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Dan Shore started working on his one-act opera, Freedom Ride, nine years ago. It was the 50th anniversary of the Congress of Racial Equality-organized protests that actually integrated public transportation in the United States, after the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation violated the constitution. Shore, a composer who also writes his own librettos, was teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans and had been asked to create something that would celebrate both that city and the civil rights movement. When he saw the 2011 PBS Freedom Riders documentary (based on Raymond Arsenault’s 2007 book of the same title), and also learned that Xavier had provided housing for some of the riders, he had found his subject. Research, writing, and workshopping followed.

Freedom Ride’s world premiere production, commissioned by Chicago Opera Theater, opened Saturday at the Studebaker. Under Tazewell Thompson’s direction, it’s a fast-paced 90-minute account of how a fictional New Orleans woman, Sylvie Davenport, decided to sign on for the risky ride to Jackson, Mississippi. We see her motivation grow, from a hoped-for personal relationship with the recruiter at the start, to something broader and more deeply principled. Ultimately she makes the trip in spite of his rejection of her and over her family’s well-grounded fears. In real life, freedom riders were beaten, fire-bombed, arrested, and imprisoned.

There’s a large cast of characters, including Sylvie’s mother, brother, and best friend, Ruby; preachers and organizers; assorted volunteers, and two sizeable choruses, one of which is made up of children. It’s a lot of people and story to process in a one-act, and the result, on opening night, was arguably more successful as a song cycle than a fully-developed opera. It might not have helped that the announced lead, soprano Lauren Michelle, was missing (for personal reasons, according to COT), though her understudy, Dara Rahming, stepped smoothly into the role of Sylvie. In fact, Rahming has sung this role before, and, Shore said in a pre-performance talk, he created it with her in mind.

The switch also allowed us to see soprano Kimberly E. Jones, a Chicago favorite, in Rahming’s place as Ruby. Among the rest of this talented cast: baritone Robert Sims, hitting the right dramatic and vocal notes as the organizer, Clayton Thomas; recent Ryan Opera Center alum Whitney Morrison in a bitter protest against rocking the boat; and a winning performance by tenor Tyrone Chambers II as Sylvie’s brother, Russell. The music–which Shore says was inspired by everything he was hearing in the Big Easy–ranges from gospel, blues, and spirituals to a “barbershop” quartet. It’s not nuanced: when a Jewish character thinks of his past, for example, the audience is flashed a hora. But Shore has produced an often rousing score that brings an important chapter of American history to life. COT Music Director Lidiya Yankovskaya conducts the Chicago Sinfonietta. v

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After years of reading the women-seeking-women Reader Matches ads and never seeing any I felt called to respond to, I just could not get hers out of my mind: “kick-boxing babe,” “Xena-lover,” “giver of tender back rubs,” “looking for articulate romance with a queer cutie.” She didn’t mention a size or shape of body that she was looking for. She didn’t talk about anything I found boring or stupid. The ad stuck with me all week, but I didn’t act. I was fat. I had almost zero dating experience. Calling a stranger was SCARY.

My roommate locked me in my room on the last night that the ad’s voice mail was active and refused to let me out until I left a message. So after wasting hours alone in my room, I finally left a voice message: “I’m fat and swear like a sailor,” “I grew tomatoes for the first time this year,” “I’m an art student.”

I could not believe it when she called me back! I was so nervous when the phone rang, but we had a long and easy conversation touching on things like the fact that her brother and I had the same pinup girl mobile, why marriage is stupid, and all the ways that monogamy is fraught. Then we set a time to meet in person the next week for our first date.

That was in October 1998. She gave me a tender kiss as I was getting out of her car. I gave her a tiny box of the tomatoes I grew in my garden. Twenty-one years later, we have a ten-year-old kid, a solid, loving relationship, and a yard with too much shade to grow tomatoes. –Searah Deysach

Josh: We were both recent divorcees looking for love.

Sheri: A friend asked me to help her write a personal ad in the Reader, and I decided to create one for myself too.

J: This was back in the days when online dating was shameful. I complimented her on her book choices, except for Ayn Rand.

S: Rand is great dark fiction. I waited a month until Christmas to respond.

J: After some e-mails back and forth, we talked on the phone and met for pizza.

S: I was training for the marathon and had just run ten miles, so I almost cancelled.

J: We both had friends call us as backup plans to bail just in case things went south.

