Artistic Home has given theater goers a rare jewel of a comedy, a 1928 send-up of Soviet society that was never seen by Russian audiences because Stalin banned it. Well, his censors must have read only half way through, and clearly had no sense of humor, because this is comedy of the highest order. 

I’ll admit I was tempted to bail at intermission, as the humor in the first half felt a bit forced, and was mostly inside jokes for Soviet citizens. But as a reviewer I am pledged to see it through, and the outcome of the pivotal turning point was set up right before break. So I had to come back to find out what would happen. OMG was it funny! Take my advice and see this whole play, because you need the set-up to get the jokes in Act 2.

I’ll offer no spoilers, but in the first act we meet the hapless Semyon (Daniel Shtivelberg), an unemployed and hopeless young man who lives with his wife Masha (Kayla Adams) and mother-in-law Serafima (Kathy Scambiatterra is a hoot) in a crowded flat—perhaps situated in the apartment building lobby. The public setting of their dwelling and a common bathroom shared with the other residents assures us the opportunity to meet the postman Yegor (Reid Coker is great)—a model Soviet citizen—and another gentleman, Alexander (Todd Wojcik is a delight, as always) who seems to be sex trafficking with his willing partner, Margarita (Kristin Collins).

Semyon laments his unhappy fate, jobless and living from the earnings of his wife, while his mother-in-law manages the housekeeping. The two women are supportive despite Semyon’s dire emotional state. After failing in a last ditch effort to become a busker—he gets a tuba and instruction booklet but can’t master the instrument—his inner conflicts drive him to end it all. (The original play by Nikolai Erdman was called ‘The Suicide’ and is freely adapted here by Moira Buffini.)

Kristin Collins, Kayla Adams, Todd Wojcik and Kathy Scambiatterra in The Artistic Home's production of "Dying For It" at the Den Theatre.

Ironically, his decision to off himself makes Semyon suddenly of interest to others, and we soon see the arrival of three counter-revolutionary tropes of Stalin’s day: a member of the intelligentsia, Aristarkh (John Laflamboy plays it for all he's worth), the Westernized temptress Kiki (Brookelyn Hébert) a romantic poet Viktor (Khyel Roberson in a spot-on performance), and an Orthodox priest Father Yelpidy (Patrick Thornton). All hope to leverage Semyon's suicide to their benefit, mostly by encouraging him to write about them in his suicide note.

His neighbor the hedonist sees the occasion as a good excuse for a party, and with that Semyon’s plans to off himself become bigger than him—and the laugh fest begins in earnest.
Watching the players perform for all they’re worth in the first act had me curious, their earnest performances almost over the top with energy. Now I know why: they had all seen the second act!

Comedy is all in the timing, and credit director Monica Payne for keeping everyone on cue. Scenic design by Kevin Hagen is excellent, and costumes by Rachel Lambert are noteworthy in their authentic feel.

This rare opportunity to see a hidden gem should not be missed. "Dying For It” runs at The Den Theatre through April 23.

“The Shroud Maker” is a look into the world of Hajja Souad, an 84-year-old Palestinian seamstress, plying her artisanal trade amid the rise and fall of violence in Gaza City adjacent to Israel. Her specialty: shrouds used in Islamic funerals to wrap the deceased.

Unfortunately for the world, Souad’s business is good, and demand trends offer a depressing timeline of decades of violence in what had been Palestine. Boiling down a lengthy history, in 1948 the British relinquished control in the region pursuant to a U.N. mandate that partitioned Palestine to create a place for modern-day Israel. Surrounding Arab states launched a war against the U.N. action, and in 1948 the Arab League established a state for Palestine, which along with Israel claimed Jerusalem as its capital. And the rest is more war-striven history.

A businesswoman and expert in crafting finely stitched shrouds, Souad has seen it all over the years, and is played ably by Roxane Assaf-Lynn. The 70-minute monologue by noted Palestinian author Ahmed Masoud is drawn loosely from a real individual. Souad shares the gallows humor that is a familiar companion to those whose lifework is death.

