“Every single play I direct brings up the question—why do we do plays?” says Anne Bogart, the founder of New York’s SITI theater company. “Radio Macbeth,” the company’s work now showing at Court Theatre, is no exception. Set in the 1940s, the play follows an ensemble of actors rehearsing for a radio performance of “Macbeth” in an empty theater. With multiple layers of performance going on throughout the play, the question arises as to what exactly the audience is watching: a performance of “Macbeth,” a performance of a company performing “Macbeth,” or a performance of the inner workings of the SITI ensemble on top of these other layers. Is it about Shakespeare’s famous work, or the experience of being an actor? Read the rest of this entry »

The musical “Caroline, or Change,” now playing at Court Theatre, takes place in November and December of 1963. It opens on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, though for most of the first act the characters go about their everyday tasks without any awareness that the president has been killed. “There is no underground in Lousiana, only underwater,” sings Caroline (E. Faye Butler), doing laundry for an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the basement of their home. The idea that rising water is both a harbinger of change and a violent force that could destroy the status quo pervades her every day, as she toils in the only basement for miles. The end of 1963 was a scary and uncertain time in America, with the escalation of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Caroline’s stressful life and her shaky ability to support her family on only $30 a week mean that she must shut out the events of the outside world. For her, subsistence is a greater concern than social progress. Read the rest of this entry »

The actor looked nothing like O. J. Simpson.

“Orenthal,” a production involving the Renaissance Society, the Experimental Station, and Court Theatre, had begun. The description of “Orenthal” in the email sent by the Renaissance Society was promising: it was to be a one-act portrayal of O. J. Simpson’s rise and fall, which would be contrasted with the story of Shakespeare’s Othello. I wondered what the two really had to do with each other. True, Othello and O. J. were both black, with white wives. And their names both began with O. But the story of Othello is a bit more fleshed out than that of Orenthal James Simpson—Shakespeare accounts for the reason behind Othello’s crime. The murder of Nicole Simpson, O. J.’s wife, was never resolved. What would be the base of “Orenthal,” the play? Read the rest of this entry »

Family, religion and race coalesce in Court Theatre’s production of Leslie Lee’s classic play “The First Breeze of Summer.” After having acted in a production at the University of Michigan in 1977, and two years later directed a production in Flint, Michigan, director Ron OJ Parson revisits and revives “First Breeze” at Court Theatre, where he is currently a resident artist. This production arrives almost thirty years after its original premiere in New York by the Negro Ensemble Company. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are looking for your standard over-the-top, saccharine musical, you won’t find it at Court Theatre. As a continuation of the Court’s rendering of classic American musicals starting six years ago, Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” will be running starting Saturday, March 15 through April 13. Based on the Hungarian play “Liliom” by Ferenc Molnár, “Carousel” explores the lives of individuals in a fishing village on the coast of Maine in 1873; fishermen live at the mercy of the sea while the women of the town face the harsh realities of laboring in the local mills. Read the rest of this entry »

If “Titus Andronicus” is one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, conventional wisdom says it’s because the thing is just too damned violent. The spectacle features a seemingly endless cavalcade of body parts getting chopped off, a disturbing rape scene, and a feast that culminates in the guests’ realization that the pie they’re eating is made of human flesh. It’s difficult to watch and difficult to stage, and plenty of criticism has been lobbed over the years at a piece of work that many detractors consider the Bard’s crudest effort, perhaps because it’s also one of his earliest. But with broadly grinning gusto for the challenge to get audiences to appreciate this black sheep of the Shakespearean canon, director Charles Newell sees the play as having an intensely relevant social value—not despite its appallingly violent content, but because of it. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were to approach Sean Graney out of context, he could pass quite easily as another nerd here at the University of Chicago—if one could ignore the soul patch and bald head for a moment. As I was fumbling around with the tape recorder, the easygoing director, dressed in a hoodie, whipped out a four-by-four Rubik’s cube. “I can do a regular one in about 1:20, but this one is harder to figure out,” he explains. “In high school, I didn’t do sports or anything else…so that’s how I got involved in theater, and I just fell in love with it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Do yourself a favor and don’t read a synopsis of “Thyestes.” To read Seneca’s masterwork in brief is to boil it down to two feuding brothers, Thyestes and Atreus, engaged in a grim sequence of murder, deception, revenge, cannibalism…and a lot more murder. As director JoAnne Akalaitis of Court Theatre’s production of Thyestes will tell you, there’s much more to the play than an endless cycle of bloodshed. Read the rest of this entry »