MUST SEE

After opening their new building with a production of Tom Stoppard’s incredibly dense Arcadia, the staff at Writers Theatre thought audiences might be in the mood for something funnier. Do they ever deliver. In a collaboration with Second City, Death of a Streetcar Named Virginia Woolf: A Parody is now the inaugural production of the Gillian, the smaller of the playing spaces in the complex. Riffing on four of the mid-twentieth century dramas which dominate the American stage (the fourth, not included in the title, being Thornton Wilder’s Our Town), Tim Ryder and Tim Sniffen’s script is a rapid-fire homage and parody which imagines a clash of icons in sultry New Orleans.

Strawdog will be moving next season to a new location at 1621 West Howard Street, but for now, it’s the end of an era at their Lakeview home for twenty-six years. They picked a great way to go out, though. Though the names George Kaufman and Moss Hart are today associated most strongly with You Can’t Take it With You, a beloved, but dated and overexposed, comedy, their first collaboration, Once in a Lifetime, has a lot more satirical bite. Written in 1930, the story centers on the movie industry, one of the few financially promising fields at the time (or so many people hoped), and director Damon Kiely has found all sorts of delightful ways of bringing out the script’s humor, while making it compatible with modern tastes. It’s the perfect fusion of old and new for a long-running company undergoing a major transition.

In 1971, John Guare’s dark farce The House of Blue Leaves launched his career by establishing him as a writer who defies genres and has a wicked sense of humor. Now, in 2016, when the farce has receded from its once-prominent position in the theatrical landscape, Guare’s story of a husband undergoing a mid-life crises while in thrall to his mentally ill wife and a group of invasive nuns awaiting the arrival of the pope looks even stranger. But in Raven’s production, under the direction of co-artistic director JoAnn Montemurro, every cackle rings true, and the horror exposed at the heart of the genre is all the more disturbing for being buried under such a goofy exterior.

The story is mostly driven by Simon’s attempts to protect the other refugees, especially Elisa and Harold, regardless of what anyone else tells him is smart or right. However, the plays is mostly a character study. The problem with dedicating your life to revenge is that it requires there to always be someone to take revenge upon. Simon hears and sees what he wants to, justifies everything, and uses the Holocaust as his framework for understanding every situation he comes across. Of course, the result is not good, but he sincerely inquired about the philosophy of justice from his biggest critics, and tried to do what was right for the people who had been betrayed by everyone else.

As this is a memory play, locations are represented mostly through Liviu Pasare’s dazzling projections, which fit with Svich’s intimate focus on the sisters’ psychology. Teatro Vista will present In the Time of the Butterflies three times for schools, but this intensely personal account, mingled with exhortations on the importance of bearing witness, edifying and rewarding for people of all ages.