Beverly Friend

When the audience isn’t cheering the endeavors, it’s holding its breath: what lithe performers, what contortionists. Everything that seems impossible suddenly is made to look impossibly easy.

The scene is set for the framing tale: how Scheherazade (Louise Lamson) prevents her husband, King Shahryar (Ryan Artzburger) from killing her with the dawn of each new day, staying her execution for 1001 days, by telling him compelling stories that pique and continue his interest.

With the Lieutenant of Inishmore, however, motivation is either non-existent or outrageous and absurd. Everything springs from the death of a cat. The result is not limited to “an-eye-for-an eye” retribution but goes far beyond this: not merely, “If you kill my cat, I will kill yours,” but “If you kill my cat, I will kill you!”

Certainly, the intimacy of the Raven Theatre provides wonderful immediacy. The audience becomes completely involved with the dispossessed Joad family, economic victims of the Great Depression, thrust from their homes in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and forced to board their makeshift truck to undertake a hard, tedious migration across the U.S.

Chicago Shakespeare Theater seldom disappoints. The plays are tried and true, the acting is always splendid, the productions are often spirited and innovative, and never has there been a staging of Twelfth Night like this one!

The theater’s location on Navy Pier inspired scenic and costume designer Lucy Osborne to recapture that ambience indoors. She is quoted as saying, “There’s something about a pier that suggests a voyage into the unknown. . . .and pleasure piers are just fundamentally playful and sort of decadent.”