S: Or in case he was a psychopath. We immediately connected on books, cats, and all things nerdy. It was love at first sight.

J: After dinner we went to the Green Dolphin ballroom with friends. The band started playing “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire.

S: He asked me to dance and that sealed the deal. The conversation turned to architecture. I was curious about the Baha’i Temple.

J: My friends suggested we go on a tour. Our second date was set for the next morning!

S: Before the tour he took me to breakfast at Walker Brothers for pancakes. We started hanging out every day and the rest is history!

J: Fast-forward six years to our wedding.

S: Fast-forward again to 2019 when we both had articles published in the Reader side-by-side!

J: That’s what I call a full-circle Reader Romance! –Josh and Sheri Flanders v

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With Autumn de Wilde’s new film version of Jane Austen’s Emma being released next week (the seventh time it’s been adapted for film or TV, not counting Amy Heckerling’s Clueless), it seems propitious that Chicago Shakespeare has Paul Gordon’s musical adaptation currently on the boards. I missed Gordon’s world-premiere musical of Sense and Sensibility on Navy Pier in 2015. But with Emma, Gordon and director Barbara Gaines create a world that, while charming, doesn’t really do much to expand the dramatic universe of Highwood, the bucolic country estate where self-involved Emma (Lora Lee Gayer) plots the romantic futures of others–with unforeseen results.

Part of the problem is that the songs and narration, while tidy and efficient at streamlining the story, lack deeper resonance. There’s a distinct sense that we’re being steered along, rather as if we’re on a Regency-era reenactment, chuckling at the social faux pas unleashed by Emma’s meddling. But the actual stakes here feel too low. The social distinctions among Emma, the self-assured poor-but-clever Jane Fairfax (Erica Stephan), and “natural child” Harriet Smith (Ephie Aardema)–an orphan of uncertain parentage and limited worldly awareness–are glossed over, despite the fact that marriage means something quite different to all of them.

Emma’s conscience and foil, Mr. Knightley (Brad Standley), sings the title song with emotion and fire. But as the spark to this flame, Gayer remains too much on the surface. Strong supporting comic turns from Bri Sudia’s affected Mrs. Elton (an Austenian take on Moira from Schitt’s Creek) and Larry Yando’s hypochrondriacal Mr. Woodhouse deserve note, and it all looks and sounds quite handsome. But it never makes the case for why we need to hear this story told in song. v

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It reached almost 100 degrees in Minnesota on the day that Erica and Adam got married. Frank cried. I did, too, but it was because I was happy.

I reached for his hand and he jumped in his seat. I scared him. After the ceremony, I asked Frank if he was crying because he was emotional, perhaps thinking about us getting married one day?

“No, that’s not why I was crying,” he said.

I stopped on the dirt path we were following to the reception. The air was humid and the ground felt like cake beneath our feet; the block of my suede heel sank into its sponge as beads of sweat chased each other down my back.

I waited for Frank to realize I had stopped walking.

“Do you still want to marry me one day?”

“Jesus Christ, Kaylen.”

“Is that a yes . . .?” I was wearing all white.

Exactly three weeks later, Frank broke up with me over FaceTime. It was a Saturday morning, and I’d propped my phone against a sturdy candle on the coffee table in our living room.

Wearing a sweater over my favorite nightie, I savored the comfort of our couch and held a mug that once held a bouquet of flowers he’d sent to work on my birthday.

Frank held his phone in front of his face while he spat dip juice into a Gatorade bottle and told me he was unhappy. His lip fat; his voice flat.

“I put ice cream in my coffee this morning,” I said.

I needed him to know what was in my cup. It was like when I discovered the value a garlic press could lend to guacamole. Who else was I going to tell?

“Nice. Was it good?” he asked.

Sipping my drink, by now a curdled combination of oily caffeine and clotted cream, I was by no means in denial of our relationship’s dissolution.

“I have to go to work,” I said. We hung up and I dumped the remnants of my affogato in the kitchen sink.

WIthin an hour, I arrived at the bridal boutique where I was a stylist, having just been dumped by the boy I thought I was going to marry. After dating for five years, it was not an unsafe assumption.

I found my coworkers in a circle at the center of a sales floor that was vacant of customers. It was one of those perfect Gold Coast mornings, and sunlight poured in through the boutique’s second-floor windows. I wished it would rain.

“I have an announcement,” I said.

