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
Leroy and Lucy
Steppenwolf Theatre Company through December 15
Recommended
Inspired by an apocryphal story about an influential blues musician, Steppenwolf’s Leroy and Lucy is full of spirit, magic and surprises.
Playwright Ngozi Anyanwu’s reimagination of the classic tale of Faust springs from the legend that Robert Leroy Johnson, an American musician, singer and songwriter best known for his Delta Blues, made a deal with the Devil to be a great blues artist. So yes, you may see a devil, and you certainly will hear some music, but the stars of this show are the two actors who come together at a Southern rural crossroads for a battle of wits and guitars.
Jon Michael Hill continues to amaze with his versatility and charm. After his brilliant turn in Steppenwolf’s recent Purpose, he is back as Leroy, a country man with a dream. Brittany Bradford is enticing as Lucy, the beautiful woman Leroy encounters, who turns out to be his equal – perhaps superior – at verbal sparring, guitar playing and singing. The sexy chemistry and snappy exchanges between them are like two instruments in and out of harmony, a fine blues piece or captivating symphony. The way Hill and Bradford touch each other, with calm, gentle, slow, sensual hands, makes you want to jump on stage with them so you, too, can be rubbed all over. Laughter is part of this composition. Some of it naturally springs from Leroy and Lucy’s lively conversation and some from jokes about Shakespeare and the Greeks that play particularly well to a theatrical audience.
The seductive back-and-forth on the relatively bare stage is enhanced by Andrew Boyce’s atmospheric nighttime scenic design, Heather Gilbert’s romantic lighting, Jeremy Jones’ musical spot-on compositions – more would be better – and Adesola Osakalumi’s choreography. Kudos to the whole creative team.
In Director Awoye Timpo’s able hands, the surprises and shifts in Leroy and Lucy feel like part of the sensual movement of the play, surprising as they can be. If you want an evening of excellent acting and multiple legends that ends up embracing many cultures, this is your play.
Pericles
Royal Shakespeare Company at Chicago Shakespeare Theater through December 7
Recommended
William Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre is rarely considered one of his best plays but Royal Shakespeare Company’s production, now in Chicago, uses music, song and dance to elevate this play and bring out its magic.
There are many reasons for Pericles’ standing in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Though it was popular in his day, from its first performance theatrical types and scholars have questioned its authorship, saying the Bard was merely a co-author. Pericles lacks the lovely language, eloquent lines and moving monologues found in Shakespeare’s best dramas. Its rush of floods, kings, princesses, villains, lovers and broken hearts is so extensive and swift that it almost seems like Shakespeare on speed. To my mind, Pericles is a mash-up of the bits and pieces of Shakespeare’s earlier plays, and a preview of what’s to come – a splash of The Tempest, a sprinkle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a dash of The Winter’s Tale – with Shakespeare’s hallmark mix of tragedy and humor.
Whatever one thinks of past assessments or arguments about authorship, RSC’s rescue of Pericles makes it into an engaging evening of theater in several ways. Among them is that this mad dash through adventures and relationships creates a parade of important issues including true love, personal and political loyalty, good government, deceit, betrayal, immoral and ideal parenting and class clashes.
Then there is the uniformly splendid corps of actors, many of whom play multiple roles. My companion and I were struck by the way the actors touched each other with warmth, tenderness and grace throughout Pericles, lending a sensuality to all the loving relationships. Given their individual and ensemble excellence, it’s hard to single out any one actor, but, for their ability to shift roles, two merit mention. Felix Hayes plays a slippery King Antiochus who moves from gracious to malevolent with imperious ease. Next he is a goofy, clueless fisherman who utters one of the funniest lines in the play. Then he is Pander, a brothel owner, a role in which he manages to combine the immorality of his first regal role with the humor of his fisherman. As King Simonides, the adoring but mischievous father of the woman Pericles with whom is smitten from first sight and marries, Christian Patterson exudes paternal love, warmth and a prankish sense of humor. His charming hijinks confirm the fishermen telling Pericles that Simonides is “a happy king” but they also note that his exemplary governance earns him the nickname “Good” from his subjects.
