Theater Reviews

Lettie, wonderfully played by Caroline Neff, is getting out of prison a couple of years earlier than projected and her checklist of things to do and “make right” when she’s released would make climbing Mt. Everest sound easy.  She’s got to find a job, a place to stay and take her kids back.  At this point, she doesn’t fully grasp that the felony  now grafted to her DNA will make each one of those things a Herculean challenge.

Playwright Killebrew specializes in characters like Lettie.  Working class folks that blend into the background living painfully complex lives. Lettie’s most pressing need is to see her kids, a boy and a girl being raised by her sister, Carla (Kirsten Fitzgerald).  Imprisoned for over seven years, the kids, River (Matt Farabee) and Layla (Krystal Ortiz) are now in high school and have few memories of her.  For all practical purposes they consider Lettie’s sister and her husband, Frank (Ryan Kitley), their parents.

Resentment can often be the most recognizable component in a family’s dynamics and when it’s aggravated by compulsory sacrifice, it can become corrosive.  In Lettie, it never reaches that level but it’s toll is still high.  One sister resents the other for her inability to right her ship and for her penchant for making bad decisions.  Understanding motivation is key to understanding actions.  Carla doesn’t reach that point with Lettie until much later in the play, after the cold realities of surviving on a meager wage brings clarity to Lettie’s ambitions.

According to the Sentencing Project, there are 1.2 million women in prison in the United States.  When they’re released many of them go into the trades; brick laying, carpentry and welding.  Lettie ends up training as a welder.  Hard, dangerous work but if you can make the grade you could pull 30 to 40 grand a year.  She doesn’t and ends up on the night cleanup crew at a junior college.  Progress is something that comes slowly and in tiny increments.  Like leaving the curfew and rules of her initial communal housing assignment to a shared apartment.

It’s clear that she’d like a better job and her own place.  But she’s beginning to grasp how wide the gulf is between the earning potential of the formerly incarcerated and the monetary cost to make her dream come true. Being smart and tough will eventually work to her advantage.   Her intelligence tells her this is as good as it’s going to get and her strength tells her she can woman up and meet the challenge.

Beyond the resentment of brothers and sisters, damaged children are also common collateral of drugs and alcoholism.  Lettie bluntly reveals the ramifications of that damage.  Layla was too young to remember much about her mother before she was sent to prison.  Her son, River, does remember.   Children have a natural need to want to be cared for and loved.  And they are acutely aware of the absence of either. Carrying the physical scars from a fire caused by Lettie’s negligence when he was a child, he eventually explodes with rage at her audacity to attempt making amends. He mocks and laughs at her dreams.  She doesn’t let the assault drain her of hope.  Perhaps she saw something of herself in him.  The rebellion and indignation he feels was something she could have felt for her own mother who had also chosen drugs over responsibility.  At least her son was now in a stable home where he could be nurtured; something she never had and couldn’t offer now.

She was settling in to the realities of her life.  A dead-end job that pays the rent and a cordial enough relationship with her family that might lead to something deeper.  Small gains like these are major victories because of the amount of fortitude and resolve it took to get even here.   Like thousands upon thousands of the formerly incarcerated, Lettie is chiseling away at life with the hope that her efforts would one day be rewarded with both tangible dividends.

Set in Chicago, from all appearances the southeast side, Stephan Mazurek’s projection design was a marvel.  Projecting floor to ceiling images onto the back of the stage, he created ever changing worlds on top of the play’s standard physical set. From el platforms to factory locker rooms, the projections made the city instantly recognizable and gave the play’s appearance a layer of depth rarely captured on stage.

Lettie

April 6 – May 6 2018

Victory Garden Theatre

2433 N. Lincoln

Chicago, IL  60614

773-871-3000

victorygardens.org

Sue Baker (Diana Coates) is a marvel. As a head buyer for a major department store, she’s a woman who’s succeeding in a man’s world long before the rise of Oprah or Hillary.  Living in small apartment in a fashionable neighborhood and with a constant composed cool, she radiates stability and resolve.

