moments. Sitting at his dressing table, Sir applies the glue, then the white beard and mustache of his character, emitting a deep throaty growl, equal parts vocal warm-up and emotional psyche-up. And it is during this scene that Letts finally quiets his performance. Up to this point, his portrayal of the obviously gay Norman is saddled with about four affectations too many. But as the play progresses (and Norman continually nips from a flask of brandy), Letts finds a more solid perch as a man perceptibly drunk and loose around the mouth, infusing his eventual panic attack with just the right amount of narcissistic bile. (Nina Metz)

“The Dresser” plays at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 North Halsted, (312)335-1650, through November 14.

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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 »