I am not a theater critic but I have been devoted to covering theater since my early 1980s reports on the explosion of Chicago storefront theaters for National Public Radio. On The Mara Tapp Show in the 1990s, I was honored to host weekly conversations about and offer scenes from some of Chicago’s best shows, and delighted when those interviews filled houses for our local theaters.
In 2015, at the request of friends, I started a series of emails with recommendations for shows I thought worthy of patrons. Some years later, actors, directors and publicity people in Chicago’s theater world prevailed on me to share these raves, a request I accepted, especially in light of the increasing tensions in the theater world and need to keep Chicago theaters healthy. Read more…
Find out what the critics think at the Review Round-up on the website of TheatreInChicago.com.
Raves
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
The Artistic Home through November 17
Recommended
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is a very funny but bittersweet play – emphasis on bitter – about the lengths to which Blacks had to go in 1930s Hollywood films to keep their dignity and succeed. It’s hard to imagine much humor could be found in the continuous humiliation of having to hide your intelligence and portray a shuffling slave, “yes-ma’am” maid or deferential driver but Playwright Lynn Nottage mixes screwball comedy with searing satire and manages to make us laugh even as we witness the damage done by racism.
Her play has two parts, both uproarious. The first begins in the center of a building storm about an antebellum film that is to be made by a dreamy German director. Every starlet wants a part, including the very blonde and white Gloria Mitchell, a star known as “America’s Little Sweetie Pie” whose range veers between self-absorption and self-pity, and her Black maid, Vera Stark. Stark has the brains but Mitchell has the name and fame. Ashayla Calvin as Stark is expert at propping up her employer, covering for her in multiple ways while understanding and sometimes enjoying her superiority in every area. Calvin’s Stark is at her best when she is home trading gossip and love with her friend Lottie. Justice Ford bestows her Lottie with irresistible spirit, expertly delivering her hilariously wicked remarks while revealing her very human heart.
The third roommate, bruised but undefeated in her quest for fame and money, offers another example of how low one can go to get what they want, even when it includes passing as whatever race is required. Everyone has a secret in the first part of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Some are more shocking than others. Some are easy to understand and forgive. Others will remain unforgivable. Each is heartbreaking in its own way and yet the three roommates expertly and naturally use humor as a way to leaven their suffering.
The second half of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is as biting and satirical as the first. It pits three academics against each other in a symposium about what happened to Vera Stark. Here Nottage points her satirical spear at the PC side of the Ivory Tower and skewers all who stand in her way. The seven cast members, strongly directed by Risha Tenae, show their versatility and talent as battling scholars and guests on a TV talk show. The shocker here is the reveal, for those who didn’t know, that Vera Stark was a real Hollywood star. What she accomplished and what happened to her are all part of the continuing secrets and sadness of this piece.
While By the Way, Meet Vera Stark takes on painful and unresolved issues, it shines a light on them and does so with an incisive and cutting humor, allowing us to understand and perhaps even work to correct an ugly history – or at least give credit to Vera Stark for her role in that.
Primary Trust
Goodman Theatre through 11-3
Highly Recommended
The remarkably intimate yet hugely moving play now on stage at Goodman shines from the moment its main character starts talking. That’s because it’s impossible not to fall in love with this man.
From the parade of the hard, sad facts of his early life, Kenneth could easily be dysfunctional and depressed yet Playwright Eboni Booth creates a man radiating a calm and intoxicating joy, and Namir Smallwood so perfectly embodies this man that you are on his side from the start. Smallwood’s skill comes out both in how he gives voice to Booth’s lovely lines – allowing us to even forgive a few stumbles – and in the way his expressive face and body capture the range of Kenneth’s emotions and experiences. This is a talky play but there doesn’t seem to be a lost syllable in what Kenneth says.