Souad is also a survivor, someone who has suffered personal loss as one by one, over the years, every member of her own family became collateral damage in someone else’s wars. Her non-stop descriptive chatter tells her own epic story—against the backdrop of that of the people of Palestine.

Set in Gaza City, the opening scene finds Souad mid-way through an animated phone conversation, where she is warned yet again that she is in danger and should evacuate her home. This time it’s because of a limited Israeli incursion into Gaza, intended to destroy border tunnels through which contraband flows, some of it the very cotton she uses for shroud making.

“I’m not going anywhere….Besides your bloody tanks are everywhere,” Souad yells into the phone. “Your freaking army will have to kill me first.” Is she just a cranky, unreasonable old woman?

We learn she is much more than this in the course of the play, and Souad voices other characters in her life: her younger self, her father, an adopted son, and his wife, and Ghassan, their child. Two more characters from her past also appear, all of them voiced by Souad, who at 11, was removed from her farm (along with her parents) to make way for a kibbutz.

During the period before Israel was formed, her father Mahmoud was hired by the British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham, as a gardener for his estate—the same Sir Cunningham whose British Army forcibly removed Mahmoud from their farm. Lady Cunningham takes a liking to Little Souad, and enculturates her as a British girl with piano lessons and training in posh British English. Essentially she is wantonly stealing Souad from her parents to replace her own child, now lost. But Lady Cunningham also teaches Souad to sew, and in her later life, Souad applies these skills to producing traditional Palestinian garments, including shrouds.

The production by the International Voices Project is nicely directed by Marina Johnson with set by Jonathan Berg-Einhorn. Ahmed Mousad’s script leans a little more toward literary—something to be read—than to stage delivery, though he generally weaves exposition in effectively. The story comes across, though the emotional side is not fully expressed. Even the best actor would be challenged, especially the demand to voice numerous characters. But the story is so authentic and compelling, coming as it does from those living in Gaza, that is is one the must be heard

“The Shroud Maker” runs through April 8 at Chicago Dramatists, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 3:00 p.m.

“Describe the Night” at Steppenwolf is serious theater that is seriously entertaining. Intellectually challenging yet side-splittingly funny, it has sat with me for days after as I’ve puzzled over what it is telling us.

Written by celebrated playwright Rajiv Joseph, whose sly wit enthralled audiences in Steppenwolf’s “Guards at the Taj,” the somewhat enigmatic script is also a captivating mystery story. It follows the emergence of famed Russian Jewish author Isaac Babel’s wartime journal, an uncensored record of his war time impressions.

Depicting real and fictional characters, Joseph spins a possible recount of how Babel’s journal survived while much of his writing was banned and destroyed. The title of the play was taken from that journal kept while Babel served as a war correspondent and propagandist for the Soviets in their 1920 war against Poland. Babel was a rising fiction writer when he signed into the military, and soon after the war wrote Red Cavalry, drawn from his personal impressions of the war, quite at odds with the positive spin he delivered in the news.

Eventually, under increasingly oppressive censorship, much of Babel’s fiction writing was banned by Russian authorities, the author imprisoned in 1939, and executed in 1940, with his working manuscripts, notes, and the journal offered in evidence at his trial. In the play's portrayal of the search for the surviving journal, we see two fictional connections to Babel—the grandmotherly babushka Yevgenia (Sally Murphy) and her granddaughter Urzula (Charence Higgins)—tailed by KGB operative Vova (Glenn Davis is pitch perfect).

The KGB wanted not just the writer dead, and his manuscripts and books destroyed, but his source material too. Hence the ongoing search for Babel’s journal. Vova's menacing presence is palpable, but his efforts are thwarted by the ditzy Yevgenia who charms him and all of us with an earnest insistence that he join them for soup. Vova acquiesces, and the playwright gives as a surreal dinner scene—foreshadowed deftly in Act 1—that is one for the ages, the laugh until you cry type.

