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 »

Marc Grapey, Tom Amandes

RECOMMENDED

Fifty years after his superlative one-act “The Zoo Story,” a stunning confrontation of class, dehumanization and loneliness between two men on a bench in Central Park, Edward Albee has added a first act, “Homelife,” that does more harm than good in attempting to clarify and frame the second. “Homelife” gives a backstory for Peter, the formerly archetypal upper-middle-class businessman whom desperate boarding-houser Jerry tries to connect with in “The Zoo Story,” but “Homelife,” which revolves around a cliché-ridden, stilted set of exchanges between Peter and his wife about passion and sex, manages to be utterly banal and overly precious despite descriptions of anal rape, circumcision and unnecessary repetition of verbs like ‘fucking’ and ‘jamming.’ Moreover, it’s painfully self-conscious about parallels with “The Zoo Story” (“symmetry” is an oft-repeated word between the couple in conversation). “Homelife” is simply dead in the water despite valiant and deeply intelligent efforts by actors and director Dennis Zacek. “The Zoo Story” is another story—Marc Grapey as Jerry is a true revelation in the second act, which in its richness and vibrance throws into relief just how derivative and hollow “Homelife” is. “The Zoo Story” is just as funny, dark, haunting and sharply-written as ever; and that it’s worth sitting through the first half to see speaks volumes. (Monica Westin)

At Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln, (773)871-3000. Through October 31.

RECOMMENDED

Arlene Malinowski’s one-woman show is a risky and vulnerable dose of humanity. The second installment of an autobiographical trilogy about growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf parents, “Aiming for Sainthood” tackles material—disability, loss of religious faith, cancer—that in other hands could easily have fallen into truism. But Malinowski’s writing and performance, ably directed by Will Rogers, is utterly charming in the best sense of the word and ultimately succeeds in one of the most difficult of all theatrical aims: really, truly, getting us to care about un-hip family history and deep questions about faith and—I’ll say it—love. She pulls it off with unexpected dark humor, quirkiness and skillful transitions between fully embodying different characters; combining monologue with expressive blocking and sign language by both Malinowski and a translator makes the show as theatrical as a full-fledged ensemble production. (Monica Westin)

At Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln, (773)871-3000. Through September 26.

Bubba Weiler and Kevin Anderson

RECOMMENDED

Joel Drake Johnson’s latest at Victory Gardens explores redemption and the long, strange trip guilt takes us on. Thankfully, the destination is as satisfying as the journey.

Ex-con Doug (Kevin Anderson) has no place to go. His sister (Meg Thalken) is absent, so he’s forced to endure his uber-anal-retentive brother-in-law Phillip (Francis Guinan). The two manage to integrate each other into their respective mental prisons.

The piece’s mood shifts can be tough to keep a handle on; both Doug and Phillip act out without pattern. But Guinan and Anderson make up for it with killer rapport and razor-sharp timing; a simple bed-making scene is heartbreakingly hilarious. Bubba Weiler holds his own as the “lying, manic-depressive” son trapped in his own cruel adolescent reality; Sandy Shinner’s direction keeps the pacing and the physicality in check as the characters seek relief from their burdens and the seemingly unobtainable vision of their futures. (Lisa Buscani)

Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln, (773)871-3000. Through August 15.

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.

Photo: Jane Nicholl Sahlins

By Dennis Polkow

“If Aristophanes were alive today,” says an elderly but still twinkling Bernard Sahlins, “he would be on cable television.”  It may a seem a long way from the satirical ancient Greek playwright to the Second City some two-and-a-half millennia later, but Sahlins, a founder of Chicago’s legendary comedy troupe who is directing a production of “Lysistrata” this weekend, puts the timeframe in perspective: “Long before Second City, when I was directing ‘straight’ plays, including the Greek tragedies, Claudia Cassidy [then Chicago Tribune critic] wrote that I had directed the worst production in 2,000 years.”  Well, she ought to know.

Sahlins says that he has always been interested in Greek drama, a love that was in part fostered by his time studying the classics at the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1943.  “A University of Chicago education was once described as ‘Casting imaginary pearls before real swine.’ But don’t use that.

“You know, the high point of Greek drama only lasted for about eighty-six years. The period of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes passed quickly and then there was nothing except street theater until the Middle Ages and the development of church plays. The era of the playwright, the individual dramatist, did not emerge again until the Renaissance and the phenomenon of the playwright as we think of it is a fairly modern phenomenon that really fully came about in the nineteenth century.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 »