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.
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Raves
The Book of Grace
Photo by Michael Brosilow.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company through May 18
Highly Recommended
When a beautiful petite waitress in a blue-checked diner uniform walks onstage and starts to talk, her quirkiness, warmth and humor are irresistible. Then you meet her husband. He is fulminating about aliens – no, not that kind – as he irons his border patrol uniform, making sure each crease is perfect.
To say Grace and Vet are a mismatched couple would be beyond diplomatic. She is filled with irrepressible hope; he is overflowing with fizzing rage. After some reassuring and flirtatious marital conversation, Grace heads off to the diner and Vet continues to prepare for his work when a handsome young man appears and knocks on their front door. It turns out he is Vet’s son.
There will be no embrace despite a 15-year estrangement. Rather, in true border-patrol style, Vet pats him down and takes all the necessary precautions one would intercepting someone crossing the border illegally rather than one’s long-lost son. Buddy, this son, doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he acquiesces, displaying his own military training.
What unfolds in the next two-and-a-half hours touches on the saddest of age-old family conflicts, of lies and deceits and heartbreak. Yet the complications and potential happiness of this blended Black family are handled with such sensitivity, skill, intensity and humor that the time flies by, and the audience is drawn into this story completely.
Every one of the three actors is sublime. The range of emotions – from forgiving love to incredible sadness to empathy to rejection to hope – that they are able to convey is evidence of their skills.
Zainab Jah glows as Grace, her open, sunny face a beacon for hope of the very sort with which she fills the pages of “The Book of Grace” that she is secretly writing. Her wiry frame bursts with joy at good memories and the happy news stories she’s collecting. Yet Jah easily shifts to a soft persuasive spouse or stepmother intent on reconciling the men in her life, this father and his son from a previous marriage.
Brian Marable, as her husband Vet, brings the right kind of rage to his role, one that makes him attractive and likeable in the first half despite his ranting, but is revealed as something entirely different as the play progresses. Marable came late to his show, replacing the actor originally cast just over two weeks before opening, which makes his performance even more impressive.
Namir Smallwood, hot off his success in Primary Trust at Goodman Theatre, is ideal here as the damaged son. His face, with its quicksilver emotional shifts, and always-on-alert body showcase Smallwood’s focus and talent in completely inhabiting his characters, which made him so charming at Goodman. Smallwood’s hallmark intensity is perfect for The Book of Grace. His tight portrayal of a wounded man, here to celebrate an award his father is receiving, and increasingly grateful to Grace for her support, optimism and, well, grace, is ideal – and full of surprises.
This top-notch trio lifts Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Book of Grace to a different level under the sure-handed direction of Steve H. Broadnax III. Arnel Sancianco’s small-town with its neat kitchen, unpretentious living room and backyard offers a believable setting to highlight the action.
The Book of Grace is a deeply layered play that comes at family relationships with a complexity expressed through its profoundly intelligent and driven characters. It is an excellent embodiment of the domestic intensity for which Steppenwolf is revered. This provocative and beautiful piece will pull you in, expand your understanding of difficult issues and hope in ways that may surprise you and alter your perspective. Isn’t that what theater should do?
The Winter’s Tale
in The Winter’s Tale.
Photos by Aaron Reese Boseman Photography.
Invictus Theatre Company through April 20
Highly Recommended
When the second half begins with an actor solemnly blowing on an unfurling party favor, it’s clear Invictus Theatre’s take on The Winter’s Tale will diverge wildly from any you’ve previously seen.
Yes, there is the Lear-like moment of rage though here the baseless banishment of a queen stems from jealousy. Yes, there is a case of mistaken identity. Yes, there are the removals and murders of royals. Yes, there are the young lovers, one with a secret identity. Yes, there is the classic Shakespearean contrast between the restrained but often joyless royals and their courtiers and the far-less-refined but definitively happier shepherds in the forest.