It was too early in the day for me to have lost my keys to the store, and my hair was already up, so I wasn’t in need of a ponytail holder. The girls were intrigued.

“Frank and I are done.”

Their faces fell, but their eyes sparkled. In a setting where relationship success stories were our livelihood, this was definitely going to spice up the day. I had dressed up to tell people my news–I wore an asymmetrical, one-shouldered crop top over Frank’s white button-down with a fitted pencil skirt. I planned to look the part of a well-adjusted, stylish woman while relaying the details of how my life was going up in flames.

Frank left for a business trip two weeks before the breakup, just a few days after the wedding in Minnesota. What was supposed to be a routine, five-day trip turned into weeks of him all but ignoring my texts and calls. The girls and I knew something was up, and I had left work the day before promising I’d have answers by the time I returned.

“Frank and I are done.”

My delivery was crisp, but the words were chewy in my mouth. I swished the sounds around with my tongue and tried to determine, “Is it too salty? Undercooked? Please, tell me what I need.”

My store is staffed by a rotating roster of women who range in age from 20 to 60 years old, and who mostly all check the “in a relationship box” at the OB-GYN. My breakup officially made me a single woman employed by a brand that caters exclusively to the newly engaged, by default and design.

Frank and I moved to Chicago two years prior, and I started working at the bridal boutique almost immediately. As a self-imposed and societally sanctioned pressure to solidify our romantic history steadily crept in during our first year in the city, our underlying incompatibility emerged in step. We held our breath while our relationship treaded water. We had the perfunctory air any long-term couple perfects over the years: Is the dishwasher clean or dirty? How are we splitting time on Christmas Eve? Did you buy garbage bags? Are we having sex tonight?

But as I spent my days with a revolving door of brides-to-be, the professionality of our interactions reinforced a healthy barrier between me and them–the engaged girls–that masked the more meaningful disconnect of my own relationship. They wanted to marry their partners, and I was getting mad at mine for putting olive oil in his hair when he ran out of pomade.

I’m good at my job. I have helped many women say yes to the dress. The journalist in me knows the right questions to ask, and my oldest-sister mentality makes it easy for me to convey that “I’ll be the one in charge here today.”

It wasn’t until I had one foot stuck in the Minnesota mud, curls limp, back sweaty, that I snapped. We’d attended five weddings in a year and a half. I kept thinking ours would be next without pausing to consider whether that was even what I wanted.

“Frank and I are done,” I told the girls at the boutique.

Ana told me to step down from the chair I’d climbed to make my announcement and go sit in the gown gallery, so I did. Someone fed me a dry bagel, and I don’t really remember the rest of that afternoon, the first day I began healing my heart in the most unlikely of places.

It was only a few days later that I stood behind my morning appointment as she looked at me in the three-way mirror.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“No, I’m not,” I shot back. “And I’m going through a nasty breakup with the guy that was supposed to propose.”

My brain returned to my body just in time for me to witness my meltdown. This was not the place. Frank was not my future. The bride was a woman my age who was just trying to make conversation. She was a bridechilla and I’d totally zapped her zen.

“No, I’m not,” I said, with a regained calm, a tacitly implied chance for a redo–all we can really ask from each other and ourselves.

In the aftermath of my breakup, what had always felt like a benevolent, underlying “me versus them” dynamic of stylist versus client became suddenly personal. A bride-to-be’s very presence in my store necessitated she have something I did not, something I assumed I should–and would–have by now.

My workplace surroundings could have served as a constant reminder of what I thought I’d lost. The revolving door never stopped spinning, and for awhile, neither did I.

But the world kept spinning, too. Shipment of new product arrived each day a little after 3 PM. We maintained our standing champagne order with Sofia Coppola, and I alphabetized order forms before locking up the store and hopping in an Uber to meet my friends at the bar.

I packed up Frank’s things, starting with the contents of the second bedroom that we’d made his office. It’s my office now. I dropped notes in strangers’ pockets, fell in (and out) of love approximately 24 times and went for long runs on the lakefront after work each night. My morning announcements at the boutique kept getting juicier.

I styled 365 days worth of brides and attended several weddings with my friends and my family. The passage of time, which was all I really needed, marked itself subtly–in the dip of a deeper neckline, the curve of a shortened train, and the evolution of my friends’ own relationships. The ease with which I slept each night in my own apartment. Nothing changed, except for everything.

