Author Archives: Diana Spinrad

POWER GOING DOWN Playwrights’ Center For Power Going Down playwright Christopher Busiel thought up some incompatible characters and got them stuck in an elevator for the weekend, then let them have at it. But most beginning improv classes in similar scenarios show far more imagination and sense of intrigue than Busiel does in his inane […]

THE LARGEST ELIZABETH IN THE WORLD Griffin Theatre Company SOVIETIQUETTE: MY DAYS IN RUSSIA International Performance Studio Playwright Stephen Gregg’s The Largest Elizabeth in the World is a hilarious absurdist fantasy about a teenage girl who grows to be 50 feet tall. Gregg, who also penned Griffin’s successful Sex Lives of Superheroes, produced last season, […]

MONSTERS . . . GLIMPSES OF URBAN LUNACY American Blues Theatre at Club Lower Links Monsters . . . Glimpses of Urban Lunacy is a series of 11 stories by ten different playwrights about the demons lurking in the minds of ordinary Chicagoans. Each of the works is essentially a monologue, though two of them […]

COUNT OEDERLAND Shattered Globe Theatre at the Project Count Oederland, by Swiss writer Max Frisch, is a wonderfully contradictory parable, epic in structure and vaguely expressionistic, mingling fantasy with reality and brutality with sweetness. It’s a darkly updated Don Quixote, the tale of a consummately respectable man driven mad by societal correctness and spurred by […]

ANGEL CITY Poison Nut Productions at the Rudely Elegant Theater TALES FROM THE UNICORN RODEO at the Rudely Elegant Theater Angel City is quintessential early Sam Shepard–which means it’s virtually impossible to explain rationally. Shepard’s plays are always firmly entrenched in myth and archetypes; but in his early works the myths crash and explode around […]

THREE WISHES Livewires Children’s Theatre at Live Theatre Three Wishes, by Corrina Maurio, is not one of those shows for adults and kids alike. There’s very little in this thinly disguised morality play about the dangers of lying to hold an adult’s interest. But the kids seemed to really enjoy the show–all of them lined […]

A BLACK MAN NAMED JOE Black Ensemble I should have been a mess when I left the theater. Jackie Taylor’s play about her brother, A Black Man Named Joe, hits a little too close to home. Like her brother, my cousin was killed by a drunk driver. He too was 29 years old. While my […]

BLUE DENIM Talisman Theatre Until Anita Hill’s allegations, Clarence Thomas’s refusal to indicate a stance on abortion was the greatest source of debate as to his ability to serve on the Supreme Court. Panelists discussing the issue on the Ron Reagan Show about a week ago all but got into a fistfight over it. The […]

THE ROTHSCHILDS Apple Tree Theatre I didn’t know much about the Rothschild family before I saw this show. As everyone does, I knew that they were rich and Jewish. I had an inkling they were idealistic, since they were instrumental in the establishment of a Jewish state–and indeed had bought a large South American tract […]

TWO ROOMS Next Theatre Company Throughout Two Rooms I was reminded of a debate I had in Israel with a diverse group of people from many countries. At the time, the mid-80s, three Israeli soldiers had been caught behind enemy lines in Lebanon, and Israel was negotiating an exchange: in return for these three prisoners, […]

THE EXERCISE Mary-Arrchie Theatre Actors have a very bad reputation as human beings. The nature of their work and the strange hours they keep mean they’re often seen as childish, irresponsible liars, people with substance-abuse problems or, at the very least, a few neuroses. Plays like Lewis John Carlino’s The Exercise perpetuate these myths by […]

RAGE OF THE AGES Alternative Productions at Chicago Dramatists Workshop Is humanity good or evil? Playwright William Rosen, who studied philosophy at Northwestern, puts his training to the test in his latest work, Rage of the Ages. Rosen explores this unfathomable question, which has spawned treatises, in a myriad of ways–so many, in fact, that […]

1 DON JUAN IN HELL at the Royal George Theatre Center Of all Shaw’s many plays, Don Juan in Hell is perhaps the most problematic–largely because it’s not actually a play at all. Stuck in the middle of the third act of Man and Superman, Don Juan in Hell is a kind of Shavian dream […]