Alex Huntsberger

Newcity Stage • 21st February 2017

Chekhov for the Smartphone Generation: A Review of At The Table at Broken Nose Theatre

Real, honest-to-god naturalism in theater is so difficult to achieve that it’s no wonder many modern playwrights and young companies are shying away from it. The returns are too low and the risks are too high. But if Spenser Davis’ production of Michael Perlman’s “At The Table” proves anything, it’s that these kinds of plays and performances can still create the subtlest kind of magic—an enchanted mirror in which you see your whole world reflected. The year might be young but this production fro

Newcity Stage • 23rd January 2017

Double Double, Jims in Trouble

If you saw Mickle Maher’s “The Strangerer” a decade ago then you certainly must see that play’s (loose) sequel, “Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double.” But even if you didn’t see “The Strangerer”—this critic, for instance, has only read the script—that is still no excuse for you to miss out on this odd, hilarious and ominous tumble down the rabbit hole. A brief recap before we continue: “The Strangerer” took place during the first of the 2004 presidential debates in

Newcity Stage • 22nd June 2017

Breaking Bonds: With Summer Remount, Broken Nose Theatre Invites Audiences Back To The Table - FEATURE

For five years, Broken Nose Theatre has been a fixture of the city’s storefront scene. Until recently, they were best known for Bechdel Fest, their yearly new-play showcase in which every show absolutely has to do one thing: pass the dang Bechdel Test. But now they’re known for “At The Table.” Written by Michael Perlman and directed by company member Spenser Davis, “At The Table” opened in February at the Berger Park Coach House to rave reviews, sold-out houses, four Non-Equity Jeff Award nomi

Newcity Stage • 12th May 2017

The Revolution Will Not Be Customized: A Review of American Hero at First Floor Theater

In Bess Wohl’s “American Hero,” directed here by Cody Estle in its Chicago debut, everyone’s bitten off a bit more than they can chew. From Bob (Brian McKnight), the ambiguously foreign franchisee of a new sandwich shop, to his employees—Sheri, (Saraí Rodriguez), Ted (Chris Daley) and Jamie (Annie Prichard)—to a beleaguered suit from corporate (McKnight again) who eventually shows up once Bob bails and the employees take matters into their own hands, “American Hero” sports exactly zero character

Newcity Stage • 12th February 2017

Progress and Privilege: A Review of Straight White Men at Steppenwolf Theatre Company

If you think the pre-show music is too loud when you enter the theater for Steppenwolf’s new production of “Straight White Men” from New York playwright Young Jean Lee—you are correct. The volume is intentional. As two gender-non-conforming performers, Elliott Jenetopulos and Will Wilhelm, explain when the play begins, how awful it must feel to be in a space that does not take your thoughts and feelings into account. (To be fair, they do have earplugs available.) What makes “Straight White Men”

Newcity Stage • 11th February 2017

Lascivious Morsel: A Review of Bootycandy at Windy City Playhouse

In a pop-cultural landscape dominated by corporate megaliths and sanded-down franchises—look no farther than the succession of B/B+ movies churned out by Marvel Studios on a semi-annual basis—it can be startling to encounter a work of art that speaks so defiantly in its own voice, especially when that voice is dirty as hell. Enter Robert O’Hara, a New York-based playwright and director, and his play “Bootycandy,” which is currently receiving its Chicago premiere at Windy City Playhouse under O’

Newcity Stage • 15th December 2016

On Hollow Ground

During the opening moments of “The Christians”—Lucas Hnath’s latest play, currently receiving its Chicago premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre with direction by K. Todd Freeman—one thing is clear: The design team clearly had a ball. Tasked with cooking up a cheesy, over-the-top megachurch service, the team of Walt Spangler (set), Scott Zielinski (lights), Joseph A. Burke (projections), Jaret Landon (music direction), Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen (sound) deliver a technical masterpiece that never cr

Newcity Stage • 23rd November 2016

A Midsummer Massacre

The premise of Emily Zemba’s new comedy, directed by Jesse Roth, sounds more like that of a horror movie. Four young and incredibly dumb lovers find themselves alone in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire. Well, mostly alone. There’s a dead deer in the cabin too. Oh, and there’s also a weird guy from animal control who shows up to help and yet somehow seems to make things worse. On paper, this show should end with the four young lovers running terrified through the woods screaming bloody murde