“Are you married?” the 24-year-old blonde from Texas asked me. She stepped into the center of the gown I held open for her in my hands, low to the ground.

She was in Chicago to shop for gowns with her mom and sisters over the holidays. I pulled the fitted, beaded gown up the length of her body. The zipper caught on its way up the showroom sample as she waited for my response.

“No, I’m not,” I said, with a smile she couldn’t see.

I knew where to apply the right amount of pressure to pull the zipper through its track of warped teeth. I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Are you ready to open your eyes?”

“Is this the dress?”

“Have you ever put a scoop of ice cream in your coffee?” v

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Let’s face it, only a few of us have relationships that call for a complete stranger installing a plaque at the site where we had our first kiss a la Barack and Michelle’s monument at 53rd and Dorchester, the former site of a Baskin-Robbins that they reportedly visited on their first date. But plenty of us can point directly to venues, restaurants, and perhaps even neighborhoods that are forever tainted in our minds by memories of love gone very wrong. Here are four Chicago spots that unfortunately resulted in heartbreak.

The Big Show
Musicians are creative, emotional creatures, and what better way to express their experience than delivering performances to the public infused with a spectrum of feelings: good, bad, and vengeful. The Replacements chose to give the audience the real deal on July 4, 1991, during their legendary “breakup” show in Grant Park during the Taste of Chicago. It was the last show of what was already announced as the Replacements’ final tour, in the last years of a band that hadn’t been getting along for a while. Shouting and arguing onstage during the last half of the show ended with the entire band handing over their instruments to roadies and walking off stage during the final number.

Swiping left in Lincoln Park Zoo
Lincoln Park Zoo’s last male lion resident, Sahar, unfortunately passed away last September, but he was a popular attraction during his stay in Chicago. Sahar was originally brought to Lincoln Park from the Bronx Zoo in 2012 to serve in part as a younger male companion to the zoo’s then 16-year-old lioness Myra. After Myra died in 2014, Sahar needed a friend and Lincoln Park Zoo brought two two-year-old female lions from Oregon, Zalika and Kamali, to attempt socialization. Sahar, whether still missing Myra or just being a stubborn male, wasn’t having it. As the Chicago Tribune reported in 2015, “The clever boy plopped down right in front of the doorway where the new cats . . . would ideally enter the outdoor exhibit and start engaging with him. But he is foiling the plan, blocking their potential path while enjoying the shade and happily flicking his tail.”

Walking through Wicker Park
Nelson Algren’s biographers know for sure that he lived at 1958 W. Evergreen for most of the 1950s, but we’re not sure exactly where he might have been when he received a letter from writer Simone de Beauvoir, putting an end to their deepening long-distance affair. It’s readable in Hell Hath No Fury, an anthology of women’s letters edited by Anna Holmes. Algren had grown weary of the distance between them and acted distant during de Beauvoir’s visit, which resulted in her painful decision to end the romance. She writes with heartbreaking honesty, “As for me, it is baffling to say so and I feel ashamed, but it is the only true truth: I just love as much as I did when I landed into your disappointed arms, that means with my whole self and all my dirty heart; I cannot do less.”

The Wiener’s Circle
Dawn doesn’t want me to tell you her real name, but I was present for this incident (roughly 20 years ago) and can concur: breaking up with someone sometimes takes a village. We’ll call Dawn’s ex-boyfriend Rahm. Rahm was a cad from the get-go, and insisted that Dawn pay for most of their outings as well as wear only outfits that he had chosen. For the record, Rahm was not a professional stylist. When Dawn finally found her self-esteem, she decided to break up with Rahm at the Wiener’s Circle, the infamous hot dog stand at Wrightwood and Clark. Dawn insisted upon doing this at 7 PM on a Friday so we could all get food afterward and miss the loudmouth crowd, but a small group of Chads overheard her telling Rahm that she was done. A debate over Dawn’s worthiness as a girlfriend was ignited, resulting in one of the employees of the restaurant coming out to the picnic benches and shouting at everyone, “She dumped your white ass; get the fuck out!” v

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Claude McKay Love recounts his life in two parts that many will be familiar with: before college and after college. At just five years old, Claude is abandoned by his mother and father who he’s been told have moved to Missouri from Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, leaving Claude to be taken care of by his grandmother and her longtime best friend, Paul. Before they leave, the young Black boy sees his parents’ friends disappear, setting the stage for a series of moments of abandonment.

