MUST SEE

Roundabout revived their production in 2014, and now, the national tour is providing American theatre-goers with another chance to see this landmark in its full glory. But despite its reputation for brashness (and possibly because of some issue with monitors and other sound equipment at opening), this seems to be an unusually contemplative Cabaret.

Some theatres are seemingly immortal, but they all have to end at some point. Several long-running companies have dissolved recently in Chicago or are in the process of mounting their last production, and they’ve gone with varying degrees of dignity. Mary-Arrchie, I’m glad to say, closes with an excellent production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, a play which is appropriate for a number of reasons. The 1975 drama is historically symbolic of the rise of Chicago’s storefront and upstairs theatres, such as Mary-Arrchie’s slated-for-demolition Angel Island space. Its gritty, unsentimental, darkly humorous depiction of life’s losers fits well with the aesthetic Mamet’s emulators popularized, and which became associated with Chicago plays in the latter part of the last century.

Many playwrights aspire to write a drama that is of vital interest to a theatre-going community’s concerns, contains an appropriate balance of comedy and pathos, depicts compelling, sympathetic characters, and tells a logical story driven by those characters’ desires, which are both unique to themselves and identifiable to the larger community. Those playwrights would do well do learn from Rohina Malik.

Monty Cole’s all-black male production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape is a wondrous display of kinetic energy in service of creating a brutal, nightmarish proletarian netherworld. Expressionism, that well-worn phrase referring to the exploration of the mind by representing its subjective interpretation of the environment, is comfortable territory for Oracle. This new African-American adaptation brings O’Neill’s 1922 early-career experiment into the contemporary world, fully restoring its vitality, while remaining true to the source.