But that’s the surface picture.  She’s been living with her boyfriend Bernie (Luke Daigle) long enough to think seriously about third finger, left hand.   A very sore subject for Bernie.  All she wants is “something she can keep”.   And all he wants is to be a bona fide success.  A bartender whose current gig as Cadillac salesman is proving less than marvelous, he’s still optimistic about his future.   Announcing that a man doesn’t hit his stride until 36, she knows he’s just fanning the flames of a fantasy.   Deep down he knows it too.  And that knowledge causes an irritating resentment to chafe him.   And there’s the scratchy issue of her being “older” that persistently floats in the air.

Anticipating the arrival of a potentially divisive visitor, the rising tension even at this point could fuel a small jet.  But Inge knows we don’t choose the outer limits of our challenges.  Because it’s Christmas, Sue’s son Donnie (Terry Bell) has been allowed to visit for the holidays. Too poor to keep him when she had him in her teens, she gave him up.  But she kept contact and didn’t completely abandon him.  She’d already prepared her “home from prep school” story  to placate the curious.  But prep school was really a home for delinquent boys.  He’d stolen a car and had been violent with a woman.

Terry Bell poured a lot of empathy into his role of Donnie.  The rage he portrayed as a confined and victimized youth appeared a little awkward. But Bell made up for it with an engendering reticence and a palpable desire to please his mother.   That meant getting along with her boyfriend.  Kids see through facades as easily as anyone else and when he innocently asks “why Bernie never pays for anything?”, we know their relationship will likely never have the respect needed to make it succeed.

One way to look at dysfunction is to read it as desperate people struggling to attain normalcy.  Natural Affection is replete with such people.  The world of Sue, Bernie and Donnie include neighbors who prove even when you have it all, you can still have nothing.  That doesn’t stop Bernie from envying them.  For him the money and trappings they flaunt are enough.  And Vince and Claire Brinkman (Joe McCauley and Cassidy Slaughter-Mason) are a fascinating couple.   Beautiful young wife and perpetually drunk hunter-of-parties husband who’s, according to Bernie, “a fag at heart”.

Under Rachel Lambert’s commendable direction, what this exceedingly strong cast does so well is make us want all of these characters to outlive their despair and make it.  With his ability to be go from wickedly funny to viciously caustic with the blinding speed of a true alcoholic, McCauley’s Vince makes a magnificent drunk.  Maybe it’s his repressed homosexuality that makes him say “life is miserable” with such arresting earnest.  Maybe it’s the misery he brings to his marriage that makes his wife so willing with other men, including Bernie.  As uncomfortable as that all sounds, Inge is able to draw these characters so skillfully and these actors are able to embody them so completely that their humanness is always in plain sight.

And to the end, Inge relentlessly stirs the pot and dredges up ugly truths that can only lead to calamity once those truths leave the heart and become words.

When dealing with a work this intense, this unforgiving in its honesty; you are guaranteed to be affected.  Some may recoil at how graphically the human heart is revealed.  As Natural Affection shows, the search for love can drive people to do things they may forever regret. What Inge has done is allow us to understand them a little better.  And if we are either moral or magnanimous, even extend a little compassion as well.

With her willed dignity and that hypnotically compelling voice, Diana Coates’ Sue was captivating. Her interpretation made us see and feel how much it takes for iron to melt. Luke Daigle’s beautifully rendered take on Bernie complemented her role well.

If this is what Eclipse’s season of Inge has in store for theater goers, it’s going to be wonderful.

Natural Affections

Eclipse Theatre Company

April 12 – May 20, 2018

Athenaeum Theatre

2936 N. Southport Ave.

Chicago, IL

www.eclipsetheatre.com

Arthur Miller did the same thing.  Taken with Ibsen’s insistence “that he is going to say what he has to say, and that the audience, by God, is going to listen”, Miller was also sympathetic to the plight of a man besieged by an outraged public because he chose to defend what he knew to be true when he presented his version of this cautionary tale in 1950.

The basic story is a moral tragedy.  An altruistic doctor, Thomas Stockmann (Philip Earl Johnson) returns to his hometown to renew his life.  He’s disillusioned about his efforts to help a remote fishing village, his first wife died and now he’s remarried.  His current wife, Catherine (Lanise Antoine Shelley) is expecting their first child together and his daughter from his previous marriage is grown and living agreeably with them.  They’re doing well.