Gabriel Bump’s Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books) follows Claude as he grows up on the south side of Chicago, then goes away to college in Missouri. A young Claude is somewhat satisfied living in South Shore, being filled with love by his grandmother and Paul. It’s not until a riot kills several people in his neighborhood that struggles of violence and abandonment mount, and he is compelled to go to college to get away from the city.

From the start there is a strong premise of moving away. Before his partner, Teeth, dies, Paul tries to convince him they should move to Florida; a family friend left South Shore after struggling to accept his wife had left him, also for Florida; and their two children ended up in another state without either of their parents. Not long after, Claude’s childhood teacher Ms. Bev goes missing, his childhood friend Bubbly moves to Oak Park, and his other friend Nugget enrolls in a middle school on the north side, both lifetimes away for any child living in a city as large as Chicago without the resources to travel.

As the book progresses, more friends move away and change becomes the ultimate constant for Claude. But the timing of events in the novel is murky. There’s so much reflection on the history of Chicago, like the 1968 Democratic National Convention, that it becomes easy to think the book takes place in the late 60s and early 70s. It’s not until drill rapper Chief Keef is mentioned that I realized that Claude was living in the 2010s when he was in high school. Obama is also mentioned here and there, but it’s unclear which political office he’s holding at the time.

In Claude’s South Shore, a fictional riot happens. No more are the days of the neighborhood being safer, with mostly Irish and Jewish residents. Black people moved to the area, white people moved away, and violence increased in the 1980s, leading to the South Shore Claude knows. Mixing real and fictional events can create a strong new world, and including local school closings hints at the struggles this community faces. Yet the story is still missing world-building to paint how Claude’s South Shore “magically” became a more violent environment; while it could be assumed that local businesses had gone out of business or were not being supported, stable jobs were not available, and the area was a food desert (amongst other real-world resource issues in South Shore), Claude is mostly seen catapulted between home, school, and sidewalks. It’s an oversight that could easily make readers who are unfamiliar with Chicago fall victim to the lazy trope about violence on the south side.

A more vivid picture could have made clear why Claude’s South Shore is so susceptible to violence and why residents are angered by police presence in the area. His neighborhood on Euclid Avenue soon goes into uproar after a police killing of an innocent boy who was feeding his neighbors’ pets while they were on vacation. The Redbelters, a neighborhood gang who seem to gain so many members that enrollment in local schools decreases, face the police while residents of the area either join the fight or try their best to leave the scene before tension mounts.

Claude is nearly caught in the uproar with a friend, Janice, and her aunt Annette. Ultimately, 26 people die in the riot, including Janice’s uncle. Janice’s aunt eventually leaves her, too. The foundation of the two teens’ confusing (and quite unhealthy) romantic-yet-unromantic relationship becomes the center of Claude’s life until the end of the book, when he is in college.

The bluntness of Claude and his childhood friends provides many literal laugh-out-loud moments, like when Bubbly says, “My parents think a police officer tied him to the tracks because Teeth wouldn’t fuck him.” Among the constant deaths and other losses, Bump ensures a laugh–even if it’s a guilty one–to soften the blows of Claude’s reality. The second part of his story is completely unrooted from precollege Claude. Whether it be a symptom of his growing up or intentional plotting, Claude’s relationship to the city and others, even himself, feels confusing and it becomes difficult to understand why he makes choices that seem to contradict what he said was of value to him as he grew up in South Shore, like safety and a sustainable future.

In adulthood, Claude learns that whether he’s in Chicago, or Columbia, Missouri, home is more about who you’re surrounded by than where you are. Though Janice only considers leaving Chicago after a run-in with the Redbelters, the urgency of having to leave Chicago to thrive, no matter who you’re leaving behind, remains. It’s unfortunate and understandable that Claude, like many other real-life south siders, finds it difficult to see a future in the city that raised them. If only Claude could see that as a Black American, he’ll be running forever if he continues to rely on others to tell him where he belongs. v

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Quentin Tarantino’s movie Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is in part a gauzy wish fulfillment fantasy that fictionalizes and rewrites the true-life brutal murder of actor Sharon Tate. The play graveyard shift at the Goodman Theatre takes a similar, if not more practical, path. The play knows that it’s impossible to practice necromancy and raise the spirit of the beloved from the grave but hopes that perhaps it is possible to drape flowers on her legacy. Like Hollywood, graveyard shift bestows the same gentleness and beauty that Tarantino lavished on Tate. It’s an act of grace that is rarely granted to the average Black woman.