That goes for the other roles as well. Director Malkia Stampley makes sure each member of this stellar cast glows. Everyone needs a best friend like Bert. Charles Andrew Gardner matches Kenneth’s joy with an easy calm that includes being his biggest fan, as well as a gentle but effective critic. There is a natural connection between the two, made poignant by the fact that Gardner’s charming and supportive Bert is imaginary yet larger than life – and almost bigger than Kenneth’s imagination. Christiana Clark has too many roles to remember but excels in each from the seemingly unending succession of servers at Kenneth and Bert’s beloved tiki bar where they overindulge in Mai Tais on a nightly basis to a series of bank customers to a surprising player in Kenneth’s life. Equally excellent in multiple roles is Fred Zimmerman, who starts as Ken’s kind-hearted but irascible boss in an old-fashioned bookstore and, with a brief hilarious stop in a fancy French restaurant, becomes another truly compassionate boss.
Intoxication is an essential ingredient of Primary Trust, which has some of the best lines about libations and drinking I have ever heard, not to mention that excellent outdated tiki bar. The kindness that permeates this play is intoxicating, as is the ode it offers to friendship, and to small towns, to what they were and still have before capitalism and the commercial chains strip them of their character with endless malls and cookie-cutter commerce.
Even Lex Liang’s set is intoxicating. An architectural, cartographic wonder, Liang fills the stage with white buildings of various heights that often are lit, and can easily morph into desks, tiki tables, bank teller windows and more. They glow against a backdrop that is an aerial map of Kenneth’s hometown of Cranberry, NY, complete with streets, houses and trees. Just as you are feeling moved by Liang’s vision, you realize that this map is also a woman’s face, full of beauty and warmth, completing the connection to human life in this intoxicating tale.
Primary Trust is one of several plays now on Chicago stages that offer us evidence of the inestimable value of that human connection, of friendship, of kindnesses, both small and large. This play challenges and engages its audience while offering comfort and encouragement to emerge from our isolated, unhappy times and selves. It’s evident why Primary Trust won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Don’t miss the chance to see for yourself and drink from its refreshing cup.
Becky Nurse of Salem
Shattered Globe Theatre through November 16
Recommended
Conjure up an intense but touching comedy about the Salem witch trials that raises difficult issues and leaves you with much to think about. That is what Sarah Ruhl offers us in Becky Nurse of Salem, now in an engaging Midwest premiere at Shattered Globe. Her 2019 play is a response to the election of Donald Trump, a challenge to Arthur Miller’s iconic The Crucible and much more. Like Ruhl’s best works, it is deliciously complicated, as is life.
Linda Reiter, a superior actor who I would see in even the worst play because of her ability to mix tragedy and humor, is the ideal lead. She plays Becky Nurse, a working-class descendant of Rebecca Nurse, one of the 19 women hanged in the Salem witch trials. Reiter conveys Becky’s challenges, chronic pain and loneliness in her usual matter-of-fact way that is so authentic it seems effortless. She also shows us Becky’s spunkier side, including her regular departures from the approved script in her tour guide job at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft.
Isabella Maria Valdés winningly plays Gail, Becky’s adolescent granddaughter, capturing the emotional pendulum of the teenage years, made harder by a plague of personal tragedies. Adam Schulmerich portrays a range of characters from jailer to judge to The Crucible’s accuser, bringing veracity, compassion and humor to all the roles but the latter. Director Polly Noonan, Ruhl’s long-time collaborator, makes sure each of the actors has the chance to tease out the many themes and stories in Becky Nurse of Salem.
And there are many because Ruhl is a playwright who has a lot of ideas running through her head and spilling into her plays. Her rage at how little has changed for women since the 1692 Salem witch trials is palpable but does not turn this play into a jeremiad. Ruhl’s ability to connect what happened then to what is happening now is uncanny. In a mere two hours, her characters enchant us with their humanity and absence of preachiness as they touch on and connect the continuing demonization of women, contemporary political fear mongering and “witch hunts,” epidemics of misused power like men ignoring the voices of women, the opioid crisis. There are lots of surprises in Becky Nurse of Salem, ones I don’t want to spoil, but know that it is a play that will engage you even as it amuses you. Best of all, it will make you think hard about the many issues we face, the ones we struggle with, and how we might find peace despite their toll on us.
