Theater season heats up with two new shows
After a relatively quiet August, the Chicago area theater season has begun in earnest. Below are reviews of two recent openings.
"Suddenly, Last Summer"
The first thing to catch your eye about Shattered Globe Theatre's excellent revival of Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly, Last Summer" is director/designer Kevin Hagan's gorgeous set. A lush garden in New Orleans' moneyed Garden District, it perfectly suits Williams' vivid tale of sexual repression and manipulation.
The second is the exceptional performances by Linda Reiter and Allison Batty. The pitch-perfect Reiter plays the ailing but still formidable Mrs. Venable, desperate to protect the reputation of her dead son Sebastian, a would-be poet murdered on holiday a year earlier. The luminous, porcelain-skinned Batty (who plays the role with the right combination of vulnerability and promiscuity) is her niece Catharine. Slightly unhinged after witnessing Sebastian's murder and confined to a psychiatric facility ever since, Catharine is compelled to reveal its terrible truth. In an effort to silence Catharine, Mrs. Venable tries to convince a psychiatrist (played with sympathetic detachment by Brian McCaskill) to lobotomize the girl.
Hagan builds slowly and surely to Catharine's shocking revelation --a frenzied, exhilarating monologue (another nicely pitched moment from Batty) -- that occurs under a blinding white light that makes the truth impossible to obscure.
"Some Girl(s)"
"The little atrocities we visit upon each other are really pretty breathtaking," says the average guy protagonist in Neil LaBute's "Some Girl(s)," which inaugurates Profiles Theatre's season-long LaBute salute. Lean, wry and unsentimental, with caustic humor and chilly candor, LaBute's examination of the carnage resulting from a busted romance is the sort of relationship drama at which Profiles excels. Director Joe Jahraus' taut production reflects a harmonious union between playwright and theater company that began last season with "Fat Pig" and "autobahn." The same can't be said of the relationship between Guy, an academic and aspiring novelist played by Darrell W. Cox (a master at portraying affable insincerity) and the "girls."Seeking absolution before his marriage, a seemingly contrite Guy tracks down former girlfriends hoping to right (and write) the wrongs he inflicted upon them. There's high school sweetheart Sam (a vulnerable Kristin Collins) still smarting from rejection 15 years later; Tyler (Jessie Fisher) the free-spirited Bohemian still more hurt than she lets on; married professor Lindsay (a fierce Susan Price, whose laser focus salvages a less-than-credible character) and Bobbi (Sarra Kaufman), the woman who got away. A fifth girl, Reggie (Julie Zarlenga) sister to one of Guy's high school buddies, appears in a deleted scene that serves as post-script to the 90-minute one-act.The play strains credulity at times and the reunion revelations get redundant. But the language is spot on and the performances are credible in this uncomfortably accurate look at the wreckage of some modern romances.