Twelfth Night is one of the most heavily featured plays of the Shakespeare 400 Festival, and is the selection for this year’s Shakespeare in the Parks series. Consequently, Chicago audiences will have plenty of chances to snicker at the Puritanical valet Malvolio. But in this adaptation, written and performed by Tim Crouch, Malvolio finally gets his long-promised revenge. On us, that is.
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Followers of up-and-coming American playwrights will be familiar with Rajiv Joseph’s experiments with a variety of dramatic styles. Though known for highly symbolic and fantastic works like Gruesome Playground Injuries, and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, in his 2013 The North Pool, Joseph proved that the old fashioned naturalistic play, in which most of the action has already occurred and the characters are simply teasing information out of each other, still has legs. Of course, it helps the play enormously to have a production such as that of Interrobang Co-Artistic Director James Yost and his two perfectly cast actors.
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So Out of The Blue is a wake-up call and a warning that homophobia still exists and is thriving in Russia and other parts of the world as well as rural America.
Will Burdin and Adam Zaininger lead a fine cast that put a face on boys struggling just to be accepted for themselves. I will never understand how gay folks are a threat to society and plays like Out of the Blue demonstrate that hate still is in the hearts of too many. This is an important play that needs to be seen by all, including teens.
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Recounted after the fact, Spinning tells the story of how a man’s pride and parental obsession led to the death of an innocent, and the ruin of his and several other peoples’ lives. The production directed by Joanie Schultz is as inquisitive as it is disturbing, zeroing in on the thorny question of what exactly to do with a person who has shown themselves to be capable of rash, destructive action after the law is finished with them.
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In 1938, with the rise of Hitler, Berlin, who was Jewish and a first-generation European immigrant, felt it was time to revive it as a “peace song”, and it was introduced on an Armistice Day broadcast in 1938 sung by Kate Smith, on her radio show.
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As shown by the number of new adaptations of The Seagull that have played in Chicago recently, Anton Chekhov’s 1896 play which he counterintuitively called a comedy still maintains a strong grip on the minds of theatregoers. After all, pretty much anyone who spends much time around young artists has met several Konstantins and Ninas. Though the production at the Artistic Home directed by Cody Estle does not reimagine this very often-done work, it is blessed with Christopher Hampton’s translation, which preserves the nuances and ironies in the characters’ dialogue, and makes it easily understandable in contemporary terms.
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If you had a friend who was desperately unhappy and thought they needed to make a major change that would not only be completely different from what you would do, but offensive to your deepest-held morals, would you support them? That’s the question at the core of British writer Deborah Bruce’s 2012 play The Distance, now enjoying its American premiere under the direction of English transplant Elly Green. In it, three women make very different choices for their families, and as the friends delve deeper into their reasons for doing so during a crisis, their ability to put on a polite face for each other becomes more and more frayed. The result is a challenging examination of parental responsibility that is starkly honest and darkly funny.
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This spring’s six-hour long Tug of War: Foreign Fire is made up of the rarely-seen Edward III, Henry V, and Henry VI Part One. Next fall’s accompanying epic, Civil Strife, will consist of the other two parts of Henry VI, and Richard III. It’s an unusual combination, which massively re-contextualizes the Hundred Years War into an examination of personalities, and perhaps most significantly, transforms Henry V into a tragedy. The result, though in some way massive in scale, is also deeply intimate, and through the outstanding work of Gaines, her ensemble, and her production team, a long-ago conflict becomes vital again.
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Lovers of British comedy, lovers of classic commedia dell’ arte, and patrons of fearless uninhibited acting will be impressed by the stage craft in this show. Laughs reign here. You’ll be hard pressed to find a funnier comedy that One Man, Two Guvnors. This show begs for more commedial dell’ arte physical comedy productions to be mounted in Chicago. Get to Court Theatre to see for yourself what smart comedy is all about. this is one of the finest shows of the year!
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Over the past few years, The Hypocrites’ artistic director Sean Graney has produced a few Shakespeare adaptations that were only an hour long and were designed by their ensembles. But while those productions ran for the standard six weeks, his new adaptation with Emily Casey of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is playing for a very limited engagement. Perhaps it’s being workshopped for another production later on. If so, it needs to be rethought in every aspect.
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