THEATER REVIEW: "Three Sisters" ★★½ Through Nov. 21 at the Piven Theatre Workshop, 927 Noyes St., Evanston; Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes; Tickets: $25 at 847-866-8049 or www.piventheatre.org

If you're of the view that the great human drama of Anton Chekhov is best viewed through a comedic lens, you won't care much for the Piven Theatre Workshop's new production of “Three Sisters,” which does not pack many giggles. From the first moment, when lights rise on Joanne Underwood's emotionally wrought Olga, one senses one is in for a throbbing and very serious kind of theatrical experience.

And so it goes all night. In Evanston, the sisters are in defiant, irony-free mode.

It goes with some interest. The famous Joyce Piven, of the Piven Theatre Workshop, is, of course, at her best deep inside the actors' studio, and she works with some skilled and accessible actors here to forge a number of scenes that expose the pain of human ennui. In very intimate surroundings — 14 actors pack the playing area.

THEATER REVIEW: "Late: A Cowboy Song" ★★★ Through Aug. 29 at Piven Theatre Workshop, 927 Noyes St., Evanston; Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes; Tickets: $25 at 847-866-8049 or www.piventheatre.org

Polly Noonan has acted in virtually everything Sarah Ruhl has ever written. Indeed, it's hard to think of another playwright and actor so joined at the hip. The two of them look alike, talk alike, maybe even feel alike. They understand each other completely. Even David Mamet and William H. Macy didn't have quite the same thing going.

In many ways, Noonan and Ruhl were spawned by the Piven Theatre, that long-running Evanston theater that one could describe as a cradle, were not the Pivens such complicated creative parents. To see Noonan starring at Piven in “Late: A Cowboy Song,” an early Ruhl play, is to see one of those small Chicago shows with unusual resonance. Especially since its director, Jessica Thebus, clearly understands the poignancy of the moment.

“Late: A Cowboy Song” might well be the best show I've ever seen at Piven. Certainly, it's the best directed piece. The staging of what is, fundamentally, a play about all manner of uncertainties is gentle and knowing. Thebus has crafted a very careful blend of the abstract and the real and, in doing so, she takes a minor Ruhl play and treats it warmly, gently, kindly, teasing out its youthful truths and covering up its flaws.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Number of People" ★½ Through April 11 at Piven Theatre Workshop, 927 Noyes St., Evanston; Tickets: $25 at 847-866-8049 or www.piventheatre.org. Starring Bernard Beck.

In the last act of “Carousel,” it is observed that no one is really dead while there is still someone who remembers them. During the best parts of the new play at the Piven Theatre, “Number of People,” that truism kept popping into my head. Memory is one of our ways of debunking the finality of death. And that's surely why the loss of memory — either your own or that of someone you love — is always so terribly painful.

“Number of People,” a solo piece by the Los Angles-based writer Emilie Beck, extends that notion by presenting us with a old man who is losing the memory of his own life, a life that includes surviving the Holocaust. If memory is an imperative for those of us with simpler lives, it takes on a whole new import where such horrors are concerned. That's why we should always rush to take oral histories of those who were there; without testimony, truths inevitably recede.

When “Number of People” is delving into those powerful areas, it is quite a moving little piece. But it is also an overly long play, with too many digressions and too much florid theatricality instead of direct communication.