It also encapsulates one powerful truth in “Describe the Night,” that a great antidote to disinformation and oppression is to laugh at it, buttressed with “alternative facts” as "truth" in our own age of disinformation and “the big lie” is in danger of becoming. In other words, we live in a time when truth and lies are harder to distinguish. And this evolving dynamic of confusion within society is at the core of "Describe the Night."

Written in 2014 and produced in 2017, “Describe the Night” predates our own unfortunate circumstances, with libraries censored, school curricula bowderlized, and news content cued to television ratings rather than impartiality. Reviews of other stagings have recognized the importance of this play, but it seems in Steppenwolf's production under the direction of Austin Pendleton, the actors have nailed the comic timing that makes the show so effective.

Kudos too, for scenic design by Collette Pollard, whose representation of the extensive KGB files on parties of interest is another high point of the show, played also to great comic effect. On Steppenwolf’s newest in-the-round theater space is a blank tablet with minimalist sets introduced only when required. Sound design by Pornchanak Kanchanabanca is noteworthy, from light touches of evocative music to dramatic sound effects such the roaring inferno where many of Babel’s writings are destroyed.

In some ways “Describe the Night” is an absurdist style play, the characters not naturalistic. But Joseph, who also won a Tony for his "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," leavens this with his signature style of natural contemporary speech. We see this particularly as two real life characters, Isaac Babel (James Vincent Merredith) and his military minder and friend Nikolai (Yasen Peyankov) who joust about the nature of truth. Likewise with two fictional characters from scenes in post-Soviet times, airport car rental agent Feliks (Jack Cain) and reporter Marikya (Caroline Neff, who I never can get enough of on stage). Mariyka also comes under questioning Vova in the search for the missing journal, making a connection to contemporary times.

This show flies by in two hours and forty-five minutes, and the first act is engaging and promising, on which the second act delivers in spades. I had no idea how much time had passed when the lights came up. “Describe the Night” runs through April 9, 2023 at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. It’s a great production of what is proving to be a seminal play.

“Signed, Sealed, Delivered: A Stevie Wonder Experience with John-Mark McGaha” was a warm refuge from the frigid Chicago weather for its opening night February 23. The Mercury Theater at Southport in Wrigleyville is the perfect venue for a show like this, intimate but big enough for the inevitable crowds of Stevie Wonder fans—myself included.

Two approaches are usually taken to creating live cover shows of favorite artists —a tribute band that impersonates the performer, or an interpretive review. “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” is the latter, and a better approach, given Stevie Wonder’s already long career and sweeping catalog. It also allows for a definition of Wonder’s place in the pantheon of greats, and a recount of the forces that shaped his soul, which infuses his music and lyrics. 

This show describes Wonder’s overall creative energy as one expressive of “jubilation” and that essence is the best explanation I have heard. His music celebrates life, and shares his joy.
His work can be approached from many angles, with his many platinum tracks, and so many hits from this precocious musical phenomenon. Wonder at age 12 was the youngest ever to have a Billboard No. 1 record - “Baby, Everything is Alright” - which writer and director Angela Ingersoll places early in the evening, and generally the 16 or more songs performed in the show were chronological.

Performing Stevie Wonder’s songs is John-Mark McGaha. Warm and personable, he sings, plays guitar and piano, and is backed by a second keyboardist (Will Kurk on synth/keyboard and lending vocals) a trumpet, saxophone, base guitar, drums, and a pair of back-up singers. With this retinue they were able to play every style of song Wonder is known for, from his big production mega hits like “Superstition,” “Always,” “For Once in My Live” and “You Can Feel It All Over.” While Wonder’s signature harmonica was missing, occasionally Kurk filled in with a synthesized version.

