Theatre Reviews

Over the past few years, The Hypocrites’ artistic director Sean Graney has produced a few Shakespeare adaptations that were only an hour long and were designed by their ensembles. But while those productions ran for the standard six weeks, his new adaptation with Emily Casey of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is playing for a very limited engagement. Perhaps it’s being workshopped for another production later on. If so, it needs to be rethought in every aspect.

As with the original myth, the heart of Eurydice is the love between Eurydice and Orpheus and, here, also between Eurydice and her father. If a production can’t make me feel this love in the actors, then 95 minutes of Sarah Ruhl’s sentimental poetry is a long time to endure just to see them all finally dunked in the oblivion of the River of Lethe. And by the end, I was just about dying to dunk myself.

Take the premise of an all-female cult that butchers men, and fill it up with camp, gore, and crude humor, and you should have something that’s funny, scary, or at least, offensive. But no, About Face Theatre’s Chicago premiere production The Secretaries is simply dull, and plods along for two hours without any emotional resonance.

What happens when you throw together a dead president, the best-selling English-language author of the nineteenth century, and an aristocratic Christian anarchist? As it turns out, not much. Director Kimberly Senior and her three-man cast wring every bit of drama and humor they can out of Scott Carter’s dry idea-play, but the gospel according to these three people who have all faded into and been surpassed by history is long on premise and doesn’t delve much deeper into philosophy than most people are likely to have already gone on their own. Actually, upon examination, the premise is self-defeating, but more on that later. It does contain some fine performances though, and another round at the sort of questions Carter asks is what a lot of people consider leisure to be for.