SR Digest: Stay gold, Ponyboy
Issue #13—March 29, 2019
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Goodman’s season announcement: Hnath, Rebeck, Friel and The Outsiders
Yesterday was Opening Day for the 2019 baseball season (the Cubs routed the Rangers 12-4 in Texas, in case you missed it), but we’re already two months into Season Announcement Season. Yesterday, two of Chicago’s heaviest hitters, the Goodman and Lookingglass, had their turns at bat. (Sorry, sorry everyone, dropping the baseball metaphor starting…now.)
There’s a lot to parse in the Goodman’s announcement. The season opens in September with a new play from divisive thought-experimenter Lucas Hnath about his own mother’s kidnapping and five-month captivity—let that sink in for a second. The play, Dana H., is based on interviews with Hnath’s mother, Dana Higginbotham, that were conducted by Steve Cosson of New York’s The Civilians, who co-commissioned the piece with the Goodman. It’s a co-production with L.A.’s Center Theatre Group, and Angelenos will see it first when it opens there in May before transferring here.
That’s in the smaller Owen Theatre; the Albert season will be kicked off by Bernhardt/Hamlet, Theresa Rebeck’s recent play about Sarah Bernhardt playing the great Dane. Other highlights of the season include Graveyard Shift, a world premiere by Korde Arrington Tuttle loosely inspired by Sandra Bland that was seen in last fall’s New Stages workshops; the Chicago premiere of Jocelyn Bioh’s highly praised School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play, to be directed by Lili-Anne Brown; and “a major revival” of Molly Sweeney, a 1994 play by Irish writer Brian Friel (Dancing at Lughnasa) that Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls wants us to know he is very excited to stage. (Question: Has any theater ever announced “a minor revival”?)
But like any good Gen X’er (especially one who grew up less than two hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma), my eye went straight to the summer 2020 season ender: the world premiere of a new musical adaptation of The Outsiders.
Based on the S.E. Hinton novel and the Francis Ford Coppola film about pure-hearted, poetry-reciting teenage greasers, the musical will have a book by Adam Rapp (Red Light Winter) and music by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, aka the Austin-based Americana duo Jamestown Revival.
I wasn’t familiar with Jamestown Revival, but I’m listening to them on Spotify as I write this newsletter and can report that they are Extremely My Jam. (They’re playing Lincoln Hall August 9, if you’d like to meet me there.) Liesl Tommy will direct the show. That the musical was in development wasn’t a total secret—at least one staged reading was held in New York last year by commercial producers The Araca Group—but junior-high me is extremely excited that Chicago’s getting the first look.
In other Season Announcement Season… announcements…
Lookingglass will mark the tenure of Chicago’s second woman mayor—whether that turns out to be Toni Preckwinkle or Lori Lightfoot after Tuesday’s runoff—by premiering a new play by J. Nicole Brooks about her forerunner. Her Honor Jane Byrne focuses on the much-debated moment in 1981 when the city’s first woman mayor declared her intention to move into the Cabrini-Green housing projects for three weeks. That’s bookended by two remounts: Mary Zimmerman’s new holiday piece, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, returns for a second run after rave reviews for its debut this season, and the company’s signature piece Lookingglass Alice will be back in the summer of 2020 for the first time in five years.
Last week, Victory Gardens Theater announced its own 2019–2020 season, the company’s 45th. It includes the Chicago premiere of Tiny Beautiful Things, Nia Vardalos’s acclaimed work based on Cheryl Strayed’s work as an advice columnist; world premieres by Lee Edward Colston II, Lily Padilla and Madhuri Shekar; and another Chicago premiere by Sharyn Rothstein.
Reviews and other views
Shanesia Davis, left, and Leah Karpel in Landladies. Photograph: Michael Brosilow
Speaking of Sharyn Rothstein—this week for the Chicago Sun-Times, I reviewed the world premiere of her new play Landladies at Northlight Theatre.
Paying subscribers to Storefront Rebellion have received three more reviews from me this week:
Missy Wise and Josiah Robinson in Bright Star. Photograph: Katie Stanley
BoHo Theatre opened the Chicago premiere of the Steve Martin–Edie Brickell musical Bright Star.
Alice is an alluring, potent leading woman, and Missy Wise feels like a real discovery in the role, pivoting convincingly between spirited young woman and hardened cynic; her honeyed voice sits comfortably in the seductive twang of country. Brickell and Martin’s score may not call for vocal pyrotechnics, but Wise’s instrument soaks into all the nooks and crannies the genre asks it to.
Nate Burger, left, and William Brown in A Number. Photograph: Michael Brosilow
At Writers Theatre, Nate Burger and William Brown star in a sturdy revival of Caryl Churchill’s 2002 two-hander A Number.
When Caryl Churchill wrote this tight little ethical nightmare in 2002, the media was going full bore on the implications of Dolly, the cloned sheep. In the years since, the distance between A Number’s sci-fi conceit and the nonfiction world has continued to shrink.
Halie Robinson in My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Photograph: Zeke Dolezalek
And I wrote about the inaugural production from a new company called Jacaranda Collective, staging the controversial solo piece My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
We never hear directly from any of those Palestinians, or their Israeli counterparts, making My Name Is Rachel Corrie unsatisfying as a piece of theatrical journalism. But as a portrait of a young girl who actually acted on her impulse to improve the world, it’s compelling. That’s especially true in Jacaranda’s bare-bones but highly moving production, driven by a luminous and truthful performance from Halie Robinson, embodying Corrie’s smarts and shortcomings in wholly relatable fashion.
And finally this week, in the March issue of Chicago magazine I have a tiny chat with Lili-Anne Brown, who’s staging the world premiere of Ike Holter’s Lottery Day (aka the final entry in the seven-play, Chicago-set “Holterverse”). That wee interview went up online this week, and Lottery Day has its first preview tonight at the Goodman.
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