The show does not mimic or impersonate Wonder’s recordings, though some numbers precisely followed the originals. But this is indeed a Stevie Wonder Experience, in which Ingersoll’s script and McGaha’s ongoing patter provided context for some works that cast a new meaning and new insights into the songs. McGaha, an accomplished performer and highly trained musician, has a personal passion for Wonder, and he shares personal anecdotes (once in awhile a little long) about how the music touched his own life

We learned about Stevie Wonder’s mother, who fled an abusive marriage with children in tow. We learn that one of Wonder’s early songs, written at 16 after a teenage romance fell apart, was put on hold, then released two years later by his producers. The song? “My Cherie Amour.” Until he was 21, Wonder’s music earnings were held in trust. He did receive an allowance: $2.50 a week. When he received the money held in trust, Wonder had earned $31 million in royalties, though he netted just $1 million. That's showbiz, and Wonder, also the youngest artist inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, soon took full control of his career, song rights, and recordings.

Some arrangements were very fresh. Opening night the acoustics were probably not fully tuned, and seemed to be affected by the room filled for the first time with an audience. At times McGaha strained to be heard above the band. In his own performances Stevie Wonder’s voice is always preeminent.

When McGaha left the stand-up mic and sat at the baby grand to sing, the band was in better balance with him. One particularly arresting number—Wonder’s 1985 “Overjoyed” —featured McGaha accompanying himself solo on electric acoustic guitar. It was his very own treatment of a song that had personal meaning to both the performer and Wonder. And it was so deliciously good and emotionally powerful that I hope McGaha releases his version

Wonder’s melodies, chord progressions, and inventive lyrics are among the reasons we regard him as a genius. While some of his cuts were topping the charts, Wonder’s pop hits were played so continuously they became grating. I was not looking forward to hearing “I just Called to Say I Love You.” But the story McGaha told of its origins and the arrangement by Kurk was really, really wonderful.

After playing Wonder’s biggest hit, “Superstition,” the show reached its finale with “Ribbon in the Sky,” one of my all time favorite Wonder songs. This intimate and sensitive rendition stayed with me all night, and was a wonderful closer on a show. "Signed, Sealed Delivered: The Stevie Wonder Experience" runs through March 12 at rthe Mercury Theater.

Caryl Churchill’s ‘Fen’ is a tragic love story laid out against a complicated backdrop. Set in the 1980s, we meet Val (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel), a mother of two, who wants to leave her husband because she has fallen for another man, Frank (Alex Goodrich). She planned for them to take her children and run away to London, but Frank won’t go, so she settles for moving in with him.

But Val’s husband will neither divorce her, nor surrender the children to her. She must return to him to be with them. Equally, Val cannot live without Frank. Betwixt these irreconcilable poles, Val unhappily lives, and the dismal pallor of her internal conflicts settles over the two lovers like a dark cloud.

The playwright strips the passion from this ill-fated romance, giving us a utilitarian core by which to examine the oppressive constraints, grounded in economics, Churchill seems to say, under which women labor with futility to find fulfilling lives.

Val charges through the play seeking some way to come to shed the unhappiness. She meets other women who cope or compensate by several means - religion, drink, cruelty - and none of these ways work for her. So she just suffers, and it is Frank’s unhappy lot to be her partner in it.

The love story is a bit like Lady Chatterly’s Lover, whose aristocratic heroine sacrificed all to live happily ever after with her working-class paramour. Unlike the well-heeled Lady Chatterley, Val’s attempts to find happiness in her love are thwarted by circumstances, and she can find no solace.

The other dimension to ‘Fen’ is the succinct and searing portrait of a very dark world. Val and Frank are among a populace of poorly paid tenant farmers working under oppressive overseers in the Fenland, a fertile reclaimed coastal marshland in the east of England. Locals harbor resentments from generations of feeling exploited by profit-seeking landowners. 

