Janet Ulrich Brooks and Craig Spidle

Immigrants bring their home with them in their culture. Playwright James Sherman returns with a salute to the historic Yiddish theater through the door-slamming, hand-wringing, arched-eyebrow farce he’s best known for.  It’s a mixed bag.

Commercial actor Jack (Craig Spidle) performs a benefit reading of an old Yiddish play with his wife (Janet Ulrich Brooks) and an attractive newcomer (Laura Scheinbaum) he has his eye on. Simultaneously, his grandfather Jacob confronts similar artistic and romantic challenges on what is left of the Yiddish theater circuit.

The ensemble masters the comic timing that farces demand. Spidle handles the Jack/Jacob duality with aplomb, but it’s hard to root for a guy so deeply into his lechery. Brooks, a fine talent, is wasted as the wife who does nothing but chase after her wandering hubby. Scheinbaum is fresh and quick, but her relationship with Jack/Jacob is improbable. Such an important theater scene deserves more. (Lisa Buscani)

Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln, (773)871-3000, through June 20.

By Monica Westin

Mike Daisey’s monologues “How Theater Failed America” and “The Last Cargo Cult” will have their Chicago premieres at the end of April and beginning of May at Victory Gardens Theater’s Fresh Squeezed series. Daisey, who was last in Chicago at the MCA for his monologue ”If you see something, say something,” about the politics and paranoia of homeland security, spoke with us about his confrontations of different kinds of hypocrisy.

“How Theater Failed America” has had sold-out runs all over the country. You’ve clearly hit a nerve with theatergoers regarding the dysfunction of the theater system in America. What’s your driving thesis behind the show?

I don’t think monologues, theater, should have a thesis, but the play concerns two stories that are woven together. One is about the state of the theatrical workplace today and its failure to fulfill its promise. The other thread could be called “how theater saved Mike Daisey”—it tracks my journey through American theater. The principal function of the show is to bring the audience to a place where we remember why we might have started doing theater in the first place… and then look at where we are now and study that gap. Where is that gap? What would it take to cross it? I want to imagine a world where theater looks differently. In a world where change is happening at a high rate of speed and the landscape is shifting, theater isn’t adapting, just standing flat-footed and watching things change around it. In a large part, it’s a rallying cry. One of my missions of the piece is to bring it to different cities and engage in roundtable discussions about ideas that can make change possible. Things don’t have to be done the way they are now. Read the rest of this entry »

Samuel G. Roberson, Jr./Photo: Brett Neiman

“The Lost Boys of Sudan” debuted in 2007  at a children’s theater company in Minneapolis as a play for teenagers, and it doesn’t seem to have been adapted for adult audiences in its new incarnation at Victory Gardens. Despite its subject material, the play is strangely infantilizing, more like a Disney film (with a cow for a narrator) than a theater piece about genocide. The first half of the play follows three of the “lost boys”  as they journey to a refugee camp in Kenya; the second half finds them in a “Pleasantville” version of Fargo, where they slowly assimilate to a reductive representation of American cultural life. Overall, it’s a fundamentally uneven dramatic experience, more like a workshop than a finished production—and the real story keeps getting pushed to the side by endless exposition, pedagogical speeches (such as a simplified view of what colonialism is, by the cow) and the incredibly stilted second half, where a study of Fargo’s niceness and the refugee’s resiliance is only briefly as interesting as the real drama left behind. The language, too, is in need of focus and profound editing; while the three main protagonists (played laudibly by Samuel G. Roberson, Jr, Leslie Ann Shepprad and Namir Smallwood) have a quick, sharp banter amongst themselves, most of the writing is wordy in a bad way, with rhymed verse that gets oppressive quickly and awkward references to Shakespeare. It’s all unnecessary to the story, which is in no need of bells and whisltles to make it moving—nothing is added in theatricalizing the story, and what gets lost is the story that needs to be heard most.  (Monica Westin)

At Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N Lincoln, (773)871-3000. Through April 25.

RECOMMENDED

Rohina Malik’s one-woman rumination on racism and religious intolerance, a hit at 16th Street Theater last spring, returns to Victory Gardens. The piece profiles five Muslim women dealing with post- 9/11 fallout. A dress designer refuses to design wedding gowns; a lawyer recounts the loss of a lover; a British rapper indicts her family’s racism; a restaurateur requires her patrons to sit next to strangers; an African-American woman defends her decision to “revert” to Islam and to surrender her head covering to avoid violence. Each monologue reveals a different aspect of Middle Eastern or Muslim culture, from tea recipes to wedding customs.

