Live Ammunition 

The Last Living Gun

The Last Living Gun is a work of theatre that demands, and rewards, patience.  The Impostors Theatre Company’s allegorical Western fantasy of two women dispatched to hunt down and retrieve the last gun in the world (for guns, and metal itself, otherwise no longer exist) begins in a deliberately awkward and ragtag style — seeming to be one of those off-putting zero-budget micro-theatre productions with painfully fake beards, awful thrift-shop costumes and acting that’s broader than the side of a barn.  

A Bankrupt Enterprise 

One of the enduring images of the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession was the sight of stunned and frightened former employees of Lehman Brothers toting cardboard boxes filled with family photos, office nicknacks and porcelain coffee mugs as they streamed out of Lehman’s New York headquarters on September 15 of that year, the date the fabled investment banking firm finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  Their lives — and the lives of countless millions of people affected by the Great Recession (which, to be clear, was not caused solely by Lehman Brothers and by some definitions actually began with the earlier housing crash) — would never be the same.

A Pragmatic Analysis

The Pragmatists

I make a practice of not reading about new plays — or plays unfamiliar to me — before seeing them, because I want to come to a performance fresh, without any preconceptions.  In some cases, this means not even reading the brief plot synopsis in the program; it’s the playwright’s job to tell us the story.  And I want to be surprised!  

Deep Cut

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice

If you’ve never seen Jim Cartwright’s play, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, you might assume that it’s yet another of those Broadway or Hollywood musical melodramas about a real-life or fictional singing sensation who rises to worldwide fame and then is destroyed by drugs, drink, groupies, self-doubt, the depredations of the music industry, or Fame itself.  We’ve all seen this story before.

STEP UP TO THE MIKE 

Mic Father, Like Son

Whatever happened to the funny drunk?

Subtext Theater Company’s enjoyable new comedy, Mic Father, Mike Son (not the greatest title, frankly) begins with a retirement party for the number one-rated radio personality in Kansas City, Mike Aldridge, Sr., to which the station’s newscaster, Marty (Andrew Pond) shows up uninvited.  Marty, who claims to be a non-drinker, quaffs a couple of cranberry-and-vodkas, and is almost instantaneously transformed into a bug-eyed, blundering blabbermouth who stumbles about the stage, collapses repeatedly and mugs shamelessly for the audience.  As a performance, it’s hammy, retrograde, tasteless, irresponsible, a relic of the era of Jackie Gleason or W.C. Fields — and absolutely hilarious.  (I never understood why in our socially self-conscious age funny drunks went out of fashion, as they’re always portrayed as fools.) It’s the best thing about this somewhat uneven play, and — as far as the anachronistic stumblebum clowning — that’s easily explained by the fact that the Aldridge family home, as the program states, “has not been redecorated since 1982.” Neither, apparently, has playwright and director Jonathan “Rocky” Hagloch’s approach to comedy, and that’s mostly a good thing.

A Passing Beauty

By the time Chicago theatre-goers read this review, the Three Crows Theatre production of Martin McDonagh’s play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, will most likely have already closed.  Its foreshortened run — just 12 performances in 11 days, closing September 17 — is the result of a fire at the theatre company’s original venue.  

Last Tango in Boston

North & Sur

North & Sur by Oscar Perdomo Marín, in its world premiere production by Water People Theater, is an engrossing, site-specific evening of theatre about an imagined meeting between a poet from the North, the enigmatic bard from Boston Edgar Allan Poe, and a poet from the South, the Argentine female poet Alfonsina Storni.  

A Brightly Shining Moon

I experienced a sinking feeling during the first fifteen minutes or so of Moon at the Bottom of the Ocean, the new play by Bryn Magnus from the Curious Theatre Branch, now playing at Chicago Dramatists.  The situation seemed dated and frayed at the edges: A scraggly bearded, deeply neurotic urban schlub named Paul (Jeffrey Bivens) who fancies himself a “literary novelist” but never seems to finish the novel he claims to be working on hires a detective to stalk a far more successful fellow writer who’s just won a MacArthur fellowship (aka the “Genius Grant”) in order to learn the “secret” of his prize-winning prose.