Newcity Stage • 22nd November 2016

Lonely at the Top

The great strength of “The Fundamentals,” Erika Sheffer’s new dark comedy, is its utter refusal to accept what it actually is: a morality tale. It takes the sharp, clean lines of class conflict and scuffs them blurry. There are no saints here, no martyrs, no devils. Only people, workers and management both, doing their best in a dehumanizing system that practically rewards greed, avarice and betrayal, where human beings are reduced to lines on a spreadsheet. In this world (correction, in our wor

Newcity Stage • 17th November 2016

A Twinkle in the Dark

On a scale of one to “death by rusty spoon,” this past year would score somewhere between “Limp Bizkit cover band” and “the comments section of a Breitbart article.” That’s where shows such as The House Theatre of Chicago’s “Nutcracker,” now playing for the eighth straight year at the Chopin Theatre, come in. This perennial holiday favorite provides audiences with comfort, joy and wonder—qualities of which the past year have been astronomically bereft. Once again, “Nutcracker” delivers those qu

Newcity Stage • 11th November 2016

A Boy and His Dog

Darkness and depression were always just underneath the surface of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” cartoons. At least they were in the early days, before it suffered the fate of all great art and became a franchise. Charlie Brown and his friends were complicated little people, grappling with complex, philosophical issues. The strip might have been for kids but its themes could be more accurately described as “for mature audiences only.”

Newcity Stage • 25th October 2016

Trading Spaces

For a play that is built around the same trope as the film “Freaky Friday,” writer-director Olivia Lilley’s play “Mary Shelley Sees the Future” takes itself far too seriously. With its minimalist staging, earnest realism and emphatically underlined theses, it is the kind of play that is agreed with far more than it is enjoyed. The play’s premise is fairly simple: Shelley (Lindsey Tindall), the recently widowed author of “Frankenstein,” abruptly switches bodies—and time periods—with a twenty-som

Newcity Stage • 17th October 2016

Not Nearly Wicked Enough

Right around the time that detective Eddie Caine (Javier Ferreira) tells femme fatale Jo Van Cleave (Lauren Roesner) that he inherited the Sphinx detective agency by answering the previous owner’s riddle, the plot of new musical “Wicked City” begins to click into place. This isn’t just a detective story, it’s the oldest detective story in the world. Van Cleave has asked Caine to locate the son she gave away many years ago after her brutish lover, Mayor Lawton (Jason Richards) made her get rid o

Newcity Stage • 13th October 2016

The Circle of Life

A good motto for Robert Tenges’ new play, “Dead Children” would be that old chestnut from Disney’s “The Lion King”: It’s the circle of life. Only, here, that circle would seem more like a noose. Tenges’ characters mostly live dead-end lives in dead-end towns, just like their parents did and just like their children will too. The circle of their lives is something that these people want desperately to escape. The play begins with a separation as husband Tom (Erik Wagner) and wife Renata (Kirsten

Newcity Stage • 3rd March 2016

Review: Midnight Cowboy/Lifeline Theatre

Before you ask: no, this is not an adaptation of “Midnight Cowboy” the film. It’s an adaptation of the 1965 book on which the film was based. Still, any adaptation would be incapable of entirely escaping the movie’s iconic shadow. Dustin Hoffman’s “I’m walking here!” is like an internet meme that arrived twenty years too early. And yet the parts of this production from adaptor Chris Hainsworth and director Christopher M. Walsh that can be compared directly to the movie hold up pretty well. Adam

Newcity Stage • 11th October 2015

Review: No Beast So Fierce/Oracle Productions

The last time that actress Katherine Keberlein and director Max Truax collaborated together, the result was Oracle’s Jeff-Award winning production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Mother,” with Keberlein herself in the lead role. The show was an intoxicating mixture of Brecht and Antonin Artaud—a stomping, beer-hall rally meeting. With “No Beast So Fierce” the two have reunited to take on Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” The results this time are far less rousing. If there’s one quality that exemplifies Ri

Newcity Stage • 9th October 2015

Review: Ride the Cyclone/Chicago Shakespeare Theater

To be a teenager is to be a creature of extremity. Not only your body but your emotions and ideas and opinions are expanding with the rush and fury of a newborn universe—your own private big bang. In telling the stories of six Canadian teenagers whose lives ended with absurd abruptness aboard a rickety wooden roller coaster, “Ride the Cyclone” also embodies their joyfully frantic mid-pubescent energy. Written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, the show is a modern cult classic in Canada. This

Newcity Stage • 6th October 2015

Review: Marvin's Room/Shattered Globe Theatre

Twenty-five years after it first premiered at the Goodman, Scott McPherson’s “Marvin’s Room” is still relevant because people are still dying—slowly, painfully, dragging their failing bodies off into the sunset. Written in the middle of the AIDS crisis—the disease to which McPherson himself would later succumb—the play sometimes feels like a light, comedic gloss on the body-horror genre. It’s an inconsistent script for sure, mashing bodily decay, broad sitcom humor and genuine pathos together wi