Once a paradise where people lived off the land and fishing, the Fenland is a dismal place where dreams die, or never are born, a place of hopelessness. The play gives us a succinct portrait of the increasingly impersonal nature of the landowners, as local farms and the estates of gentry alike are snapped up by ever-larger global agri-businesses. It is in the exploration of these aspects of the Fenland that Churchill's immense skills as a wordsmith and playwright shine. It is why she is regarded as a pre-eminent English playwright - recalling 'A Number' at Writers Theatre still gives me chills -  and the chance to see a serious presentation of any of Churchill's works is not to be missed. 

Churchill’s script has been given a fully realized production, with a beautifully constructed set (Scenic Design by Collette Pollard) dominated by rows of potato fields, the stage big enough for a full-sized tractor to roll through. Director Vanessa Stalling orchestrates excellent performances from a sprawling roster of 22 characters, played by just six actors, as is the playwright's intent. Yet there is no confusion for the audience as actors reappear, playing as many as five characters, with distinctive costumes ((Izumi Inaba) and dialect (Eva Breneman). One key to understanding the action is to follow the character of Val, the only role played by Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel. Especially noteworthy are the performances of Alex Goodrich - the only male cast member - and Elizabeth Laidlaw.

Depending on your taste in theater, ‘Fen’ may seem bewildering, but it is entertaining nonetheless. While Churchill frames big ideas in the play, she is also a master at dialog, and the characters are colorful personalities engaged in intriguing repartee.'Fen' runs at Chicago’s Court Theatre through March 5.

‘Right to Be Forgotten ' is a play for our times, in contemporary language and a production at Raven Theatre that is laser-focused on an issue of our day—the inability of the average person to remove online content about themselves that is damaging or even life-threatening.

Directed by Sarah Gitenstein from a script by Sharyn Rothstein, this Chicago premiere features minimalist sets—a simple table and chairs evokes a coffee shop; a desk makes an office—and characters that are quickly recognizable types. The stage features a surround of screens on which social media posts and Google search results are displayed, apropos of the subject: the indelible stamp made by digital records of our lives.

Hapless 17-year-old nerd Derril Lark (Adam Shalzi), who for weeks dogged his first school crush, Jamila Tyler (Eve Salinsky), was called into the principal’s office and set straight. Mending his ways thereafter, his stalking behavior was documented on the ‘High School Girl’ blog, and he soon became a symbol of stalkers despite stopping his behavior.

A decade later Darril Lark is at work on his PhD in literature, and dreaming of settling into a serious relationship. Dating through match-up apps, he meets Sarita (Kelsey Elyse Rodriguez), and the two hit it off. But very soon he divulges to Sarita that his profile carries an assumed name, for his real name is infinitely attached to the hashtag #lurkinlark. The story of his brief high school misstep was subsumed into an onslaught of posts about other heinous aggressions suffered by girls and women everywhere, along with numerous related supportive posts, all of which appear when anyone googles his real name.

The story leads us through Darril's futile attempts to have his history cleared voluntarily by the search engine giant, using their appeals process. In desperation he pleads his case to a lawyer known in the field for battling internet behemoths, Marta Lee (Susaan Jamshidi), who takes his case. The plot now turns on the legal and eventually political jousting around his case, leading us through the twists and turns of a first-rate courtroom drama.

‘Right to Be Forgotten’ is an artful exploration of the dynamics of a fraught societal issue. Threaded neatly with exposition of the subject, we learn that Europeans have the right to be forgotten, and upon request can have their histories expunged from the web. Via the clashes among lawyers, politicos, and individuals online (who are both consumers and suppliers of content) the playwright leads the audience to understand the unresolved tension in the U.S. between freedom of expression, and the right to privacy, both enshrined in the Constitution.

