Writers’ Theatre, Glencoe, Ill.
(847) 242-6000
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“Here is a Cold War fueled by that most heated of emotions—absolute fear,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. John W. Lowell’s 75-minute play turns a short office meeting between two co-workers into “a dramatic stranglehold of an encounter” by setting it in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, where privacy and freedom of expression have virtually no place. Even though Anna (Kate Fry), an editor for a government publisher, is a loyal Communist who’s been dutifully redacting the “pornographic” passages in a famous composer’s diary, she is not immune to suspicion. “Apparently someone has made a personal copy of the diary,” and the office’s director (Mark L. Montgomery) has launched an investigation that, for Anna, becomes highly personal. Every seemingly innocuous question that the boss asks is a potential trap, and every carefully worded response “can be twisted into an indictment” that could land Anna in the gulag.
The result is “a rather smart and sexy thriller,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Fry, an actress who, “to my mind, can compete with the Hollywood best of ’em,” makes Anna’s every thought process crystal clear. Because the young apparatchik is focused on self-preservation, she actually has “very little to say,” but “Fry’s face registers everything from ignorance to fear, defiance to raw terror.” Montgomery, by contrast, keeps you guessing. It could be that the director is conducting an official government interrogation or that he’s abusing his position to take sexual advantage of Anna. He might just be “looking for a confidante, or a mother confessor.” As the story “twists in deliciously serpentine fashion,” the audience can never quite be sure.
-
Third judge rejects DOJ's Epstein records requestSpeed Read Judge Richard Berman was the third and final federal judge to reject DOJ petitions to unseal Epstein-related grand jury material
-
'It's our financialized economy in miniature'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Texas OKs gerrymander sought by TrumpSpeed Read The House approved a new congressional map aimed at flipping Democratic-held seats to Republican control
-
If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.