Best Chicago theater:
Female directors influential to many top shows in 2019
Tribune critic Chris Jones ranks his top-10 shows of 2019.
A new generation of mostly female directors were behind many of the best shows of 2019. And, lucky for Hyde Park, Court Theatre turned out one stellar piece after another.
Here are the 10 best Chicago shows of the year, ranked, as absurd as that may be, along with another 10 that also deserve to be long remembered.
I’ve included only shows I reviewed that either originated in Chicago or had their North American premiere here, otherwise there would be room for such touring glories as “Hello, Dolly!,” “Dear Evan Hansen” and “An Inspector Calls.”
Here we go. You will have to tell me which ones I missed.
1. “Photograph 51” at Court Theatre:
A play about the oftforgotten mastermind of the competitive scramble in the early 1950s for the double-helical structure of DNA does not sound like a candidate for the best show of the year in a great theater city. But Anna Ziegler’s biographical drama about the scientist Rosalind Franklin is rich, complex, averse to melodramatic heroes and existentially moving: DNA is, after all, the key to life itself. And director Vanessa Stalling’s Court Theatre production was exquisitely crafted, detailed and visualized with utter precision befitting a drama about scientific research. The star of the show, Chaon Cross, gave a performance that, in a different city or another media, would get you a Tony or an Oscar. Here, of course, it was all about the work. Franklin would have approved.
2. “Every Brilliant Thing” at Windy City Playhouse:
A British one-man show that became an American one-woman show beautifully directed by Jessica Fisch, “Every Brilliant Thing” rewarded its audience at every turn. People have always gone to the theater for hope: “Every Brilliant Thing,” penned by Duncan Macmillan and first performed and co-written by the comedian Jonny Donahoe, literally offered reasons to go on living. Reasons you could carry out with you; “Every Brilliant Thing,” you might say, was hope to go. And none of this would have worked without the actress Rebecca Spence, fusing her own biography and considerable personal charm with the words on the page. This was spectacularly generous work, not only involving the audience but enveloping them in a place of warmth, compassion and optimism. Nobody wanted to leave.
3. “Lottery Day” at the Goodman Theatre:
The poetic scribe Ike Holter brought his seven-play Rightlynd saga, one of the most notable accomplishments in Chicago playwriting of the past decade, to the Goodman Theatre climax it deserved. “Lottery Day” did not betray Holter’s activist storefront roots, nor his commitment to his ad hoc local repertory company of actors, including the director Lili-Anne Brown. But this capstone was Holter reaching for profound themes impacting the destiny of his home city: he wrote of gun violence, inequitable schools, racism, gentrification, the corruptions of the “Chicago way,” the stealing of stories by careerist white progressives. He did this by sticking all of these things in one backyard on one fateful Chicago day, and setting them all loose. No winners, but helpful truths all around.
4. “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf” at Court Theatre:
It must have tempting for the director Seret Scott to try and make Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreo-poem relevant to today’s issues in some self-conscious way. Instead, Scott and her immensely talented cast mostly got out of Shange’s way, and dedicated themselves to allowing her gorgeously expressed words to speak loud, after nearly half a century of American history and no decline in sorrows. “Colored Girls” was always, of course, a work ahead of its time: its poetic expression at Court felt like a rebirth, a renaissance, a celebration of what the late Shange long-ago called “a black girls’ song.” In this production, we were all inside a Greek-style Agora, listening to all of these halfnotes and tunes and rhythms and struggles, as if for the first time.
5. “Dana H.” at the Goodman Theatre:
So strange a show was “Dana H.” that it contained no spoken lines: instead, we watched as an actress, Deirdre O’Connell, precisely lip-synced to words spoken on tape by the real Dana H., who just happened to be the mother of the playwright, Lucas
Hnath, and who was abducted by a acquaintance and held for months against her will. “Dana H.” divided people, but most everybody thought this a unique, riveting and daring show, forcing you to think about the complexity and force of first-person testimony and the dangers of its fusion into conventional storytelling. Hnath was writing about all kinds of relevant things: the difficulty of speaking out and the perils of someone monetizing and reinterpreting your truth, in the all-American way.
6. “Grey House” at A Red Orchid Theater:
It’s hard to scare people in a theater and it’s even harder to craft horror that works for people who don’t feel alone in the dark with a movie. But the Chicago playwright Levi Holloway managed all of that, playing with the preconceptions of the genre in a deliciously metatheatrical way and forging a live thriller with path unknown. And with its flock of creepy teenage girls, director Shade Murray’s production was every bit as unsettling as the script. Shiver.
7. “Yen” at Raven Theatre:
This gorgeous little drama from the playwright Anna Jordan was not the first show to probe the desperate outcomes of parenting in absentia or the perils of adult caregivers who remained kids themselves, but it wrestled with those themes in an uncommonly intense and yet compassionate way. Director Elly Green’s production was among the best productions in this long-established theater’s history, filled with actors offering up risky and uncompromising performances, all encapsulating the work’s themes of longing and sadness. Beautiful.
8. “Pomona” at Steep Theatre:
Steep Theatre is a courageous kind of theater that knows its audience will go along on some rough rides, all in the service of understanding human pain and cruelty. Alistair McDowall’s play was one such trip, filled with elliptical plot twists, strange scenes and actors willing to go to the wall to tell this story of lonely people in a cold city with emptiness and corruption at its heart. Everything in director Robin Witt’s production, of course, happened right in your face, and I watched plenty of audience members wince, and then turn back, trying to figure out the deeper truths that the show was trying to reveal, even as we all ran away.
9. “Six” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater:
Successful theater — and, mark you, the musical “Six” was a blast — always starts with a great idea. In this case, the notion of turning each of Henry VIII’s much-maligned spouses into pop divas ready, willing and able to sing their own empowering anthems was the kind of notion of which commercial producers dream. Sure, there were deeper shows. But the Broadway-bound “Six” really managed to evoke the feeling of being at a pop concert where the stars just happened to be Tudor queens and, on a deeper level, it made you realize how much depends on the moment in history in which we are born. The whole thing was accessible fun all the way, especially since the gritty queens all retained their their wit, if not their heads.
10. “The Adventures of Augie March” at Court Theatre:
Just to theatricalize this picaresque 1953 novel by Saul Bellow — once a household name in Chicago — was an achievement in and of itself. And director Charles Newell’s production caught most of the work’s existential themes, as its wandering, lost hero tried to connect himself, and by extension Bellow’s home city, to the swirling world at large. Not only did Newell find a visual metaphor that worked, but his ensemble cast created a whole series of jewel-like portraits of adventurers and nervous apologists, lovers and losers, the thrilled and the bereft, all struggling for the viewer’s attention.
Ten more memorable shows, in alphabetical order: “A Chorus Line” at Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago; “Dutch Masters” by Jackalope Theatre; “For Services Rendered” by Griffin Theatre Co.; “Grinning From Fear to Fear” at Second City e.t.c.; “Hamlet” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater; “Into the Woods” at Writers Theatre; “King Hedley II” at Court Theatre; “The Producers” at the Paramount Theatre; “Red Rex” at Steep Theatre; “West Side Story” by the Lyric Opera of Chicago.