On July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland moved from Chicago to Texas to begin a new job and was pulled over during a traffic stop by Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia. The routine interaction, which should have resulted in no more than a warning or a ticket, quickly spiraled out of control and Bland, who recorded the entire exchange, was pulled from her car, forced to the ground, and arrested. Three days later, Bland was found dead, hanging in her jail cell. Encinia was indicted for perjury for making false statements about her arrest and fired; the charges were dropped when he agreed to leave law enforcement permanently.

The senseless and tragic murder of Black people by law enforcement in America has become a national crisis that Bland was aware of before her death and was an activist against. Rubbing salt in the gaping wound of these tragedies is the predictable and unempathetic public reaction. Within hours of these violent acts, the common reaction of the general public is to search for reasons why an officer might have been justified in an outsized violent overreaction, whether that Black victim was back-talking, selling cigarettes on the street, or walking home after buying Skittles.

The fact is that there is no justification for murder, and good police officers regularly take even extremely violent people into custody without causing harm. Racism is clearly in play. Writer korde arrington tuttle understands that even while processing the grief of loss of life, it is doubly brutal to reduce the life of a murdered Black woman to a statistic. He builds the scaffolding upon which to elevate the rest of her humanity in graveyard shift. Last April the Goodman and Black Lives, Black Words staged The Interrogation of Sandra Bland by Mojisolo Adebayo, a theatrical recounting of the transcript of the Sandra Bland traffic stop featuring 100 Black women, as part of the I Am
. . . Fest. I was one of those 100 Black women. To engage with these works as a Black woman is to unflinchingly contemplate my own mortality.

Tuttle creates a fictional Black woman named Janelle who embodies the spirit of Bland, and we follow her through her job search and move from Chicago to Texas. Actor Aneisa J. Hicks plays Janelle with full vibrancy and joy, leavened with the moments of doubt and insecurity of being a young professional striving to establish a career in a troubled economy. Director Danya Taymor does an exceptional job keeping the scenes light and frothy in the beginning, wisely anticipating the challenge of staging a story whose ending we already know. Set designer Kristen Robinson has smartly arranged the stage as a marble cemetery slab, so even as we laugh at the many mirthful moments, it ominously never fully lets us forget that lynching looms in the future like a dark shadow.

Janelle is paired with Kane, her long-distance boyfriend in Texas, played by an incredibly sincere and heartbreaking Debo Balogun. We ride the heights and depths of their relationship, and Kane offers a flawed yet painful requiem of anguish after the inevitable. In a metaphorical mirror, the other side of the stage is the interior of a Texas state trooper’s office where we follow the day-to-day life of Brian, self-proclaimed fuckup and a proxy for Officer Encinia, played by Keith D. Gallagher. Gallagher brings a full and necessary humanity to a character that would be tempting to write off as a one-note villain. His affable “good ol’ boy” charm allows us to see that the face of evil is often one and the same with the faces of those that we love. A scene where Brian tells a cornered raccoon “I know you’re just trying to survive” foreshadows the tenderness often granted to animals that isn’t extended to cornered humans.

The play vacillates between traditional storytelling methods and lyrical, poetic stylings for occasionally on the nose, yet usually smart and impactful, effect. When Janelle and Kane playfully sing the lyrics “Say my name, when no one is around you, say baby I love you” it takes on a sickening double meaning when contrasted with Brian and Elise rocking out to rap music, singing the “N-word” with impunity, knowing that the PC police cannot mandate empathy in the graveyard of shadowy hearts. #SayHerName. v

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In 2017, First Floor Theater premiered Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow–a send-up of what Winkler terms “white people by the water” plays, in which a wealthy clan gathers at a beach house to fight, reveal secrets, and reminisce. The catch for Winkler’s work was that the characters were all played by people of color, offering ironic counterpoint to white privilege’s ridiculous insularity.

Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly, which had its world premiere in 2006 with Chicago’s Congo Square before eventually opening on Broadway in 2011, has some things in common with the world that Winkler parodied. But Diamond’s family is actually Black and wealthy, with long roots in Martha’s Vineyard and Romare Bearden paintings on the wall. Diamond, who grew up the daughter of an academic, has written about the collisions of class and race within and without Black families and communities in several works. In Stick Fly, now revived at Writers Theatre under Ron OJ Parson’s direction, the outlines of the traditional “well-made play” serve her well in anatomizing the subtle but hurtful hypocrisies and internalized self-loathing that keep the characters from fully connecting.

