Theatre Reviews

In case you haven’t noticed, the job market is tough. Already weakened by decades of Reaganomics, public-sector unions have taken another hit across the Midwest in recent years, and private-sector unions have declined since the nation’s bicentennial as well. Also, people are eating mass-produced, preservative-laden crap instead of local produce. Playwright Rebecca Gilman sees all these things as connected, and lays them out in her 2014 play Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976.

Twelfth Night is one of the most heavily featured plays of the Shakespeare 400 Festival, and is the selection for this year’s Shakespeare in the Parks series. Consequently, Chicago audiences will have plenty of chances to snicker at the Puritanical valet Malvolio. But in this adaptation, written and performed by Tim Crouch, Malvolio finally gets his long-promised revenge. On us, that is.

Followers of up-and-coming American playwrights will be familiar with Rajiv Joseph’s experiments with a variety of dramatic styles. Though known for highly symbolic and fantastic works like Gruesome Playground Injuries, and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, in his 2013 The North Pool, Joseph proved that the old fashioned naturalistic play, in which most of the action has already occurred and the characters are simply teasing information out of each other, still has legs. Of course, it helps the play enormously to have a production such as that of Interrobang Co-Artistic Director James Yost and his two perfectly cast actors.

Recounted after the fact, Spinning tells the story of how a man’s pride and parental obsession led to the death of an innocent, and the ruin of his and several other peoples’ lives. The production directed by Joanie Schultz is as inquisitive as it is disturbing, zeroing in on the thorny question of what exactly to do with a person who has shown themselves to be capable of rash, destructive action after the law is finished with them.

As shown by the number of new adaptations of The Seagull that have played in Chicago recently, Anton Chekhov’s 1896 play which he counterintuitively called a comedy still maintains a strong grip on the minds of theatregoers. After all, pretty much anyone who spends much time around young artists has met several Konstantins and Ninas. Though the production at the Artistic Home directed by Cody Estle does not reimagine this very often-done work, it is blessed with Christopher Hampton’s translation, which preserves the nuances and ironies in the characters’ dialogue, and makes it easily understandable in contemporary terms.