Tom Williams

Few in the audience laughed, most were uncomfortable. The script was so full of forced double meaning—always sexual and the dialogue contained extremely strained potty talk that initially wasn’t funny and quickly became tedious.

The Saturday Morning Movie Club is playwright Dan Filowitz’s take on the 30something’s relationship problems. Jonah (Whitney Derendinger) is a detail-oriented guy who resists change in his life. Routine rules his life as he has days for Chinese food with his moved-in girlfriend Sarah (Nora Best) and Saturdays are for a meeting of the Saturday Morning Movie Club hosted by Jonah with his long-time pals Drew (Adam Miller-Batteau) and Greg (Glenn Fancher)

First Folio Theatre in Oak Brook continues mounting outstanding theatre and their latest is a most worthy mounting of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. The intimacy of First Folio’s indoor stage (nice set by Angela Miller) at the Mayslake Peabody Estate serves the production well. A Moon for the Misbegotten is the story of Josie Hogan (Erin Noel Grennan in a tremendous performance)—an ungainly daughter of an impoverished sharecropper whose love for alcoholic Jim Tyrone (Christian Gray in his finest performance to date) comes to ahead one long summer night.

By Marisa Wegrzyn Directed by Brian Golden Produced by Theatre Seven of Chicago At the Greenhouse Theater I didn’t see

5th Floor productions offers a funny off-night (Monday & Tuesday) comedy that dares to deal with how our profession defines us as a person. The three—Annalise (Eva Gil) is a geographer; Dave (Max Lesser) is a Court Reporter-stenographer; Margaret (Sarah Kinsey) is typographer—exploration of the idiosyncrasies of their jobs in a quite funny and truthful comedy. These three actors gave honest, heartwarming performances.

Steppenwolf Theatre, under Tina Landau’s wildly ambitious direction, has launched The Bard’s final work in an uneven production that features gender bending interracial casting with gymnastic elements, excruciating sound effects peopled with a rich assortment of Steppenwolf ensemble members some with expert Shakespearean talents and some with no clue to the Folio Method. That made for a radically strange production that included a screeching loud opening ship wreck scene, some terrific comic turns from K. Todd Freeman (Caliban), Yasen Peyankov (Stephano), and Tim Hopper (Trinculo).

Utilizing a simple white runway set with only two benches, God’s Ear unfolds as a depressing exercise in psychological fantasy that has Ted and Mel hallucinating as they struggle to cope with a child’s death. Using twisted language, wordplay, poetry and rhythm chants, Ted and Mel recite, almost babble, several meaningless monologues that drone on. So many free-flowing words, so little meaning. Might as well recite the phone book. There is a long list of clichéd figures of speech and repetitious questions and answers in this absurdist work.