Pericles is a play that comes with music and song but the compositions in RSC’s production are lyrical and lovely, enhancing what is in the script with beauty made even more sublime by the excellent singing of the cast, accompanied by musicians whose expertise includes not overpowering the words being sung. The elegant and slow choreography perfectly matches the music while echoing the sensuality of the lovers and parents with their children. The flowing costumes keep perfect rhythm with the music, dance and sensuality by wrapping themselves around their wearers like a hug, swaying like the sea or spreading out like wings. Colors of costumes for each country help locate and keep track of the many characters and municipalities. While simple, the set includes props exactly appropriate to each location, and a series of ropes at the back of the stage that reference the many ships on the ever-present sea serve as a second small stage for pantomimes that amplify and keep the plot moving.
All these talents and elements make Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s returning the Royal Shakespeare Company to Chicago with its shimmering Pericles a welcome act. Even better, it is here at a time when many of us need a little bit of joy – and perhaps even magic.
Until the Flood
Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre Company through November 10
Highly Recommended
How little has changed. Barely over a decade ago, an 18-year-old Black man was shot and killed by a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. The witnesses and the cop’s accounts of what happened in the murder of Michael Brown differed radically. Peaceful protests and violent riots started in Ferguson and continued around the country as the case drew national and international attention.
Playwright, Poet and Actor Dael Orlandersmith went to Missouri a year later and talked to residents, using their thoughts to create a dramatic exploration about racism. Until the Flood, her one-woman show, has eight characters who are composites of the people she interviewed. These Black and white women and men range in age from two teenagers to a septuagenarian whose 1960s protests during her City College years in New York “set my heart on fire.”
There is fire and passion in each of Orlandersmith’s characters, and the two actors who play them ignite that with their tremendous skill and ability to portray vastly different people. First up is Jazzma Pryor as Louisa, the retired high school English teacher who’s in her early 70s. Her observations bookend the monologues. Pryor artfully conveys this African American woman’s youthful enthusiasm, her sadness, resignation and anger, and her belief that racism’s legacy is Black self-hate. Pryor fluidly morphs into a 17-year-old Black teenager who is all about flow and fluidity. Here she expertly employs Orlandersmith’s words to convey this rap-loving teen’s break from stereotypes. Pryor shines when she inhabits Reuben, a Black barber who refuses to be pegged or outclassed by two perhaps well-meaning but definitely clueless Northwestern University journalism students. She is celestial as the Universalist minister filled with joy and working for compassion.
Jasmine “Jazz” Robertson brings great talent to her challenging roles, most of which are white people, often racist. She manages to make us understand their views as much as possible, honoring Orlandersmith’s approach. Sometimes it’s not possible but Robertson’s portrayals make us want to hear even their most painful words, like those of the white cop explaining the need for gun use or the Appalachian landlord from a self-described dysfunctional family who is a lot less about fairness than he thinks. Robertson is particularly moving as the other 17-year-old Black teenager. Paul lives in the same public housing complex as “Mike-Mike” Brown, a place he describes as prison-like. All he wants to do is get out and go to Berkeley to study art history. An encounter with a white cop endangers that dream. Shocked than a Black teen would have an armload of books, the cop asks Paul if he stole them. In a risky move, Paul responds with his own question: Does this cop think he would really risk prison for a book about Leonardo da Vinci?
Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre Company’s Artistic Director, Tim Rhoze, himself a fine actor, directs Pryor and Robertson with his usual genius, reimagining the one-woman Until the Flood with two actors and allowing each to fully inhabit their characters. Sets at Fleetwood-Jourdain are always a visual treat. This one, designed by Rhoze and Technical Director Shane Rogers, is no exception. The spontaneous shrine of flowers, photos, remembrances and stuffed animals with which we are now all too familiar, forms a hill in front of a powerful mural with black bodies and phrases from the protests.