In some respects this script is a series of vignettes, and characters and dialog are lean and purposeful, like a web search result. While not naturalistic—we get just what we need to know, both about the characters, and for scenes to advance the action—the whole of ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ works together to conjure our empathy for individual suffering. And it ends with a satisfying, even optimistic resolution. Running through March 26 at Raven Theatre in Chicago, ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ is unforgettable, and comes highly recommended.

*Extended through April 2nd!

Sometimes a deceivingly "small" story can pack a wallop, and that is the case with LaDarrion Williams’ ‘Boulevard of Bold Dreams,’ premiering at TimeLine Theatre before it moves on to Boston.

Set in 1940, this finely crafted script quickly establishes fully fleshed out characters Arthur (Charles Andrew Gardner), a bartender at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel, and his friend, Dottie (Mildred Marie Langford), who is a maid there.

Both are recent arrivals from Alabama, friends since they were two. Arthur, an unapologetic optimist, came to pursue a dream of directing movies, while the more cynical Dottie, who is a singer, is fleeing more pain-filled circumstances back home.

This is a night like no other. It is February 29, 1940, the evening ‘Gone With the Wind’ will win a slew of Oscars and Hattie McDaniels will become the first Black actor to receive the award. But McDaniels (Gabrielle Lott-Rogers), as she enters the bar to avoid the press, only knows she has been nominated.

When she hesitantly appears at the doorway to the bar, it is clear McDaniels has goose-bump inducing star power. Credit director Malkia Stampley for the cadence of this entrance, the spotlighting, the costuming, and Lott-Rogers’ acting skills. It’s not overdone, just the right touch, to let us know a power player has arrived. And indeed, that was the case with McDaniels, whose dad put her on the stage beginning at 10, for his traveling minstrel shows.

The plot turns around McDaniel’s ambivalence about accepting the award at all. In the white world, the Oscar nomination looked like progress. (Ethel Waters had been nominated the year before.) But in the black community, there were mixed feelings: the NAACP felt the role of the step-n-fetch-it slave Mammy was a demeaning stereotype. Others felt “grin and bear it” for the value to future generations of a Black breakthrough. (This territory was covered in Alice Childress’ 1955 backstage drama, ‘Trouble in Mind,’ suppressed from wide exposure in its day and remarkably cogent in its TimeLine Theatre production in November.)

McDaniels also was sequestered to a table hidden in the ballroom corner of the ordinarily segregated Ambassador Hotel with her Black friends. She was not allowed to sit with Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable and the rest of the cast. She was given a prepared speech expressing the hope that she would remain “a credit to her race.” Ugh.

We know how McDaniels decided, and the footage of her acceptance is played. What playwright Williams gives us is the nuanced dimensions of the internal struggle within Daniels’ heart, and within the Black community. The interweaving of exposition and dramatic interchange is artful at an exceptional level. In an epilogue scene we hear the speech the playwright imagines McDaniels might have delivered, and it’s standing-ovation stuff.

A must-see show, ‘Boulevard of Bold Dreams’ runs through March 19 at TimeLine Theatre, 656 W. Wellington Ave. in Chicago.

‘Andy Warhol in Tehran’ is a delight, an incisive comedy packaged with a serious exploration of art, history, and political values.

Rob Lindley as Warhol captures the artist exactly as he was seen in his public persona, somewhat vapid, seemingly desultory, with a passion for attaching to others’ fame, while amplifying his own. The script by Persian-American playwright Brent Askari gives a knowing monologue delivered with droll deadpan humor by Lindley, providing an entertaining overview of Warhol’s background and his work.

Warhol, who died in 1987 and coined that timeless phrase “15 minutes of fame,” rose to a far more lasting version of it by turning the mundane—Campbell’s Soup Cans, celebrity photos, a five-hour film of someone sleeping—into highly coveted and admired pop art.

Cultivating his own celebrity, he leveraged that as well to boost the price tags on his canvases, his access to well-heeled collectors and famous personalities, ultimately driving demand for commissioned work—which is where the play opens.