Newcity Stage • 16th July 2015

Review: Grand Concourse/Steppenwolf Theatre Company

I’m writing this twenty-four hours after the final blackout and “Grand Concourse” is still making me unsettled. Set in a Bronx soup kitchen run out of the basement of a Catholic church, the play explores the limits of forgiveness with playwright Heidi Schreck putting her nun protagonist Shelley (Mariann Mayberry) through hell and high water. Shelley’s kitchen caters to homeless transients like Frog (Tim Hopper, with Francis Guinan assuming the role starting August 11) who’s friendly and will sel

Newcity Stage • 15th July 2015

Review: Whatever/the side project

Given that its first scene contains a teenage girl scheduling an abortion and then her boyfriend showing her a gun—one that might as well come with a giant neon “Chekhov” sign blaring above it—this play is a quiet one. But it’s not a settled quiet, not the calm of a mid-summer afternoon nap on the veranda. It’s the proverbial calm right before the Category 4 storm. Written by Chicago playwright Robert Tenges and directed by Adam Webster, “Whatever” is one long 100-minute drop in barometric press

Newcity Stage • 4th July 2015

Review: Bent/The Other Theatre Company

I wonder what it would have been like to watch “Bent” in a parallel universe where Obergefell v. Hodges went the other way. It’s not an easy play to experience under any circumstances, and Keira Fromm’s production with The Other Theatre Company is a skilled, deliberate bludgeoning that leaves you walking out in a daze. At least in this universe when audiences leave the theater they get to walk out into a world where gay marriage is newly and still exhilaratingly legal. In that parallel universe

Newcity Stage • 2nd July 2015

Review: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike/Goodman Theatre

The opening moments of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” are pure Chekhov. A brother and sister sit in their country home staring at a pond, hoping to see a blue heron and marinating in their regrets. Then the sister propositions her (adopted) brother, their Jamaican housekeeper shows up shouting disturbing prophecies and pretty soon a half-naked movie actor is dancing around for all to see. That’s when you remember that this isn’t Chekhov. This is Christopher Durang doing Chekhov. Instead o

Newcity Stage • 29th June 2015

Review: All Our Tragic/The Hypocrites

One might think that Sean Graney’s title for his play/adaptation/mashup/opus “All Our Tragic” is a bit of playful hyperbole. But nope. It’s all in there. From Prometheus on the rock to Herakles butchering his children to Oedipus and Troy and Orestes’ revenge on Klytaimnestra, “All Our Tragic” is an entire survey course in Greek tragedy crammed into a single twelve-hour play. Oh yes, about that. It’s twelve hours long. And it is definitely worth it. Adapted by Graney from all thirty-two survivi

Newcity Stage • 23rd June 2015

Review: The Who & The What/Victory Gardens Theater

When characters clash in Ayad Akhtar’s “The Who & The What,” they do so under a number of different banners. The play, receiving its Midwest premiere at Victory Gardens, has conflicts informed by religion, generation, tradition, gender, family and love. It is a multi-faceted portrait of the ways in which we can be at war with each other. However, for vast stretches of its 110-minute run time, the play is also at war with itself. “The Who & The What” is half comedy and half drama—just like life,

Newcity Stage • 18th June 2015

Review: Body + Blood/The Gift Theatre

Priests are common characters in American storytelling but they are rarely ever protagonists. They often have a part to play, it’s just never in their own story. So it is refreshingly bracing when William Nedved’s “Body + Blood” gives audiences something rarely seen on the modern stage (or screen or Kindle, for that matter): a story about a man aspiring to become a priest that a) takes his faith in God seriously, b) has nothing to do with child abuse and c) allows this man to be a complete and t

Newcity Stage • 17th June 2015

Review: The Birds/Griffin Theatre Company

Irish playwright Conor McPherson is a master of dread. From “The Weir” to “The Seafarer” to “The Shining City” McPherson’s plays have an impeccable knack for slowly turning up the heat—so slowly, in fact, that his audiences barely even notice the temperature rising until they’ve reached full, excruciating boil. “The Birds” then is an ideal piece for him to adapt. Originally a short story by English writer Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” is most famous for the 1963 film by Alfred Hitchcock, a man

