Events Next 7 Days
Celebrate Hops, History and Craft Beer
Wed., May 22, 6-9 p.m.Drink Events
Learn about Chicago's urban history while sipping on a pint with Denese Neu, author of Chicago by the Pint.
773-878-5942The Birdfeeder Doesn't Know
Sun-Wed 5/19-5/22: 7:30 PMTheater & Performance
A couple's relationship with their disabled son encounters rough patches as he grows up. $10
Orange Flower Water
Through 6/9: Thu-Sat 8 PM , Sun 3:30 PMTheater & Performance
Craig Wright's play of domestic dysfunction contains one of the most excruciating onstage depictions of marital sex I've seen. Kathy (Cyd Blakewell) seduces Brad (Keith Neagle), the husband about to leave her for another woman. The raw intensity of the scene, which takes place on the singular set piece—a queen-size bed—manages to evoke both the ephemerality of love and the selfishness of pleasure. Director James Yost's staging reveals the hostility and aggression that underlie desire; Kathy doesn't want to keep Brad, she wants to degrade—or is it destroy?—him. Either way, Blakewell's emotional journey is one of the show's high points. Yost keeps all actors onstage throughout, heightening the feeling of ambient suffocation imparted by married coupling. Wright's script doesn't have much new to say about marriage, and the ending, with its moves toward closure, feels particularly cloying. Still, this expert BareBones and Interrobang coproduction appeals far beyond its climax. —Suzanne Scanlon $25
The Electric Baby
Through 6/22: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PMTheater & Performance
A tragic car accident and a luminous baby inspire an unlikely friendship. $30
The Knowledge
Through 6/23: Thu-Sat 8 PM; additional performances Sun 4/28 and 5/5, 5 PMTheater & Performance
Steep Theatre Company's U.S.-premiere production of a British dramedy by John Donnelly deftly presents the British school system as an unforgiving farce. Under Jonathan Berry's direction, Jeff Award winner Caroline Neff is fantastic as Zoe, a naive young teacher assigned to babysit four teens the school would rather see pushed through the cracks headfirst. She's supposed to be teaching boundaries, but her own become fuzzy, with both laughable and dangerous results. The prudish title may be the best summation of which worlds collide here: "the knowledge" alternately refers to oral sex, what a teacher imparts to students, and the hundreds of routes a London cabbie must memorize to get certified. Though Britishisms abound, the play's vulnerable characters and thought-provoking power struggles translate well on our side of the pond. —Marissa Oberlander $20-$22
Reverb
Through 6/23: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PMTheater & Performance
A couple experiences reverberations of their own troublesome pasts, causing a "vicious maze of loving tenderness and mortal combat." $25-$30
Brighton Beach Memoirs
Through 5/29: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3:30 PMTheater & Performance
Set in the far reaches of oceanside Brooklyn in the depths of the Great Depression, the first play in Neil Simon's semiautobiographical "Eugene trilogy" surveys the emotional and financial tribulations of an extended Polish-Jewish family. Charlie Bazzell shines as the smart-ass teenage narrator, Eugene. There aren't any obvious weak spots in director Cody Estle's cast, though more than a few actors flubbed lines as they gargled on thick Brooklyn accents. Simon's grand family comedy can feel at times like an entire sitcom season compressed into one sitting, with the first act setting up dilemmas like dominoes for act two's often pat string of resolutions. Ambitious stuff, maybe, but this Raven Theatre revival is up to the task. —Keith Griffith $36-$45
In the Company of Men
Through 6/30: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 5 and 8 PM, Sun 7 PMTheater & Performance
Neil LaBute employs numerous cinematic techniques in this 1992 play—rapid crosscuts among various locations, multiple incidental characters who appear only once—so it's no wonder the 1997 film version worked so well, especially given LaBute's drum-tight direction and pitch-perfect cast. But onstage, in a newly revised version, the story of two self-absorbed advertising executives plotting to ruin a female coworker's life as vengeance against all the "bitches" who've ever done them wrong is comparatively sluggish and inefficient, dulling its keen-eyed evisceration of masculine privilege. And director Rick Snyder's Profiles Theatre production never conveys the toxic, cutthroat environment of LaBute's hyperpatriarchal world. Still, the show's climax is devastating, no matter how long it takes to get there. —Justin Hayford $35-$40