Having tapped out other gambits, Warhol in his late career took aim at portraiture of world leaders, reasoning they would need numerous versions of portraits for multiple public spaces. It is just such a commission, for the Empress of Persia, that finds Warhol in Tehran. Lindley’s Warhol, as voiced by the script, keeps us engaged throughout this fast-paced disquisition on Warhol’s background when there comes a knock on the door: room service.

Enter Farhad (Hamid Dehghani), in a gold braided bellhop jacket rolling a cart laden with caviar—and to Warhol’s delight, just $10 a serving. A few moments in, we find this is not just any hotel staffer, but a dissident impersonating a staffer. He aims to take Warhol hostage, in an effort to draw attention to the Iranian dissidents' efforts to remove the repressive Shah of Iran—placed in office by Western governments when the very popular and democratically elected president tried to nationalize Iranian oil, particularly Anglo-Persian Oil.

Warhol, as an artist and particularly with his focus on capturing ephemeral moments and celebrities, had no awareness or even interest in politics in Iran, or anywhere else. Farhad, holding a gun, declares, “We are going to announce we have kidnapped the famous Andy Warhol.”

“Why me?” Warhol says, suggesting Farhad kidnap another hotel guest, Barry Goldwater. “He’s very handsome.”
“What does that have to do with anything,” Farhod snaps back, seemingly infuriated by Warhol’s nonchalance and disengagement with the seriousness of his situation. Warhol was chosen, “Because you’re the most decadent artist alive. You see, Andy Warhol, we want our 15 minutes of fame.”

As the two wait for the getaway van, the playwright uses the dialog to reveal the characters. While the fictional kidnap attempt never happened, everything else about Warhol’s background, including the visit to Tehran, and everything that Farhad describes about Iranian politics and history, is factual.

Hamid Dehghani’s performance as Farhad is surely informed by his background as an award-winning actor and director in Iran. And likewise the script carries an authenticity that comes from intimacy with, and passion about Iran. Northlight’s production of ‘Andy Warhol in Tehran’ is a unique expression from those who know, and comes highly recommended. It runs through February 19, and hopefully even longer.

CityLit Theater’s ‘The Birthday Party’ opens with a load of laughs, seducing the audience with its low-key humor, then shaking us up as sinister overtones are gradually revealed.

We are introduced to the middle-aged operators of a British seaside boarding house: Meg (Elaine Carlson is delightfully comedic) and her dead-pan husband Petey (Linsey Falls in a flawless regional accent). Meg is all in a dither all the time—think 'All in the Famiily’s' Edith Bunker—just able to serve breakfasts of cornflakes and keep the larder filled.

WIth a naturalistic style that is reminiscent of David Mamet’s work (though written by Harold Printer decades before him) this play will leave you smitten by the characters, and the way repetitive, everyday speech is mined for its humor. And as with great comedy, it’s all in the timing, which the cast and director handle beautifully.

Meg and Petey's very down-on-its-heels establishment has had but one guest for the past year, Stanley (David Fink) and we soon see that the relationship with this lone customer has devolved to an enmeshed co-dependency between Meg and Stanley. She mothers, teases, and fauns over Stanley, who returns the excessive attention with a withering derision and acidic jokes that fly over the good natured Meg’s head.

Fink is perfect as the dissolute Stanley, a failed musician who sleeps in, and stays perpetually in pajamas and robe. Soon arrives the vivacious, self-assured Lulu (Sahara Glasener-Boles), a comely lass about Stanley’s age, who chides him for not bathing or going out of doors.

Things turn ominous when two new guests arrive in a big black limo—the erudite Goldberg (James Sparling is pitch perfect) and his towering thug McCann (Will Casey). Now Pinter takes the action to a darker level, as the titular birthday party for Stanley unfolds, despite his disinclination to attend. Fink ably registers Stanley’s discomfort with strangers entering the household, and Stan moves from suspicious to paranoid, desperately demanding (to no avail) that Goldberg and McCann find other accommodations. The play can be taken literally, but its many enigmatic and contradictory twists place it firmly in the absurdist camp. 