Newcity Stage • 15th June 2015

Review: Abraham Lincoln Was A F*gg*t/About Face Theatre

Any show buys itself some goodwill when it prominently features the Michael Jackson catalogue. The music of the King of Pop threads its way through Bixby Elliot’s bluntly titled “Abraham Lincoln Was A F*gg*t,” here receiving its Chicago premiere with About Face Theatre. A cappella renditions of Jackson’s songs embody the show’s (mostly) goofy and light-hearted approach, while the disassociation between the man’s music and his personal life—which two characters briefly touch on—points toward the

Newcity Stage • 12th June 2015

Review: Soon I Will Be Invincible/Lifeline Theatre

On paper, superheroes and stage musicals would seem like a natural fit. Both stories feature larger-than-life characters, bright shiny action and, more often than not, a syrupy core of sincerity. However the two most high profile superhero musicals to date, “It’s A Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman” and Julie Taymor’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark” were both kludgy, ill-begotten flops. Unfortunately, Lifeline Theatre’s “Soon I Will Be Invincible” falls into this same category. Adapted by Christo

Newcity Stage • 8th June 2015

Review: Motel 666/Wildclaw Theatre

A playwright friend and I were recently discussing the problems we had with shows that were collections of short plays. While these shows are often promising in theory they usually suffer in either consistency, quality or both. And at a deeper level, they often lack a unifying artistic vision that makes for a satisfying evening. The parts remain just parts, never cohering into a whole. By chance, I took this friend to see Wildclaw Theatre’s “Motel 666,” which just so happens to be a short horro

Newcity Stage • 2nd June 2015

Review: Chalk/Sideshow Theatre Company

Theater as a whole is starting to come around on sci-fi and fantasy. And while that might put it about twenty years behind the cultural zeitgeist (can’t wait for that three-part Avengers musical in the 2035 Broadway season), it’s also about dang time. There are new stories to tell, new worlds to conquer. And, besides, there have been so many plays set in the American living room that I’m afraid the furniture’s starting to prolapse. Earlier this season there was the epic Kentucky-fried-Tolkien g

Newcity Stage • 27th May 2015

Review: Les Liaisons Dangereuses/AstonRep Theatre Company

For “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” to work properly, you need to credibly believe two things: the danger, and the liaisons. AstonRep Theatre Company’s revival, directed by Charlie Marie McGrath, provides neither. There is no sense of danger, no illicit thrill to watching Valmont (Robert Tobin) and Merteuil (Sara Pavlak McGuire) work their devilish wiles. And there is no erotic charge to the couples’ scenes (nor to any of the scenes really). For a story that features seductions within seductions this

Newcity Stage • 26th May 2015

Review: Cowboy Versus Samurai/A-Squared Theatre Workshop

That title is a little misleading. Or it’s not so much misleading as it is entirely metaphorical. Michael Golamco’s “Cowboy Versus Samurai, ” being given its Chicago premiere here by A-Squared Theatre Workshop, doesn’t actually involve any scenes of cowboys battling it out with samurai. It is not a descendant of “Shanghai Noon.” Instead, it is a pleasant, sometimes kind of milquetoast story about an Asian-American man, Travis (Cary Shoda), whose quiet small-town Wyoming life is disrupted when a

Newcity Stage • 26th May 2015

Review: Lunacy!/Jackalope Theatre

Why is it that conspiracy theories like, say, the one about the US government hiring director Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing, continue to endure? Is the belief in a vast conspiracy underlining all things really all that different from a belief in the innate, inalienable righteousness of one’s country? Could a man who lied to America about the moon landing then go on to lie about something bigger? Like maybe a war? Patriotic paranoia is what rocket-fuels “Lunacy! (A Cryptohistorical Co

Newcity Stage • 25th May 2015

Review: Another Kind of Love/InFusion Theatre Company

There’s a problem sometimes at music festivals where you’re too far away from the band to hear them. Sometimes it’s because you didn’t get there early enough to get a good spot. Sometimes it’s because the amplification at said festival really sucks. But other times it’s because the band’s sound just isn’t made for a large festival stage. They are best-suited to playing clubs, not arenas. This same problem plagues InFusion Theatre Company’s “Another Kind of Love.” Performing in the Chopin Theatr

Newcity Stage • 14th May 2015

Review: The Little Foxes/Goodman Theatre

There is nothing little about Lillian Hellman’s 1939 potboiler “The Little Foxes.” The characters, the drama, the incestuous pairing of family and greed, it is all larger than life. Director Henry Wishcamper’s new revival at the Goodman, one with a knockout cast, doesn’t try to make the play smaller or more human than it is. This is a play about monsters—Southern, wealthy, money-grubbing monsters. Best to get out of the way and let them fight. Set at the turn of the century, “The Little Foxes”