The title comes from the work that Taylor (Jennifer Latimore), an entomologist from an economically lower class, does with examining insects; they have to be secured to a stick in order to document their wing movements. But things rapidly become unglued over the course of a few days, as Taylor’s fiance Kent (Eric Gerard) faces the disdain his neurosurgeon father Joe (David Alan Anderson) has for his nascent career as a novelist, compared to the chip-off-the-old-block attitude Dad has toward his eldest, plastic surgeon Flip (DiMonte Henning), who brings Kimber (Kayla Raelle Holder), an old-school WASP, to meet the family. Meantime Cheryl (Ayanna Bria Bakari), daughter of the family maid, learns the truth about her parentage.

Diamond’s writing works against the grain of the potentially soapy plotlines, and each character gets at least one moment to burst through social constraints to reveal what they’re really thinking. (Latimore’s Taylor more than the rest.) Old history (familial and otherwise) collides with present-day realities, and by the end of Diamond’s wise and funny play (well acted across the board here), everyone’s wings have been clipped by reality. v

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Adapted by Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan from the original play Scherenschnitt, (scissors cut), by German playwright Paul Portner, Shear Madness is not so much a fully realized work of comic theater as a kind of silly party game writ large. The premise is reminiscent of interactive murder mysteries: setting–a beauty salon; characters–a brace of stereotypes (gay hair dresser, ditsy beautician, bulldog homicide detective); McGuffin–the murder of an upstairs neighbor. But the real mystery is why we should care about the death of a character we never meet. This is theater for people who don’t know much about theater, and comedy for audiences drunk enough to laugh at anything. (The snack bar serves alcohol that you can take into the auditorium.)

The current Mercury Theater Chicago revival, directed by Warner Crocker, is by design tipsy and “fun.” Actors break character all the time, ad lib ad nauseum, or fake cracking up (like the late Harvey Korman used to do way too often on The Carol Burnett Show). And then about halfway through it all the fourth wall is ripped down, and the audience is invited to “participate” in the “solving” of the “murder.” I suppose this kind of thing must have seemed daring in 1963, when Portner’s original play opened. But today the premise is too tired to even be called retro. There is nothing novel about Crocker’s point-and-click direction.

Still, the casting is great. In the leads, Ed Kross and Brittany D. Parker get lots of chances to show off their comic chops. But the flashes of comic brilliance they and the rest of the cast display from time to time make one wish they were in a real play. v

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Before Ta-Nehisi Coates laid out “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic in 2014, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic A Raisin in the Sun clearly showed the effects of racism on Black Americans seeking better living conditions–a problem we’ve yet to fully address. The Younger family–so cramped for space in their roach-infested apartment that son Travis has to sleep on the living room couch–hopes to buy a better piece of the American pie, thanks to a life insurance payout from their late husband and father. But what that pie looks like varies wildly, and Invictus Theatre Company’s current revival of Raisin, directed by Aaron Reese Boseman, honors those conflicting dreams with conviction and heart.

Matriarch Lena (Cheryl Frazier) wants to buy a house, even if that means moving to an unfriendly white neighborhood. Her son, Walter Lee (Michael Lewis), wants to stop being a driver for white people and take the wheel of his own destiny by buying into a liquor store. His little sister, Beneatha (Ashley Joy), wants to be a doctor and is torn between a bourgeois beau, George (Keith Surney), who is interested in her as arm candy, and a Nigerian student, Joseph (Jo Schaffer), who offers a broader vista for her life. Meantime, Ruth (Nyajai Ellison), Walter’s wife, is facing an unexpected pregnancy and anguish about her husband’s growing anger about his deferred dreams.

Hansberry crammed a lot of life into that small flat (the story is based in part on her own family’s legal challenge to racist restrictive housing covenants), and Boseman’s production goes for broke with heartfelt zest, spilling over the edge of Kevin Rolfs’s appropriately tiny dingy set. On opening night, there were some moments where the actors didn’t feel completely connected to each other, but it’s clear that they know these characters’ hurts and hopes to the bone, and I suspect the ensemble will grow even stronger over the run. v

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