Almost every scene in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time inspires a variety of deep emotional reactions, so choosing just one to introduce the brilliance of this script is a challenge. If forced to choose, I would decide upon a relatively quiet scene. Christopher (Adam Jones Langdon), a 15-year-old, has discovered a box of letters addressed to him from his mother Judy (Felicity Jones Latta). Christopher believed that Judy was dead, but her letters reveal that she is alive and residing in London.

Judy dictates the letter from backstage while Christopher pieces together a model train set center stage: “I was not a good Mother, Christopher. Maybe if things had been different, maybe if you’d been different, I might have been better at it. But that’s just the way things turned out.”

Continue reading “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Oriental) — 12/21/16” →

Experiencing Nick Dear’s adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is like viewing a perfect negative imagine of the 1818 novel.  The playwright shifts point of view and reworks the plot’s chronological structure, yet his script remains authentic to Shelley’s vision, highlighting the psychological tortures inflicted and endured by the two main characters while recreating the images most pertinent to novel’s horror and science fiction roots.

Continue reading “Frankenstein—National Theater Live (10/25/16)” →

Man in the Ring is not a musical, but while walking out of the theater I was not the only one humming “Brown Boy in the Ring.”  This children’s Calypso song provides a rhythmic thread that holds together the meandering thoughts of the dementia-suffering protagonist.

Michael Cristoffer’s world-premiere play at the Court Theater explores the tortured life of Emile Griffith, a boxer born in St. Thomas and blessed with the strength and speed to become international welterweight and middleweight champions in the early 1960’s.  He amassed a record of 85-24 before retiring in 1977.

Continue reading “Man in the Ring (Court Theater) — 10/5/16” →

The Merchant of Venice as produced by Shakespeare’s Globe hits a bullseye with every artistic nuance, every original interpretation, every actor’s performance.  It remains true to its genre as a Shakespearean comedy and to the time period in which Shakespeare wrote the play while exploring modern connotations of the characters’ actions.  And, perhaps most rewarding, it allows Jonathon Pryce’s Shylock to be the loathsome antagonist while treating his predicament with sympathy.

Continue reading “The Merchant of Venice — Chicago Shakespeare (8/10/16)” →

“Never put it past anybody to vote against his own best interest.”

This quote from JoAnne (Ann Whitney), an elderly pessimist who gets many of the best lines in Rebecca Gilman’s Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976, embodies much of Gilman’s message about changes America willingly accepted in the era when big business played its trump card against private labor unions.

Continue reading “Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976 — Goodman Theater (6/15/2016 & 6/19/2016)” →

One disadvantage of video replacing photography as the public’s primary means for interpreting the world is video provides a false sense of context.  Viewers watching a 30-second video too often choose a side in a conflict without considering what occurred in the hours, days, weeks, and years preceding the video.

Lucy Kirkwood’s play Chimerica (playing at the Timeline Theater) is anchored on June 6, 1989, the day that photojournalist Jeff Widener immortalized the Tank Man photo as a symbol of the Tiananmen Square protests.  In this three-hour exploration into the contrasts between modern China and modern America, most of Kirkwood’s ideas find their target despite Kirkwood not quite recognizing the most powerful moment in her script.

Continue reading “Chimerica–Timeline Theater (6/18/16)” →