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Chicago Tribune
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Gorgeous' by Raven and Rivendell Theatres begins with the love between pets and people
The bond between a beloved pet and its human is a powerful thing. Animals can draw a person out of depression, provide a sense of purpose and comfort a lonely heart — and when relationships fall apart, the question of pet custody can be as painful as any other aspect of breaking up. These emotions and more are triggered by the English bulldog that gives her name to 'Gorgeous,' a new play by Keiko Green now onstage at Raven Theatre in a co-production with Rivendell Theatre Ensemble. Kirsten Fitzgerald directs the world premiere of Green's dramedy about an unlikely friendship, which has its touching moments, even if some of the narrative turns and tonal shifts feel rather sudden or far-fetched. In this two-hander, Stephanie Shum plays Jenny, a young Japanese American woman who works as a certified nursing assistant and is mourning the recent death of her partner Bill, an older man who was her patient before the two formed a relationship. As she sorts through old belongings in Bill's suburban Georgia home, which he has left to her, Jenny is startled by a middle-aged woman appearing in her garage. Bernie, played by Rivendell artistic director Tara Mallen, turns out to be Bill's estranged wife, and she has returned to lay claim to the house. After threatening legal action, she offers Jenny an alternative option: keep the house but hand over Gorgeous, who used to belong to both Bernie and Bill. The problem? Jenny is deeply attached to the bulldog, having trained and exhibited her in dog shows, where Gorgeous has established herself as a prize-winning competitor with a promising future. Mallen's character is a blunt, irreverent woman with a thick Southern accent, a tendency toward microaggressions and a talent for manipulation. She also delivers most of the play's best one-liners. During Bill's funeral, Bernie arrives late wearing oversized sunglasses and conspicuously sits in the front row during Jenny's moving eulogy, after which she crashes the stage to hurl expletives at her husband's corpse. Her explosive personality and underhand tactics constantly antagonize Jenny, a down-to-earth woman who's more or less content staying in her small hometown despite often being treated like an outsider. Over a series of confrontations between the two women, secrets emerge about Bill's past that make Jenny question the man she thought she knew, while Bernie's bitterness becomes more understandable. Domestic abuse and anti-Asian racism are two of the heavier subjects addressed in the show, which takes some dark turns — especially with one startling visual created by scenic designer Mara Ishihara Zinky and props designer Paloma Locsin. After so much tension, Green's resolution feels somewhat too convenient. I also have mixed feelings about the real dog who steals the final scenes; she's an adorable crowd pleaser, but her presence distracts from the actors' delivery of some key dialogue. All in all, though, 'Gorgeous' is worth seeing for its vividly rendered characters and its thoughtful exploration of grief, loneliness and the complicated legacy of one man for the women who survive 'Gorgeous' (3 stars) When: Through June 7 Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Tickets: $45 at
Chicago Tribune
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘At the Wake of a Dead Drag Queen' is about identity in a small Southern town at the end of the AIDS crisis
For those of us who lived through the AIDS crisis, 'At the Wake of a Dead Drag Queen' triggers too many memories of performances at funerals and wakes, staged in rooms filled with people trying to smile through their tears. For most younger folks, the appearance of a drag queen offers the chance to hoot and holler, to have fun and show some support. Sitting there at 'Wake' on Friday night, I found myself hoping that Terry Guest, the writer-performer behind this world premiere from Story Theatre (in residence at Raven Theatre) would not let the voluminous audience reaction go to his head. Steeped in his own sense of Southern gothic, Guest is a huge Chicago writing talent; I've admired his work since I saw 'Magnolia Ballet' some three years ago. 'At the Wake of a Dead Drag Queen,' which was first produced even before that, could really be something. But that will take more focus and work, and maybe even Guest giving up his starring role. Guest has said that his 85-minute piece, a two-hander also starring the phenomenal Paul Michael Thomson, was inspired by the death of Guest's uncle from AIDS at the age of 35. The show is set in 2004, backstage at a small-town Southern establishment where a drag queen named Courtney Berringers (Guest) holds nightly court. Through the narration of this character, whose 'government name' is Anthony Knighton, we learn of struggles and aspirations, as you might expect, but Guest also builds a complex picture of one who has built impermeable personal walls of such solidity that he has rendered himself incapable of accepting the support he needs. Even when proffered. Therein lies the core of this show, as directed by Mikael Burke. Thomson's character, a young man named Hunter Grimes, falls in love with his fellow performer. Grimes performs as Vickie Versailles but off stage he focuses mostly on trying to connect with his friend. Since Anthony is Black and Hunter is white, the two debate issues of race and oppression as they change their gowns, both being outsiders in a sometimes cruel town. In these moments, 'Wake' is very moving. It's fundamentally a piece about friendship and boundaries and you hardly need to perform in drag to recognize its topography. Thomson is credible at every single moment. As vulnerable as he is forceful, this actor inhabits a wounded character