Theatre Reviews

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.

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.

The structure of The Good Doctor, with The Writer (Chekhov) himself presiding, offers nothing in the way of insight into Chekhov or Art, but merely serves as a convenience for Simon to string together a series of silly stories that would have been better left in prose. There’s a very probable reason why Chekhov did not translate these stories to the stage, and that reason is this very play. In fact, rather than honoring Chekhov, I feel the play disgraces him by not only associating him with this outlandish sketch show but by making him take part as its ringleader