Chicago Shakespeare Theater
(312) 595-5600
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.
Timon of Athens is “surely Shakespeare’s most cynical play,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. When the titular nobleman suffers a hard financial fall, the most difficult lesson he learns is that other people cannot be counted on for generosity, even toward a person who’s been unfailingly generous before confronting his time of need. Director Barbara Gaines’s contemporization of this work was a bold move, given that her Timon, a Wall Street futures trader, is “clearly intended to be the kind of figure whose name adorns lobbies and theaters.” Unfortunately, we never learn exactly how to read him. Was he “a great man let down by the lousy world?”—or was his generosity born of narcissism?
Ian McDiarmid points us firmly in the direction of the latter, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. The Scottish actor plays Timon with “coolly arrogant panache,” making it fairly clear that we’re to view him as a “vain, self-centered fool” deluded enough to think that the sharks who surround him will come to his rescue. Gaines’s depiction of the pre-2008 financial world is astute and vivid, helped enormously by set designer Kevin Depinet’s ultramodern corporate offices and ticker crawls. Even so, Depinet “keeps an eye-popping visual ace up his sleeve for the top of the second half,” when the setting shifts to a deserted shore and “the ex-tycoon becomes a crazed, Lear-like beachcomber.” High-concept versions of Shakespeare don’t always succeed, but once this one gets rolling, “you’ll feel it like a sucker punch.”
-
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.