Director Ann Filmer keeps the pacing brisk; Timothy Spencer’s scenic design showcases beautiful fabrics and intriguing silhouettes. Malik’s opening performance seemed rushed, blowing through opportunities for important pauses. But each well-crafted story offers audiences the opportunity to learn and feel. You can’t ask more of a show than that. (Lisa Buscani)

At Victory Gardens, 2433 North Lincoln, (773)871-3000. Through April 4.

Playwright Tanya Barfield’s Pulitzer-nominated “Blue Door” is ambitious in the range of topics and emotions it throws into its stew, from terror to humor, from classic questions of black identity—if you play the white man’s game, are you black enough?—to more contemporary versions surfacing in the age of Obama, such as, is it time to stop fixating on racial identity issues once and for all? But some stews, no matter how delicious their individual ingredients, end up tasting rather blah. And that’s the problem here: plenty of choice wordplay, funny bits and heartbreaking stories that, when mixed together, fall apart.

Lewis finds himself alone, his life something of a mess. He involuntarily “seeks” answers in his ancestors, who come to him in a series of sleepless waking dreams one night. How does this great grandson of slaves, now a member of the intellectual elite as a college mathematics professor, end up so unhappy, in search of “the why” of his life? Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 Shows
“Desire Under the Elms,” Goodman
“Blackbird,” Victory Gardens
“South Pacific,” Lincoln Center Theater
“The Tempest,” Steppenwolf
“Spring Awakening,” Broadway In Chicago 
—Brian Hieggelke

Top 5 Shows
“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” Victory Gardens/Teatro Vista
“An Apology For the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening,” Theater Oobleck
“The Pillowman,” Redtwist
“Frat,” The New Colony
“Red Noses,” Strawdog
—Nina Metz Read the rest of this entry »

The Addams Family at The Oriental/Photo: Samuel Adams

By Brian Hieggelke

As the wind blows the snow sideways this December evening, the weatherman is telling Chicagoans to stay bunkered; the deserted downtown streets reflect their obedience. All save the sidewalk near the intersection of State and Randolph, as TV crews jockey for faces on the red carpet in front of the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre, where more than 2,000 patrons, including a who’s who of backstage Broadway, are gathering for the world premiere of a new musical featuring a AAA list of talent, onstage and off. “The Addams Family,” with multiple Tony winners Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in its leads, a book from the librettists of “Jersey Boys” and so on, is certainly Broadway bound, but tonight—tonight—Chicago is the center of theater in the world.

That’s the story of Chicago theater in the zeroes: the decade in which it grew up and got big. Whether it’s the launch and monumental success of Broadway In Chicago, the maturation and astonishing quality of a remarkable number of small and mid-sized companies or the increasing demand for Chicago product and Chicago talent on Broadway, Chicago theater has fully come into its own. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter DeFaria and Randy Steinmeyer in "A Steady Rain" at Chicago Dramatists

Annoyance Theatre
Coed Prison Sluts: $64,000, 5,380 people

The Artistic Home
Peer Gynt: $19,044 box office, 1,200 people

Chicago Dramatists
A Steady Rain: $21,000 box office,1,500 people at CD, 10,000 at Royal George Theatre
Cadillac: $23,000 box office,1,600 people at CD, 1,500 at Theatre on the Lake

Collaboraction
The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, $150,000 box office, 6,500 people Read the rest of this entry »

The 2006/07 season brought the grand opening of the new Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, following more than $11 million in renovations

Annoyance Theatre (founded 1987)
“We don’t really have a regular operating budget—just plan as we go along.”
—Jennifer Estlin, President, Annoyance Theatre

The Artistic Home (founded 1998)
End of nineties: $62,000
End of zeroes: $164,500

Bailiwick Chicago (founded 2009)
End of nineties: N/A (Bailiwick Repertory is now defunct)
End of zeroes: $120,000 projected 2010

Chicago Dramatists (founded 1979)
End of nineties: $171,000
End of zeroes: $550,000

Collaboraction (founded 1996)
End of nineties: $50,000
End of zeroes: $500,000

Court Theatre (founded 1955)
End of nineties: $2.6 million
End of zeroes: $3.2 million Read the rest of this entry »

2000

Milestones

500 Clown, Steep Theatre, the side project and Teatro Luna are founded

Broadway In Chicago launches as a joint venture between Live Nation and the Nederlander Organization

Goodman departs its original home in the Art Institute of Chicago and moves into $51 million new digs in the North Loop

Chicago Shakespeare moves into a $24 million theater on Navy Pier

Collaboraction produces its first Sketchbook

The City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs opens The Storefront Theater

Passings

Michael Maggio, Goodman Theatre Associate Artistic Director and Dean of The Theatre School at DePaul University Read the rest of this entry »