Author: Colin Douglas
The Chocolate Cream Soldier
Arms and the Man – ChicagoShaw Theater Company
Continuing their 25th season, which is celebrating “All Shaw, All the Time,” is this popular and charming classic. Considered to be one of the playwright’s most entertaining comedies, ShawChicago has included a new production of this play in a season that celebrates the company’s namesake. Audiences unfamiliar with this company’s superb handling of the playwright’s works are in for a real treat. The play truly is the thing, because ShawChicago’s productions consist primarily of the author’s words. Stripped of snazzy scenery, ponderous props and special effects, the actors receive all of the focus, all the while carrying scripts and portraying their roles upon a bare stage. Mary Michell, in the tradition of the company’s late founder and artistic director, Robert Scogin, guides her actors toward their discovery of the play’s dynamics and pitch. She draws their performances downstage and full front. Working from music stands, the cast focuses front, engaging the audience as their acting partners. The result is an intimate performance that truly focuses on the author’s text.
Comedy With a Capital C
A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder – Porchlight Theatre
The magnificent production that earned the Tony, Drama Desk, Drama League and the Outer Critics Circle Awards for the Best Musical of 2014 is now a glorious production at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. This comedy, which borrows its plot from the 1949 British film, “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” and was, in turn, adapted from Roy Horniman’s novel The Autobiography of a Criminal, is as over-the-top as a play can be. With an operetta-like score, composed by Steven Lutvak, a book by Robert L. Freedman and lyrics by both gentlemen, this delightfully madcap musical is more fun than a day spent at Faulty Towers.
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Permission to Start Over
The Roommate
A pair of very talented Chicago actresses absolutely own the stage in Citadel’s excellent continuation of their sixteenth season. Ellen Phelps and Laurie Carter Rose star in Jen Silverman’s two-hander about a couple of middle-age women, each from very different backgrounds, who are about to share a house together in Iowa City. Sharon, a 55-year-old divorced empty nester, decided that her roomy, two-story house is big enough for another inhabitant. After she placed an ad for a roommate, it was answered by Robyn, a woman about the same age, who’s decided to leave her Bronx home for the peace and quiet of rural Iowa. What evolves throughout this entertaining one-act is a powerful character study of two women who are each searching for a new beginning.
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A Lesbian Love Story
I Know My Own Heart – Pride Films & Plays
At the age of 50, Irish-born Canadian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and playwright Emma Donoghue is finally having her first theatrical drama premiered in the United States. Ms. Donoghue’s name may be familiar to some theatergoers as the author of the novel, and subsequent Oscar-nominated screenplay, for Room. She’s a prolific writer of various genres, whose works often explore the sometimes unnamed, hidden love between gay women. In this play, Donoghue was inspired by the secret coded diaries of early nineteenth century gentlewoman, Anne Lister.
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Great Balls of Fire
Million Dollar Quartet – Marriot Theatre
Inspired by a true story, and under the splashy and spectacular direction of James Moye, a slice of rock and roll history has been brought to life in the Marriott Theatre’s brilliant 2019 season opener. This joyful and infectiously likable show will introduce a lot of great music to younger audiences, but it’ll be a fond trip down memory lane for many other theatergoers. It’s chock full of nearly two dozen popular rock and roll and country-western hits. Based on an actual, previously little-known event from the archives of recording history, Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux created this little jukebox musical that has, since its 2006 Florida premier, taken on a whole life of its own.
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Non Sequiturs Ricocheting Everywhere
The Realistic Joneses – Shattered Globe and Wit Theater
Much like an episode of “Seinfeld,” nothing really happens in this one-act by Will Eno. We glean a little bit of information about each of the four characters but there’s not really a story, per se. The author of such other noteworthy plays as “Thom Paine (Based on Nothing),” “Middletown” and “Title and Deed,” Eno’s 2014 comedy took home a Drama Desk award and earned the title of Best Play on Broadway by USA Today. The New York Times warned audiences “not to come to this play expecting tidy, clearly drawn narrative arcs or familiarly typed characters.” The dramatic comedy feels more like a contemporary Theatre of the Absurd offering with its plethora of non sequiturs ricocheting everywhere. Eno’s actually crafted a single play out of a series of short scenes that almost feel like a series of Second City comedy sketches. However, the developing relationship between two couples adds up to a bizarre plot, of sorts, and an authentic portrait of real life.
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Having It All
Dada Woof Papa Hot – About Face Theatre
In Peter Parnell’s comic drama, which first opened at Lincoln Center three years ago, we get a realistic look at how the Marriage Equality Act of 2015 has altered the lives of many gay and lesbian couples. Its passage seemed to promise the same idyllic life and privileges that heterosexual couples had been enjoying for decades. Gay couples would now be able have it all but, as Parnell shows us, that new life comes with its own set of problems, considerations and complications.
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Vampires Around Us
St. Nicholas – Goodman Theatre
He begins his 90-minute monologue by confessing to the audience, “When I was a boy, I was afraid of the dark.” Interestingly, this unnamed character, a drama critic, makes his living by sitting alone in darkened theatres, observing actors who are bringing to life the characters a playwright has created on the page. Has this writer, who admits to being a cruel commentator on productions about which he has little knowledge, overcome his fear of the dark? Or has he simply learned to endure that which scares him the most and join their ranks?
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Sardines and Slamming Doors
Noises Off – Windy City Playhouse
As elderly housekeeper Mrs. Clackett begins exiting while balancing the telephone, a newspaper and a ubiquitous plate of sardines, she suddenly stops (as does her Cockney accent) and she begins questioning herself. “I take the sardines? No, I leave the sardines. No, I take the sardines…” Audiences unfamiliar with Michael Frayn’s laugh-a-minute farce begin to wonder if the actress (Amy Carle, brilliant as Dotty Otley playing the character of Mrs. Clackett) has lost her way…or her mind. And indeed her character does have problems with all her lines and stage business, but that’s the gimmick behind this play-within-a-play. A so-so farce entitled “Nothing On” is being rehearsed by a third-rate British theatrical company, but the audience only comes to understand that this is a rehearsal when Lloyd, their hard-working director (nicely played with manic mastery by handsome Mike Tepeli) interrupts Dotty’s muttering to provide some much-needed direction from the auditorium aisles. The “dress rehearsal” (or is it “the technical”?) continues to stop and start as each new problem arises. With them come new complications and even broader laughter.
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Violence and Its Aftermath
Cardboard Piano – TimeLine Theatre Company
In small church in northern Uganda, as New Year’s Eve ushers in the new millennium, two young girls prepare to celebrate by secretly exchanging marriage vows in a faux wedding ceremony. Chris is the rebellious daughter of strict, conservative missionary parents; Adiel is a feisty, but romantic African teenager, who’s smitten with her. Their lesbian love, not to mention an unheard of racial relationship, are both taboo and strictly forbidden in Uganda. The couple’s secret union will culminate in a night of sexual romance, before they flee from this repressed country to a city where being gay doesn’t mean persecution and punishment. However, as might be expected, their idyll is about to be violently interrupted.
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