Before he left, he had recommended to his brother Peter (Scott Jaeck) that the community should develop natural springs found within the town’s borders and market their health benefits to tourists.  By the time he returned, business generated by the springs was thriving and the town was prospering well beyond expectations.  Hired by his brother, who was also the town’s mayor, as the spring’s medical advisor, he enjoyed the privileges of respectability that accompanied his assignment and affiliation with people who wield influence.

But several things were slightly off kilter.  The doctor was not a conformist by temperament and held views that weren’t consistent with the conservative norm.  He enjoyed conviviality and the taste of wine; unlike his brother and others in positions of authority.  And he was conscientious.  He wanted to insure the springs were indeed as sage and beneficial as the community claimed.  Privately, he had the waters tested at the university as a precaution.  Several people had become ill after visiting the springs and he wanted to determine whether the water was the cause.

That the test concluded the waters were indeed tainted didn’t surprise him.  What alarmed him was that they were far more toxic than he expected.  The only conscionable thing to do would be to notify the public and fix the problem.  It sounded so simple; but as is often the case, simplicity often becomes complicated when money is involved.

From here the play descends into deceit, betrayal and denouncement.  The truth of the waters’ hazards didn’t change.  What did change is how the public, the majority, would choose to view that truth.  The ramification of revealing it to the outside world carried a high price.  The loss of revenue and the loss of esteem are formidable motivators influencing peoples’ actions.

Many consider the character of Dr. Stockmann to be a surrogate for Ibsen himself; a person whose commitment to what is right and true is the essential component of a person of character.  Neither the fictitious Dr. Stockmann or the playwright could understand why, after being presented with irrefutable fact, anyone would choose to ignore them.  And not only would they ignore them, they would reject them and revile the messenger.  The failure to understand this deadly human flaw may go beyond being naïve.  Faith in the dignity of mankind may blind someone to our capacity to consciously harm ourselves in order to preserve the status quo.

With references like “draining the swamp” when the newspaper editor Hovstad (Aubrey Deeker Hernandez) initially lambasted the corruption of town officials, The Goodman Theatre’s An Enemy of the People planted the play’s language squarely in the political vernacular of today.  Ana Kuzmanic’s striking costumes may have been intended to evoke Victorian Norway, but the words were as American and as contemporary as Chance the rapper’s latest hit.

Philip Earl Johnson as Dr. Stockmann sank deeper and deeper into his role of the defiant defender of truth.  It was difficult not to admire the tenacity of his natural goodness.  Allen Gilmore as Aslaksen the printer and head of the small businessman’s alliance has an uncanny ability to sparkle on stage.  Here he’s like a sober and cautious Napoleon choosing sides based on the impact an event has on the balance sheet.

An Enemy of the People

Through April 15, 2018

Goodman Theatre

170 N. Dearborn St.

Chicago, IL  60601

312-443-3800

www.goodmantheatre.org/

Garnering plenty of attention and praise during previous runs last year, the performance is now scheduled to play through April 1^st  which means even more people will get the chance to fall in love with six wonderfully talented women controlling the night.

What do you expect when you go to an all-female comedy show?  Especially given the perennial culture wars raging from coast to coast?  In the case of She the People, simply expect a text book lesson on how to slay.

Headed by Carly Heffernan, the writing team that includes some of the performers was big.  What they wrought was a tsunami of bone crushing comedic wit. Even though the style and delivery couldn’t be more different, the production still had the feel of a Dave Chappelle show because it wasn’t just funny, it was stupid smart. You need high intelligence to pull of exceptional comedy and that’s exactly what this show has and does.

It’s bullet train speed had the audience panting trying to keep up. Each sketch went up, killed, and instantly rolled into another equally audacious and brilliant skit.  Was the writing just so wonderfully good or did the performers propel the show into awesomedom?  It’s a completely immaterial chicken or egg question.  This show couldn’t stand without both being remarkable.

