So what can we say about the Chicago premiere of playwright Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark? Well, for starters, its funny, alarmingly smart, and beautifully conceived under Chuck Smith’s current direction at the Goodman Theatre.
But given all that, why doesn’t it work?
This one-man show explores the nature of being a minority within a minority in a magical, mythical journey to the land of Common Grounds.
At times, Mascot feels as thought its attempting to do for personality disorders what Sarah Kane’s 2000 psycho-monologue Psychosis 4:48 did for clinical depression, isolating the psychological symptoms in a dramatic vacuum and giving them a more or less unrestrained ability to manifest themselves. The audience—like a room full of clinicians—is thus always on the outside looking in, giving us the sense that what we are watching is something much darker than lies ostensibly on the surface, i.e. a scene of frustrated bondage and unflagging sadism. A man beyond our help, but who nonetheless approaches us with all the charm and insinuating familiarity of a self-knowing psychopath. Someone who evokes our pity even as we think he might be oddly dangerous.
What holds this theatrical effective piece together is the honesty of the epitaphs since the dead on longer had to use their ‘live’ facade making the truth easy to render. The dramatic monologues demonstrated the variety and the actual actions and motivations of a vast variety of folks from a small town
Get to the Civic Opera house to experience the original Oklahoma! in all its glory, all its down-home charm, and all its artistic acumen. You’ll either discover or re-discover the genius of Rodgers & Hammerstein as they changed the landscape of Broadway musicals forever with Oklahoma! After seeing many fine productions of this classic show, I must report that Gary Griffin and the Lyric’s production is the finest, most heartfelt production of Oklahoma! I’ve ever seen!
The Pajama Game is an ageless fable that has a fresh winning grin on its face from the outset. It is a vibrant young, funny, earthy and spirited show with a score featuring a wide-ranging mixture of tunes. The Pajama Game is one of my all-time favorite Broadway musicals and the Music Theatre Company’s production serves the piece well.
But all in all, Tea with Edie and Fitz needs desperately to learn how to walk before it can run, remembering in the last analysis that no amount of “literary” cleverness can substitute for emotional honesty and depth of character.
Shaw Chicago and Oakton Community College
Team up to present a 4-day
WORLD OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW FESTIVAL
May 20-23.
Though on the surface an attempt to resurrect figures lost to our historical memory, barely protruding from just beneath the surface is a kind of artlessly self-conscious, reachingly hip, and morally patronizing piece. Evoking the setup of an indie music concert—largely by stuffing the front tables with eager twenty-somethings sipping Sam Adams and caking the stage in high-octane venue lighting —we can perhaps sympathize with Ploughed Under’s hopes of bringing a kind of chic authenticity to musical theater, even if it doesn’t quite succeed.
The final scenes offer emotional arguments from both as the changing roles in the mentor-protege relationship emerge. Often when the protege learns too well, the mentor either feels useless and not needed anymore. That can be difficult for both. In Collected Stories, Margulies layers trust, loyalty, and mutual need into a complex web of circumstances. Is Ruth paranoid or is Lisa an opportunist? And what if a protege takes literally the advise from the mentor and acts upon that advise, is she exploiting and betraying the mentor? See this play and judge for yourself.