The promise of college hangs over Until the Flood. Michael Brown was headed to college. Paul wants to make it there. Louisa talks about her transformative time there and the promise college holds for the youth in her community. It is, as we know, a dream often extinguished when Black male lives are cut short by tragedies like the murder of Michael Brown, and a list of others so long it could be a tome.
Orlandersmith’s work is in the tradition of the dramatizations of Studs Terkel’s thousands of interviews, of Anna Deavere Smith’s documentary theater, of The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project. All have received exemplary productions in the Chicago area, including Orlandersmith’s excellent 2018 performance of Until the Flood at the Goodman Theatre. Each continues to talk to us about seemingly intractable problems stemming from racism that we still face. The question is are we really listening? If you want to hear what remains front-page news and a tragic part of our lives, and to get a sense of how it still happens, and how we might fix it, this complex, compelling show is your ticket to understanding – and perhaps fixing the problems.
Dear Elizabeth
Remy Bumppo Theatre Company through November 17
Highly Recommended
It’s a rare play that make us want to write letters and read poetry so the fact that Dear Elizabeth inspires both makes it a treasure in Chicago’s theatrical offerings. It left my companion, a writer herself, and me longing for a return to this epistolary art, and heading home to read poems by the poets with whom we’d just spent a couple hours.
Dear Elizabeth is an ode to friendship that chronicles the three decades American Poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell spent writing to each other. Their meetings were infrequent but intense. Their passion for each other and their poetry was in the many letters they wrote over 30 years. There is so much in those letters, missives that cross time and geographical borders. They are a testament to a friendship that was flexible enough to encompass the potential for early love, blunt professional critiques, tragic heartbreaks and much humor. Along the way we meet a parade of literary and philosophical contemporaries and giants, some of whom Bishop and Lowell knew. One of my favorite moments is when Bishop pulls out her Kierkegaard and quotes him to support an argument. She and Lowell are honest with each other but alternate between direct assessments and the loving kindness that comes with deep caring. How many people who start with a romantic notion can rebound into such a friendship and have it last for the rest of their adult lives? It is a joy and a revelation to behold.
Leah Karpel captures Bishop’s independence, fierce passion and intelligence in a winning matter-of-fact way. As Robert Lowell, Christopher Sheard shows us the poet’s radical ups and downs, and turns him into an even match for Bishop. The two actors have a natural energy that makes their interactions like an intimate workshop for two. The set, with its desks and piles of books and evocative scenic backdrops that capture wherever these two are, enhances their performances thanks to Remy Bumppo’s collective tech talents. What could have been a very static play, given that most of it comes from letters, becomes a charged and moving conversation in the able hands of Director Christina Casano and thanks to the thoughtful and lively script from Playwright Sarah Ruhl.
Ruhl has another very different play running at Theater Wit, Shattered Globe Theatre’s Becky Nurse of Salem, about which I also raved. She is a writer of many ideas and insights – and much humor that animates them and keeps them moving.
After seeing Dear Elizabeth, it’s hard not to get wistful about the power of letters and well-crafted written words. Much as I love email, which I often treat like letter-writing, it is not the same. The lure of writing letters is partly the wait for their arrival, and partly the effort that goes into composing them. They lack the immediacy of social media, and require care and thought.
Before I met the love of my life, I relished several lengthy epistolary romances with men I never met in person, and delighted in many letters from those with whom I was in love. I adore and desperately miss the epistolary emails my late husband and I exchanged, and our children and their friends are still amused by his texts, which were usually more epistolary than not, but it is his letters I truly treasure.
Bishop’s most famous poem, “The Fish,” figures early in Dear Elizabeth. I will not spoil its role in case you’ve not read it or don’t recall it, but I will say it is about a survivor and a transporting moment when the narrator stares at a fish “until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” Go see this play to experience emotional and intellectual rainbows, and to honor the value of letters and friendship. For me it was as magical as rereading “The Fish” decades after it first took my breath away.
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.
Becky Nurse of Salem
Photo by Liz Lauren.
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.