Tony Lawry Archives - Chicago Reader

Four actors stand in and around a wooden gazebo with benches and flower boxes.

Nip-and-tuck Oscar

by Kerry Reid April 27, 2023April 27, 2023

Cutting Oscar Wilde’s 1895 classic comedy of manners down to a sleek 90-minute running time is a bold step, but Theatre Above the Law’s current staging, directed by Tony Lawry, manages that task pretty handily. All the greatest Wilde lines (“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in […]

Three women onstage. At left a young woman in a white dress is seated. A woman in a pink blazer and black skirt is standing next to her, appearing to be very upset. Another woman on the right, in a sleeveless white blouse and black trousers, stands stoically. There is a table with a pink phone in front of them, and index cards are flying all through the air.

Theater Review

A mixed quartet

by Kerry Reid November 23, 2022November 23, 2022

Theatre Above the Law’s sampler platter of four one-acts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (most of them seldom produced) offers mixed results. The opening piece, A Dollar by Yiddish playwright David Pinski, feels like an extended acting exercise in which archetypes (the Comedian, the Villain, the Ingenue, etc.) fight over the titular […]

A woman in black-and-orange checked pants, black shirt, and tan vest, wearing wolf ears and sunglasses, stands center stage singing into a botle. She is surrounded in the tavern setting by four other characters in various costumes sitting along the wall.

Theater Review

Survivor stories

by Kerry Reid October 13, 2022October 13, 2022

Theatre Above the Law returns to the fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, as adapted again by Michael Dalberg. (Dalberg’s adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is also currently onstage with Idle Muse through October 23.) I saw last year’s outing, and this time the connective tissue in […]

A kitchen set. A young Black woman in contemporary clothes stands left, with a white woman in 19th-century dress next to her. In the foreground, another white woman in contemporary dress looks offstage.

Theater Review

The bones of grief

by Kerry Reid May 12, 2022May 11, 2022

Laura Schellhardt’s Digging Up Dessa was commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center as part of its Theater for Young Audiences program in 2018. But this play, now in its Chicago premiere with Theatre Above the Law, is like a lot of great YA fiction—relevant to many audiences. Digging Up Dessa Through 5/22: Fri-Sat 8 […]

Young woman seated on bed in background, while another young woman stands with hands clutched in front of her face in attitude of excitement. Young man in black coat stands with his back to camera in front of the standing young woman.

Theater Review

Eb & Belle riffs on A Christmas Carol

by Max Maller November 24, 2021November 24, 2021

When the Ghost of Christmas Past visits decrepit miser Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, one painful memory the ghost has him swoop back over concerns a delightful young girl named Belle, who Scrooge was supposed to marry until greed eclipsed tenderness in his heart and she broke off the engagement. Adjusting the […]