And yes,  it’s comedy so nothing’s really sacred. The six women on stage had no problem satirizing “girlness” as well as slipping guys on the skewer.  The opening sketch about a woman looking for some love from her girls after she thought her boyfriend dumped her let you know what you were in for.  Friendship means sometimes you lie and sometimes you go point blank with the truth.  These ladies showed how funny it can be to do both.  Alex Bellisle, who’d play the more radically irreverent one all night, was irrepressibly hilarious.

Indeed, some of the best skits happened when they bored in on particularly “female” predilections like dieting.  Battling to see who can have the thinnest slice of a birthday cake leads to Carisa Barreca launching into erotic rhapsody to the cake.

In addition to Barreca and Bellisle, Alexis J. Roston, Maria Randazzo, Katie Caussin and Kimberly Michelle Vaughn make up the cast.  The team acted as one; a tight, precise unit out to fulfill a mission.   And did they ever succeed.

Deconstructing the silliness of our conceits and showing them for what they are through comedy is one of the sweetest ways to accept truth.  It’s what makes She the People so strong.   There is no bitterness seeping through the humor.  It is simply wry acknowledgment molded into stories that reflect and rebuff our reality through laughter.

She the People:   Girlfriends’ Guide to Sisters Doing it for Themselves

Second City

Up Comedy Club

230 W. North Ave., 3^rd flr.

Thursday, Friday & Saturday at 8pm

Sunday at 7pm

Tickets start at $26

Plays through April 1, 2018

Karam’s definition of misfit is joyfully much more elegant and nuanced than any contemporary dictionary’s.  Here he shows us that they can be and often are blazingly bright, mesmerizingly poignant and flat out funny.

Speech & Debate kneads you into the lives of three fascinating high school kids grappling with some very serious issues.  Issues that may very well prove to be primary determinants of their futures.    They’re revealed to us in stages.  First, we notice their keen intelligence.  Then we discover how fearlessly they seem to resist convention.  Later, we’re slightly surprised to see how much they defer to those same conventions.

Diwata (Deanalís Resto) becomes the energy force that so beautifully drives the production.  Before she arrives on stage, we get an over the shoulder glimpse of another one of the three, Howie (Trevor Bates); in a scintillatingly suggestive texting spree with an older man online.  And we’re also rather explosively introduced to Solomon (Darren Patin); a precocious, socially awkward student reporter out to expose hypocrisy. They all prove to be relentless personalities who pursue their individual truths with dogged resolve.  That it all appears so unconscious is all the more impressive.

An aspiring actress who posts her theatrical proclivities on her blog, sometimes while drunk, Diwata is wildly appealing. She has the confidence of Muhammed Ali in an America Ferrara chassis.   What she may lack in talent, she more than makes up for in passion. Passed over time and again for school productions, the drama teacher becomes her arch-enemy, her nemesis with a “receding hairline” and a dangerous secret who we never meet.  It’s her antipathy for him that morphs into the link that brings the three teens together as conspirators and unlikely friends.

Brown Paper Box Co. merits recognition for so well living up to its mission of creating “challenging and inspiring theater that focuses on the text”.  As young and kinetic as Speech & Debate is, it’s the language and personalities that make it both memorable and wonderful.  The stage is quite bare save for a few classic classroom desks like those found in 99% of the high schools across the country.  Beyond that, some very spare and effective projections onto the back wall give additional context to the progression of the story.  Virtually nothing interferes with the power of the spoken word or the craftsmanship needed to deliver it effectively.

Not only was the story quintessentially current and reflective of a world where our private lives, with a few well thought out clicks of a mouse, are easily discovered and exposed; it flowed with a perfectly plausible rhythm.

Self-awareness and self-acceptance bloom at different stages in different lives.  Maturity is allowing one another the space for the transformation to happen. In Speech & Debate, these young misfits give the world a lesson in doing it right.

Deanalís Resto’s Diwata is one of a kind.  Darren Patten’s Solomon kept you guessing if he would ever get beyond his fear of himself to self-actualize and Trevor Bates’ Howie was a case study in innate teenage cool.  One can hardly wait to see how each of these very talented actors will transform themselves in future projects.

Speech & Debate

February 2 – March 4, 2018

Brown Paper Box Co.