The Last Wide Open
American Blues Theater through October 26
Highly Recommended
From the moment he turns away from the piano and beams out at you, Mikolaj, a recent Polish immigrant to Chicago, grabs your heart. Winningly played by Michael Mahler as a man with guileless charm, Mikolaj has the enthusiasm of a new immigrant. He posseses an irrepressible cheery optimism that could easily be annoying on almost anyone else, and a warmth that glows as if it is centered in his core and leaking out through his skin.
It is 10 PM and this dishwasher is soon joined by Lina, a waitress in this Polish diner, and an American with a decidedly less delighted perspective on life. Played with impatience and engaging candor by Dana Cameron, Lina is the plainspoken pragmatist who worries way too much. Mikolaj is the starry-eyed romantic who can’t take his eyes off her even if she doesn’t notice his palpable love that the rest of us can’t miss. Their interactions could so easily veer into an unbearable love story that would make you choke on its excessive sugar but this couple always corrects the recipe by leavening it with humor. And that humor often transmogrifies right back into sentiment and thought. The gum under the counter is a perfect example, a silly but irresistible scene in which Mikolaj finds Lina depressed on the floor, and they end up having an existential moment about previously chewed gum stuck to the bottom of the counter, a moment that is reprised in true musical fashion.
What lifts this play from the genres that could trap it is its structure. It is called “a love song in three movements.” Matthew M. Neilson’s eclectic music is an essential part of this show. Rather than take the form of a classical composition, The Last Wide Open liberates its audience to decide what should happen. I’ll not give away more except to note that Mikolaj breaks the fourth wall with a persuasive argument that masquerades as a love song AKA a plea to heed passion. AKA has an important supporting role in this show, one that will tickle you, as it often does the ivories.
The Last Wide Open’s history is unusual and custom-made for Chicago, which has the second largest Polish population outside Warsaw. It started in Cincinnati as play about an Italian immigrant. American Blues Theater got permission from the playwright to adapt it to reflect Chicago’s robust and longtime Polish population. The result was a collaboration between Audrey Cefaly, who did the book and lyrics, and two first-generation members of the Polish diaspora, sisters who grew up in Marquette Park – ABT’s Katarzyna Muller, who adapted the play, and Matilda Szydagis, the dialect coach.
As soon as I saw the set, which puts patrons into a Polish diner, I thought of Podhalanka, a favorite Polish restaurant of mine that recently closed despite decades of surviving the gentrification of Division Street. As it turns out, that very spot was part of the inspiration for Director Gwendolyn Whiteside and her crew’s immersive set design. Although this set lacks Podhalanka’s plastic-over-everything décor or its card carousel filled with Catholic greetings for all occasions, it has many of the other touches, making it the perfect Polish diner preserved in a 1950s time capsule.
Mahler and Cameron are a real-life couple, which did not surprise me but did make me happy. I was so persuaded by their chemistry that I was going to suggest they take this beyond a stage kiss and get married. Whatever their secret is, it is pure pleasure to watch them together.
There is so much heart in The Last Wide Open that I was elated by its Fall encore after a successful summer run because now I can rave about it. Make sure you get tickets to this show, which transcends typecasting offering instead a love story with a heart and a brain, allowing us many moments “of joy, of transcendent joy.”
Noises Off
Steppenwolf Theatre Company through November 3
Recommended
Who doesn’t need a good laugh? Steppenwolf’s latest somewhat atypical offering of the British farce Noises Off comes as a welcome tonic in these tense times.
At first glance it seems an odd pick – something acknowledged in the artistic co-directors’ welcome note – but it actually fits snugly into the Steppenwolf oeuvre though my arguments for why differ somewhat from the theater’s leadership’s. After all, for 49 years Steppenwolf has been known for its visceral plays about dysfunction and this is indeed a play about dysfunction – this time with a comic twist.