‘The Birthday Party’ was Harold Pinter’s first full length play, and it broke the mold, launching a genre: it is a ”comedy of menace” (as opposed to comedy of errors or of manners). Perhaps because it is so out-of-the-box, it closed after just eight performances following its 1957 premiere. But a positive review secured attention for Pinter, and ‘The Birthday Party’ is now recognized as a masterwork.

City Lit distinguishes itself in the selection of this play, and in an absolutely wonderful production. Highly recommended on the basis of casting alone, artistic director Terry McCabe deserves kudos. Don’t miss a chance to see this live production of a Printer classic, running at CityLit Theater through February 26, 2023.

"Bald Sisters," in its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre, tells of a Cambodian refugee who escaped the unspeakable terror of the Kmer Rouge with her daughter, and made a new life and birthed a second daughter in the U.S. But the play only touches that in passing, instead focusing on universal themes as it portrays very realistically the generational divides that affect us all.

With incredible performances across the board, Bald Sisters is must-see theater. But the biggest star just may be the script by Vichet Chum, a rising playwright gaining national renown. Bald Sisters was created under a new play development initiative by Steppenwolf Theater Company, which reliably discovers and delivers work by promising playwrights with fully realized productions, this one directed admirably by Jesca Prudencio.

Chum’s characters, who represent familiar Boomer, GenX, Millennial types, are fully dimensional, their speech realistic, fresh, and completely on key for the range of ages and personalities. He gives the actors convincing language to work with, and they deliver it powerfully.

We have the mother, Ma (Wai Ching Ho), a naughty sprite who has put all the bad memories behind her, living in the moment, and readily speaking her mind. Ma prefaces her most pointed remarks with, “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to,” eliciting laughs, while cueing the audience for the zinger to follow.

Ma generally directs the barbs at her eldest daughter, Him (Jennifer Lim), whom we deduce escaped with her from Cambodia. Him and Sophea (Francesa Fernandez McKenzie), Ma’s younger daughter, are planning mom’s funeral - a plot device that brings a clash between the daughters. Him has a darker view of the world, while her younger sibling Sophea - born in the U.S. - has traveled an easier path. Sophea was spared the trauma of Him’s past as a refugee, but she longs to be anchored in her culture, seeking her roots by meditation and styling herself as an eastern zen. Him, on the other hand, has assimilated into U.S. culture, marrying a white Christian minister.

The end-of-life hook is a convenient device for the siblings to confront unfinished business. The younger sister Sophea is living an extended adolescence, and is very judgmental about her older sister Him’s life and values. Him sees her sibling as an infantile bag of pretension and Buddhist wanna-be.Him, though seriously ill, lives a dutiful life, supporting Ma in her decline, and her husband Nate in his church career.

Jennifer Lim gives a most noteworthy performance, on opening night delivering one of those incredible Steppenwolf-style monologues, filled with fury and passion, so affecting that the audience burst into applause. Francesa Fernandez McKenzie, as Sophea, conveyed in her physical performance as much or more about this pouty, self-immersed girl-woman as the playwright’s fresh, dead-on millennial lines.

Also notable were Coburn Goss as Him’s husband Nate, and particularly Nima Rakhshanifar as Seth, a college student who mows lawns, and whose Middle Eastern and Muslim heritage showed the author is at home writing any type of character. Seth sings a Muslim song of mourning that transcending language, was viscerally moving. A shout out to Andrew Boyce for scenic design, and to Polly Hubbard, dramaturg, a role that serves as eyes and ears so theater companies stay abreast of trending talent and scripts like this one.

Highly recommended, Bald Sisters runs through January 15, 2023 in Steppenwolf’s new 400-set in-the-round Ensemble Theater.