who is unafraid to deviate from the drag queen cultural gospel, not all of which he even knows. We intuit that Hunter has figured out that love is the only means to salvation. Truly, Thomson's work as the second banana in this show is one of the best pieces of acting I've seen this year in Chicago. As his friend spirals downwards, this character keeps calling and calling. To say that the audience becomes invested in this relationship is to understate. Burke, the very capable director, clearly focused there. Guest is very potent and entertaining, don't get me wrong, although I think if he stepped out of the show for a while in favor of one of Chicago's many professional drag queens with top-shelf lip synching skills, he'd be better able to see what it now needs. That's mostly specificity: Of performance, of theme, of time and of location. Ideally, we'd have a better sense of how the performance space separates from the backstage areas and of what a small-town Southern drag club really looked, felt and sounded like in 2004. The set here, from Alyssa Mohn, is rich in symbolism but I found myself wondering about who and what went where and why. To my mind, the flashback structure also needs more clarity and although Guest clearly started down the road of using the drag performances to mirror the relationship we are watching unspool, it could go much further for a greater sense of unity; as of now, the musical numbers live somewhat uneasily within the whole, lacking the snaps and pops of climaxes. The show is already attracting and exciting an audience; the remaining challenge, which could make this a show that could live long here in Chicago or even off-Broadway, is to raise the emotional stakes and yet better honor those artists who lived, worked, and sometimes died, all too young, long before RuPaul. Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. When: Through May 25 Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Chicago Tribune
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘A Lie of the Mind' is a Chicago-style treatment of Sam Shepard's most difficult play
With 'Fool for Love' playing at the Steppenwolf Theatre and now 'A Lie of the Mind' at the thriving Raven Theatre, Chicago is having something of a Sam Shepard revival. The late, great bard of the lonely American prairie and desert went out of favor here for a while; it's good to have his work back and being interpreted by a younger generation of artists. I found Steppenwolf's 'Fool for Love' overly styled and tentative, but that's far from the case with director Azar Kazemi's Raven production, filled with compelling young actors such as Ian Maryfield, Arash Fakhrabadi, John Drea and Gloria Imseih Petrelli going for broke in Raven's intimate theater. Now 40 years old, 'A Lie of the Mind' started out as a three-act, four-hour play, although Raven is using the revised version, first produced by the New Group in 2010, that clocks in at around 2 hours and 40 minutes — still nearly twice as long as 'Fool for Love.' The piece has accurately been described as the final episode in a quintet of familial dramas that also includes Shepard's 'Curse of the Starving Class,' 'Buried Child,' 'True West' and 'Fool for Love' and it's probably fair to say that it's Shepard's last great 20th century masterpiece. His 'Long Day's Journey Into Night,' kinda. All of those plays deal with broken families and romantic relationships, some subject to healing, some not. All of them are about the disconnect between the sparse natural environment in these United States and the human craving for intimacy. And all deal with American iconography: more specifically, the nation's foundational reliance on mythology and self-dramatization and the largely detrimental impact of all of that on, well, just making love and having children and trying to keep the wolf from the door. Whatever else I have to say about Kazemi's show here, this is a most serious production, one that understands this great writer strikingly well and that wrestles admirably with what is, I think, his most difficult work. All the characters in 'Lie of the Mind,' even the parental figures played here by Meighan Gerachis (in an exceptional stretch of her long career in Chicago theater) and Rom Barkhordar, who plays Baylor, the classic brutal Shepard father figure. The plot? It involves a young marriage where there has been horrific domestic abuse and both parties, aggressor and victim, have gone back to their original families in a kind of psychic retreat. Things go from there. Thus the piece tells the story of two agonized families striving for, oh, I don't know, coherence? Forgiveness? Self-awareness? Revenge? Redemption? Probably all of the above. Compared to other productions, which have fused much music into the show and used a sparser and more experimental or meta visual aesthetic, Kazemi situates the play more in terms of domestic realism or, if you like, a storefront Chicago gestalt. That's fair enough, especially given the resources at Raven, and it often works very well in terms of helping us identify with these struggling characters and reminded us of the autobiographical underpinning of all this man's plays. At other times, though, it fights Shepard's more surreal inclinations, especially as the play goes on and its non-realistic elements become more and more pervasive. The show's strength is the potent and courageous ensemble acting, as adroitly and generously directed by Kazemi (it will get yet better too). Its weakness is an intermittent lack of vulnerability and an occasional disinclination to leave all of that behind and pull out individual characters who have figured out that their travails flow from the difficulty of stopping American family life from turning into a Sam Shepard play. Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@ When: Through March 22 Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes
