Jacob Davis

By John Logan

Directed by Terry McCabe

Produced by City Lit Theater, Chicago

Hauptmann’s Case Still Fascinating

Before he wrote the Tony Award-winning Red and the screenplays of The Aviator, The Last Samurai, and Gladiator, John Logan was fascinated by courtroom dramas. His early play Never the Sinner, about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, played in Victory Gardens last year, and now, City Lit Theater is reviving Hauptmann for that play’s thirtieth anniversary. Artistic director Terry McCabe, who also directed Hauptmann’s world premiere at Stormfield Theatre, and has directed it several times since, including at Victory Gardens, calls it his favorite play.

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Directed by Kendra Miller

Movement Direction by Thom Pasculli

Created by Walkabout Theater Company

Produced in Association with DCASE

Old Library Makes Existential Struggle a Spectacle

If you’ve ever seen The Seagull, and wondered what Konstantin’s decadent dramatic experiment on the subject of matter and energy would look like as a complete production, Walkabout’s The Cure may be about as close as you’re going to get. Part promenade and part performance art, this meditation on death, medicine, and spirituality, with a commissioned text by Emma Stanton, is a dizzying display of symbols and archetypes whose meaning is highly subjective. But though the work is confusing and often frustrating, it is an interesting use of the Chicago Cultural Center’s strange architecture, and contains athletic, daring choreography by Thom Pasculli.

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By Rebecca Gilman

Directed by Robert Falls

Produced by Goodman Theatre, Chicago

History Comes to Life with a False Ending

In case you haven’t noticed, the job market is tough. Already weakened by decades of Reaganomics, public-sector unions have taken another hit across the Midwest in recent years, and private-sector unions have declined since the nation’s bicentennial as well. Also, people are eating mass-produced, preservative-laden crap instead of local produce. Playwright Rebecca Gilman sees all these things as connected, and lays them out in her 2014 play Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976.

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By Tim Crouch

Designed by Graeme Gilmour

Produced by Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Malvolio Has Had Enough of Your Shit

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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By Rajiv Joseph

Directed by James Yost

Produced by Interrobang Theatre Project

Playing at The Athenaeum Theatre, Chicago

A Well-Made Mystery for a Modern High School

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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By Deirdre Kinahan

Directed by Joanie Schultz

Produced by Irish Theatre of Chicago

Playing at The Den Theatre

What Happens After a Family Tragedy

At the same time Haven Theatre is exploring negligent parenting in the American premiere of the British play The Distance, the Irish Theatre of Chicago is presenting the horrifying opposite extreme in the American debut of Deirdre Kinahan’s Spinning. 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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By Anton Chekhov

Translated by Christopher Hampton

Directed by Cody Estle

Produced by The Artistic Home, Chicago

A Strong, Conservative Seagull Takes Flight

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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