Reviews

Jim Lynch is a talented playwright with a keen ear for street talk and a knack for character development. His works begs an audience. CCX is a powerful, in-your-face, Chicago style play filled with outstanding performances particularly by Henri Watkins and David Lawrence Hamilton. The complexity of police work in gang infested Chicago that becomes shades of gray in execution wherein the line between the good guys and the thugs becomes blurred is vividly presented in Lynch’s terrify play.

MATRYOSHKA makes its point. But occasionally at the cost of considerable tedium. For by the time we’re running close to our second hour, the whole experience starts to feel like a nonsensical blur, not quite achieving an absurdist circular structure but nonetheless going nowhere, as though slowly following a geometrical line into an infinite horizon.

Still, Vigils is prone to some heavy-handed and clichéd ruminations on the nature of love, loss and renewal. And its efforts to blend the conventions of a realist drama with more mytho-poetic diction results in several awkwardly mawkish metaphors

Filled with colorful customs, shadow puppets, and loads of stage combat, Qui Nguyen’s ridiculous comedy, She Kills Monsters, is highlighted with much screaming, physical comedy and over-the-top performances. This wild and unworkable mess is the story of a most unlikable lead character, Agnes (Katherine Banks)’s life is tuned upside down when she stumbles upon her late sister’s Dungeons & Dragons notebook

In Christina Anderson’s interesting play, Blacktop Sky, we meet 18 year old Ida (Kristin E. Ellis), a resident of a Chicago housing project. she slowly befriends a young homeless man who lives on a bench in the project’s courtyard after she witness police rough up a fellow project resident