Theater: Aunt Dan and Lemon

Chopin Studio Theatre

Chicago

(800) 838-3006

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Wallace Shawn’s chilling Aunt Dan and Lemon gets “just the kind of carefully ambivalent yet wholly immersive handling it needs” from director Matthew Reeder, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Shawn’s “perennially controversial little play” focuses on a frail young woman named Lemon, whom we meet in her bedroom, “talking intimately and gently of Nazis and fascism.” Lemon shifts to remembrances of “Aunt Dan,” a family friend who used to regale her with bizarre tales about dominance and submission, the most strange being fantasies involving Henry Kissinger. The themes here are political, but the play is really a “cautionary tale, reminding you to be careful about who gets to say what to your children.”

Lemon’s memories are “populated with brilliant creatures spewing articulate hatred,” said Caitlin Montanye Parrish in Time Out Chicago. Most brilliant of all is the charismatic Dan, who expresses uneasy truths about the brutality of human nature. Brenda Barrie plays Dan as a woman of dominant yet “disarming sensuousness.” Even as you recoil, you can see why Rebekah Ward-Hays’ Lemon becomes entranced by her arguments about the necessary evils that must be committed to keep society safe. Then, after gradually forcing you to question your own motivations, the play hits you with the “cold and subtle question: Are we just less honest about our complicity in the world’s horrors than Lemon?”