5451 N. Broadway

Chicago, IL  60640

www.brownpaperbox.org

Entering its 26^th year, Eclipse enjoys the distinction of being the only theatre in the Midwest to focus exclusively on the works of a single playwright every season.  By choosing to mount contemporary adaptations of  plays by William Inge, Eclipse will be reintroducing modern audiences to a writer considered to be “one of the most important voices in American Theatre”.

Encouraged to pursue his interest in writing for the theatre by Tennessee Williams, Inge went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his play Picnic performed in 1953 and an Oscar for his original screenplay, Splendor in the Grass.  Come Back, Little Sheba, The Boy in the Basement, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs are also included in his portfolio.

According to Eclipse Theatre Company Artistic Director, Nathaniel Swift, “William Inge’s plays are personal and political, grounded in family and community relationships, and his stories resonate with a powerful artistic vision of America and what it means to be American.  We plan to show a wide range of William Inge’s writing, including award –winning dramas and rarely produced plays.”

Eclipse will be performing:

Natural Affection                                                     April 12 – May 20

Bus Stop                                                                  July 12 – August 19

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs                             November 15 – December 16

All performances will be held at:

The Athenaeum Theatre

2936 N. Southport Ave.

Chicago, IL  60657

www.eclipsetheatre.com/

The Black Ensemble Theatre (BE) has a tradition of delivering solid theatre by telling compelling stories through song.  In Sammy: A Tribute to Sammy Davis Jr., song and dance act as ornamentation to a drama depicting exceptional innate talent and steely perseverance in the face of raw bigotry.

Typical of a good BE show, a well told history lesson accompanies generous doses of infectious music. In Davis’s tribute, the audience is reminded what it was like to be an extraordinary talent living in a rigidly confining world.  Born in 1925, Davis’s birth preceded the civil rights movement by almost 40 years.  The bite of racism did not spare him because he was born and raised in NYC.  Jim Crow may not have made it to the Big Apple but the color line sure did.  Much of the ridicule Davis faced can only be called horrific.  Despite that, his fame at the height of his career in the 50’s and 60’s stood on par with the established Hollywood deity of the day.

BE’s tribute splendidly recounted his success as a crooner who could make other people’s hits even bigger hits and who parlayed his success as singer into Broadway and Hollywood bank.  As diminutive as Bruno Mars and as ubiquitous as Snoop Dog, he seemed to be everywhere during his time in the sun.

Glimpsing more of the captivating talent that characterized Sammy Davis Jr.  during this tribute would have elevated the show’s appeal.  The tiny 5’ 5” bon vivant sang in the lower registers and could control a song the way Zeus commands thunder. Dancing professionally on stage well before most kids start kindergarten, by the time he came of age his acumen as a dancer was oil slick and reached master class level.

The essence of all of those gifts made it to BE stage.  As the production flowed, the cast mellowed more comfortably and effectively into their roles.  Although Michael Adkins took on the role of Davis, other actors shared the duty of covering the many songs that Davis single handedly embedded into a generation. From Mr. Wonderful, to I’ve Gotta Be Me and finally with Kenny Davis’s bravura rendition of Mr. Bojangles, the review of Sammy Davis’s discography nostalgically revisited another time when the coda for excellence was very much different than it is today.

Even though mild cases of first night jitters peeped through, the cast displayed aplomb as it recounted through song, dance and dialog the components of a remarkable life.  Emily Hawkins, making her first appearance on the BE stage, commanded attentive admiration for a singing voice that easily and beautifully filled the room and her sumptuous acting.  In one sequence in which she portrayed May Britt, Davis’ Swedish born second wife, she effortlessly displayed how the craft of acting gets done.  With bags packed and a heart leaden with regret; she was announcing she was leaving Davis.   The whole theater sat captivated by her performance.

Skillfully juxtaposing laughter and tears is a BE hallmark.  Sammy:  A Tribute to Sammy Davis Jr. was no exception.

Sammy: A Tribute to Sammy Davis Jr.

Through January 21^st,  2018

Black Ensemble Theatre

4450 N. Clark St.

773-769-4451

www.blackensemble.org,