This story is a classic one familiar to fans of the Bard and of fairy tales: King Leontes of Sicily suspects his beloved pregnant queen of infidelity with the King of Bohemia, who is his childhood friend. Leontes tries and banishes her and all their progeny, condemning them to death. That’s the first half of The Winter’s Tale. The second half erupts in joyous mirth peppered with somber scenes of Leontes’ descent into madness. It is what Shakespearian experts call a “problem play” because of its very different and seemingly united halves so it is rarely done but I’ve always found it intriguing and moving. Besides it has one of William Shakespeare’s two best stage directions – the first being “Enter Ghost,” which kicks off Hamlet. In The Winter’s Tale the excellent stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” does not appear until Act III but it heralds one of the most amusing murders in the Bard’s oeuvre.
Queen Hermoine’s warm and loving relations with her son and members of the court are interrupted by King Leontes’ rage. “You speak a language that I understand not,” the queen tells her husband during her trial, as he scoots around the stage in a wheeled throne full of menace and disdain. Andrea Uppling gives us an admirably calm and reasonable Hermoine, who protests her fate with a love that cannot erase her husband’s irrational rage. Michael Stejskal skilfully captures Leontes wild range of emotions, from blind fury to deep depression to forgiveness and remorse. His body maps the king’s bitter rage with staccato moves, his despondence with diminished posture familiar to anyone who’s had a depressed loved one, his love and forgiveness with a lift of his face and limbs.
Sicilian Noblewoman Paulina is played by Amber Dow with courage and power, standing up for her queen to a king blinded and crazed by jealousy as his courtiers look on, unable to stop him. She does this at a time in which women were usually powerless to assert such authority. Paulina takes the rational human approach in her pleas to the tortured king. She is the moral compass, a force urging fairness and love. Sicilian Nobleman Camillo plays a similar role on the king’s side but his nature is less forceful and brave. Kim Pereira conveys Camillo’s tortured efforts with grace.
And then there’s that second half…
Sam Nachison nearly steals the show as Autolycus, a flim-flam traveling salesman. In the spirit of the best Zero Mostel moves – think his brilliance in The Producers – Nachison introduces himself with a riotously polished full-body pickpocket that masquerades as a striptease. His elastic face, fine singing voice and comic bits are unmitigated delight.
Much of this second half of The Winter’s Tale belongs to those shepherds and their entourage, who bring an ebullience to this production. The shepherds’ bawdy humor called to mind a line from a much sadder Shakespearian monologue. “There with fantastic garlands did she come / Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,” Laertes says, as he describes Ophelia’s drowning in Hamlet, “But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.” When I was learning this speech at age 15 for drama class, my professor father helped me understand it line by line. “Think about it,” he instructed when it came to those liberal shepherds until my face showed I’d figured it out. I ask the same of you. Pause. Indeed! Shakespeare always lifts the happy-uneducated-peasants-versus-smart-tortured-denizens-of-the-upper-classes cliché right out of its stereotype, and he does so again in The Winter’s Tale. The lines from Hamlet seem the perfect encapsulation of this “problem play,” as well as Shakespeare’s delight in teasing out the complexities of life and opposites in his characters.
There isn’t a weak actor in the corps of 16, even more impressive given that most play multiple roles with talented élan. Their work is by improved by many other talents. Charles Askenaizar’s sure-handed direction marries this play’s two worlds and styles. Jessie Gowen’s modern-yet-classic court costumes and silly outfits for the forest crowd differentiate the distinct groups and enhance the action. Jen Cupani’s choreography lets all strut their best stuff. Kevin M. Rolfs’ flexible wooden set with a circle surrounded by openings, a castle-like door and the suggestion of a drawbridge with a ramp for the court scenes is inspired. That ramp becomes the gateway to the forest where, under the trees that flank the stage, form a perfect canopy and surround for the cavorting shepherds and their friends. Randy Rozler’s props include the striking use of candles carried in by the royals and their courtiers, who set them down around the edges of the stage in a manner that both redefines the space as a quiet nunnery, in which stands a statue of the queen, and adds dignity to her regal presence. Petter Wahlbäck’s original score is brimming with luscious music, expertly performed by the actors and a five-piece instrumental ensemble.
It all adds up to an ideal Shakespearian experience, not to mention a seasonally appropriate one that travels from the grim cold of Winter, with its economical and serious emotions, to the fulsome unfolding of Spring, replete with its joy that welcomes new life. Treat yourself to this resplendent awakening while you have the chance. It will lift your spirits.