And yet there is depth in this laugh fest. My always analytic theater companion offered her usual astute explanation noting that the main topics of Noises Off are strife between coworkers, the stress of putting together something at the last minute and sex on the job. These are indeed timeless and universal topics. She went on to observe that that the workplace has long been a staple of American TV sitcoms and comedies like the amusingly accurate Abbott Elementary, a behind-the-scenes look at a Philadelphia public school. Others might pick Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. For my generation of Feminists it was The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I’d argue that English Playwright and Author Michael Frayn, an incredibly versatile artist who also gave us the award-winning plays Copenhagen and Democracy, here offers us a gem from the genre of British Bedroom farce. Think multiple doors and Sir Alan Ayckbourn, among others. Of course, British bedroom farces aren’t for everyone. My late husband and I lost a longtime family friend over a slightly bawdy one but that’s a story for another time. But Noises Off showcases Frayn’s exemplary and delightful use of “the play within the play” trick – a technique expertly applied by William Shakespeare, and we know how well that turned out whether in his tragedies or comedies. Still “the play’s the thing,” as the Bard’s Danish Prince put it so well in Hamlet so back to Noises Off.
It is the story of a group of actors and their director doing their best to mount a play about class and sex with too little rehearsal while their off-stage lives and own affairs mirror the comic chaos onstage. Lest I give too much away, know that each of the three acts offer a different and equally hilarious perspective on the play and the offstage drama.
From the moment the always sublime Ora Jones walks into an elegant sitting with an ideal English pastoral view and answers a ringing phone while balancing a plate of sardines, we know this will be a hilarious evening. Jones plays the housekeeper to this country home onstage. Offstage she is the elegant doyenne of the TV world who doesn’t quite recall every line but retains her allure. In short order we meet the rest of the corps, starting with Andrew Leeds, who excels as a spacey actor offstage. Onstage he is trying to rent the house though trying harder to have it off with a comely employee of the British tax service. Amanda Fink’s portrayal captures both this lusty lady and her offstage self, a clueless young actor more focused on her disappearing contact lenses than the artistic endeavor. Next up are the owners of the house, who are evading tax collectors but have escaped self-imposed exile for an anniversary weekend in their beloved home. This amusing couple is portrayed by two topnotch Steppenwolf Ensemble members. James Vincent Meredith captures all the pomp and anxiety of the onstage homeowner and offstage he is the kind but equally anxious actor. As his onstage wife, Audrey Francis is her usual snappy self as an elegant, controlling mistress of the manse. Offstage Francis, who is one of Steppenwolf’s artistic directors, is just as efficient and controlling, as well as being the most professional actor in the corps. Francis Guinan, long a Steppenwolf favorite for good reason, plays a burglar onstage and offstage he is a formerly great actor from whom all liquor must be hidden.
The offstage technical crew is made up of the handsome director of this play within the play, Rick Holmes whose long-suffering director strikes the perfect balance of confidence in his abilities and expertise at coddling his needy and insecure actors. Always ready to serve in any way possible is his assistant stage manager, a bag of nerves and raw emotions deliciously captured by Vaneh Assadourian. Her stage manager boss is deliciously incompetent, as aptly played by Max Stewart.
For a couple hours these actors’ antics, both onstage and off, amuse us. The ensemble work is excellent, both in timing and elegant physicality. The play, and the play within the play, ideally directed by Anna Shapiro, offer audiences an unusually intimate insider view, in essence revealing the acting process, which is most fitting for a piece that involves so many actors taking off their clothes in the best British bedroom farce tradition. My friend and I didn’t go on opening night so our audience was not overwhelmingly theater people but its members enjoyed Noises Off, relished every laugh and left the theater chuckling and smiling.
Steppenwolf’s artistic co-directors noted that one of the reasons this season starter is appropriate for their audiences is our collective need to laugh together. While my taste often is for more serious fare, I have to agree that sometimes we do need some cheering up. As my insightful theater companion put it, “We’ve been to a lot of plays and, after the successful tragedies, we’ve left feeling exactly as we should, but we’ve also left some plays that missed the mark feeling both depressed and unimpressed. At this point, I think I’d rather have the Noises Off experience and simply leave a play feeling amused.”
So if you need some cheering up, an evening of amusement courtesy of excellent actors or just a night full of laughs, make sure to spend a couple hours at Steppenwolf enjoying Noises Off.