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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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Kate Hendrickson directs the Chicago premiere of Krista Knight’s Lipstick Lobotomy, an arch but moving 2019 play about mental illness, conformity, and the search for understanding in World War ll-era America. When Ginny (Ann Sonneville) checks into an upper-crust sanitarium hoping to be cured of obsessive thinking and persistent depression, she immediately latches on to Rosemary (Abby Blankenship), an unruly fellow patient and the eldest daughter of kingmaker Joseph Kennedy. What starts out as an over-the-top comic skewering of social mores gains a tragic gravity as the “cure” for the women’s illnesses comes into sharper focus.

Ginny’s and Rosemary’s families want them to fit in and not embarrass them, so they resort to the latest, largely-unproven procedures to correct their behavior. When Rosemary’s lobotomy goes so badly that it leaves her permanently incapacitated, Ginny is forced to rethink her ardent desire to follow her friend into the operating room.

The conflict between the desire to be like everyone else and to hold on to what makes one unique is an evergreen problem, given a twist in Knight’s cheerfully tragic text. Each era has its quack cures that look barbaric in hindsight. I have no doubt that many 2020 treatments for mental and emotional troubles will be considered savage and inept within a couple decades. So cutting out chunks of brain matter to make women behave is, sadly, not as outlandishly archaic as it should be. The horrific final image of a roomful of patients dancing and singing in grotesque smile masks is now lodged in my head like a bad dream. v

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Anton Chekhov’s famous dictum that if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must go off by the second is reimagined in Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco’s Kiev in the seemingly innocuous form of a diving board. No one literally goes off the board into the stinking murky waters of the pool on the Badenweiler estate, soon to be demolished by steamrollers. But what it hides has poisoned the whole family.

The parallels to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard are deliberate. But Blanco, whose work receives its dynamic and absorbing U.S. premiere with Aguijon under Abel Gonzalez Melo’s direction (in Spanish with English supertitles), has more than the economic disruptions of one family in mind. And that pool, in which matriarch Eiren Badenweiler’s child drowned years earlier, isn’t just about that earlier tragedy. The Badenweilers are representative of any family living under–and complicit in–the horrors of an authoritarian state, like the one that dominated Uruguay in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Eiren (Rosario Vargas), like Madame Ranyevskaya in Chekhov’s play, is torn between past and present, and depends upon generous helpings of denial to help her deal with her pain. But that denial has come at great cost to her disabled son Alden (Oswaldo Calderon) and daughter Dafne (the luminous Marcela Munoz), who soothes her own pain in opiods when not trying to smooth the conflicts among everyone else. Uncle Esvald (Sandor Menendez) has kept the estate running over the years–but for what purpose?

The arrival of Tavio (Israel Balza), the former tutor for the drowned boy, threatens to uncover everything Esvald has tried to hide. But his own guilt (and the disaster unfolding in the city of the play’s title) means that a true healing reckoning can’t be found. “The civil atom is as dangerous as the military atom,” Esvald observes at one point. In Kiev, that civil danger lives on; remorseless, relentless, and inescapable. v

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It’s not every day you see 128 roof tiles displayed on a gallery floor, ash from joss sticks painted on a canvas, and artwork cocreated by trained silkworms. But at Wrightwood 659, it’s possible. The four floors of the museum are filled with “The Allure of Matter: Material Art From China,” a new exhibition that looks at Chinese artists working in the material arts movement, which focuses largely on every-day items like hair, plastic bottles, or found objects. These artists experiment with one material for decades and transform it into something monumental. The Smart Museum of Art and Wrightwood 659 are introducing this movement in two parts with a total of 26 artists who produced work from the 1980s until the present day.

When I walk into the space, the docent reassures me that there is no right or wrong way to view the exhibition. I take the elevator up and am confronted with Zhu Jinshi’s work, Wave of Materials, a large installation made from xuan paper, cotton thread, bamboo, and stones. Xuan paper is a type of material used by calligraphers and painters and has been used as a significant material in Jinshi’s work since the late 1980s. Here, Jinshi crumples, flattens, and hangs the paper from the ceiling to create a monolithic, yet delicate, installation on the top floor.

Traveling down leads viewers towards Transformation, an installation created by Yin Xiuzhen in 1997. Scattered across two gallery floors and down a set of stairs, the piece exhibits black and white photographs on tiles that lie on the floor. I appreciate the experimentation with displaying photographs, as photography can become traditional and less experimental than other mediums, transfixed to frames on white walls. Xiuzhen takes city streets–the rubble, the physical materials that build a city–and conflates them with images of day-to-day life from her Beijing neighborhood.

My favorite piece in the exhibition is Zhan Wang’s Beyond 12 Nautical Miles–Floating Rock Drifts on the Open Sea, made in 2000. The single-channel video documents a performance of a stainless steel “rock” floating in the open sea. The viewer sees a shining silver object with soft edges rocking back and forth slightly on the waves for eight minutes and 36 seconds. The work is meant to reference how any country can claim open water as their own territory, and how the rock simply travels wherever the waves take it. In five different languages, the rock has the following inscribed into its surface: “This is a piece of art created specifically to be exhibited in the open sea. If by chance you pick it up, please put it back into the ocean. The artist thanks you from afar.”

Bringing things back down to earth are Liang Shaoji’s trained silkworms. What started small has resulted in Chains: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Nature Series, No. 79, a large installation of chain-like pieces hanging from the ceiling wrapped in silk and cocoons from Shaoji’s silkworms. The artist–who has said, “I am a silkworm”–has raised them for more than 25 years. In his Nature series, the silkworms spin silk into certain objects, and in this work, it’s hollowed chains. Shaoji and his silkworms create work together as they play the role as the artist and the art.

It’s challenging to take in and absorb the exhibition, especially because the artwork is exhibited in two different parts of the city. Digesting one exhibition takes time to process; the works all range in concept and unconventional material. A personal tip: pick a museum to visit first, bring water, take a breather for a day or two, and tackle the next collection with a new set of eyes. It takes physical and mental time to sit with each piece, to really interpret and analyze the process. But at the end of it all, it’s worth it. v

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Among the matches burning in the dumpster fire of U.S. immigration is the system of chutes and ladders facing foreign artists. To make a long, very complicated story short: Overseas artists who want to stay in the U.S. without obtaining a U.S. spouse– or those who’ve already married another foreign national–must apply every three years for an artists visa. This is also known as the O1B: Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement.

Woof.

As they check off the long list of qualifications that comprise such an application, the artist must present press coverage of their work. You know, art criticism, a thriving field with abounding coverage.

Double-woof.

That’s where badass art critic and historian Lori Waxman wants to step in. An internationally renowned critic with a regular byline in the Tribune, Waxman is currently bringing her 60 wrd/min project to artists in need of this press–live and free of charge. Waxman spends 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writes a 200-word review. As a former student and number one Lori Waxman Superfan, I can attest that her writing is nothing short of face-meltingly insightful. This is truly a gift to Chicago’s artistic community.

While the initiative launched on February 1, artists can still schedule appointments for the 22nd, with completed reviews published in the April issue of Lumpen. For more information, visit 60wrdmin.org. To schedule an appointment, email [email protected]. v

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