Invisible Man

Court Theatre, Chicago

(773) 753-4472

***

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Playwright Oren Jacoby has been “remarkably faithful to the source” in this first-ever adaptation of novelist Ralph Ellison’s 1952 magnum opus, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. The late Ellison had expressed skepticism that his celebrated novel, a wide-ranging encapsulation of the African-American experience, could ever be adapted for the theater. But Ellison would have been impressed by what Jacoby has achieved. Because the play hews so closely to the novel—even taking all of its dialogue from the book’s pages—it loses momentum when the story’s black Everyman retreats from life’s tumult to a basement. Still, though Jacoby and director Christopher McElroen need to do some tweaking, their Invisible Man is already “a must-see” work of theater.

We should expect nothing less from a book that was a “mid-20th-century American version” of Dante’s Inferno, said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. As the protagonist journeys from a promising start at a Southern college to activism and disillusionment in Harlem, no good intention goes unpunished and “no circle of hell is left unvisited.” Teagle F. Bougere, in the challenging lead role, proves again to be “an actor of breathtaking range.” Every life his story touches has been poisoned by pre–civil-rights-era racism, but his journey is no historical curiosity. It “suggests the human condition writ large.”