THEATER REVIEW: "Orlando" ★★½ Through April 10 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $40-$60 at 773-753-4472 or courttheatre.org 

Virginia Woolf's “Orlando: A Biography” is concerned with a young man who lives through many centuries and one day discovers that he retains the same thoughts and personality but has acquired the body of a woman.

“It is a strange fact but a true one,” Woolf wrote of Orlando's unusual discovery, “that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought.”

Hmm. That simple-put-potent line spoken from the stage of the Court Theatre in Sarah Ruhl's dramatic adaptation sends you pondering whether men actually think about maleness. Woolf's point, of course, was complex. On the one hand, women must think more about being female due in part to its imposed trappings — Orlando has to suddenly worry about complicated dresses. But Woolf also spoke here of the joy of femininity known to no man. Except, now, to this Orlando, a character partly based on Woolf's own lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Charles Newell, the artistic director of the Court Theatre, will direct a major Chicago revival of Tony Kushner's “Angels in America” in spring 2012.

The two-part epic, Newell said, will feature a common company, rehearse simultaneously, and open in its entirety on the same day. Newell said that he wanted to encourage “as many people as possible” to see the shows in a marathon. He also said that the production was Kushner's personal suggestion and that the playwright is expected to be in Hyde Park for at least some of the process.

Court also will produce the first stage adaptation of the Ralph Ellison novel “Invisible Man,” adapted by Oren Jacoby. It will be directed by Christopher McElroen, a founding artistic director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem and opens in January.

The Court season will kick off in September with “Spunk,” George C. Wolfe's zesty adaptation of the work of Zora Neale Hurston. In November, the Hyde Park institution will open a one-man version of “An Iliad,” as adapted from the Homer by Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare and starring Timothy Edward Kane. Newell, who has a busy year ahead, will direct.

THEATER REVIEW: "Three Tall Women" ★★★½ Through Feb. 13 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Running time: 2 hours. 20 minutes; tickets: $40-$60 at 773-753-4472 or www.courttheatre.org

On a good night — if "good" is the right word — Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women" can make you feel like every other show or movie in town is nothing more than a peripheral and tangential meditation on pointless ephemera. Or, to put it another way, yet another chance for you to fiddle while your life burns.

On a really good night — and Charles Newell's new Court Theatre production firmly occupies that category in the second act — it can make you feel that way about every other way of spending your evening.

Such is the insouciant and demanding insistence of this 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner, which opened Saturday night in Hyde Park with a cast of Lois Markle, Mary Beth Fisher, and Maura Kidwell (who play three tall women, eventually distilled to one), and Joel Gross, as their silent, miserable progeny.

You have more chances to see three of the fall's top shows.

• The Court Theatre's production of "Home" has added four performances on Dec. 17, 18 and 19 (matinee and evening). Court rarely extends.
• The House Theatre of Chicago has added Saturday and some Sunday matinee performances to its run of "The Nutcracker," along with a Tuesday night performance on Dec. 21. "The Nutcracker" runs through Dec. 26.
• Theater Wit has extended its production of "The Four of Us" by Itamar Moses through Dec. 18. That's an additional two weeks for this smart comedy about male friendship and competition.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "The Comedy of Errors" ★★★ Through Oct. 17 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.; Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; Tickets: $40-$60 at 773-753-4472 or www.courttheatre.org

Early in his outre and provocative directorial career, you'd never have tapped Chicago director Sean Graney as a master farceur. But Graney is proving remarkably adept with wigs, prat falls, mistaken identities and soft heads smacking into hard moving doors. Even pierced hipsters have to eat. Some of them even have to laugh.

Hard on the heels of his hit Court Theatre production of Charles Ludlam's “The Mystery of Irma Vep” comes a similarly amusing Graney take on “The Comedy of Errors.”

Well, the title in the program says “The Comedy of Errors.” There isn't a great deal of the Bard's actual prose on the Court stage. The show runs only about 90 minutes, and many of the lines come from the pen of Graney, rather than the quill of Shakespeare, who didn't usual write lines like “How y'all doin'?”

This is really a Theater-of-the-Ridiculous (or Neo-Futurist) kind of take on “Comedy of Errors,” wherein six actors (six very, very funny actors) play all of the various Dromios, Antiopholi and random hookers and hangers-on. Anachronisms abound and you get everything from audience participation to gently obscene musical interludes. Think “The Bomb-itty of Errors” (minus the rap) meets “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (minus the ABBA) and you get the basic idea.

Stephen J. Albert is the new executive director of the Court Theatre.

Albert is a founding partner in Albert Hall and Associates, an arts consulting firm. That firm was hired by Court for management-consultant service and to help conduct its executive-director search. In the tradition of former vice-president Dick Cheney, Albert helped conduct a search and found himself to be best qualified. 

One can see why. Albert has a powerful managerial resume, including time as managing director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and as executive director of both the Alley Theatre in Houston and the Hartford Stage. He has also been a board member at the Theatre Communications Group, which is meeting in Chicago this week.

His hiring is a significant coup for artistic director Charles Newell and Court, based in Hyde Park and currently in expansion mode.  Albert replaces Dawn J. Helsing, who now is the managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. 

THEATER REVIEW: "Sizwe Banzi is Dead" ★★★½ Through June 13 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.; Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes; Tickets: $32-$56 at 773-753-4472

In apartheid South Africa, those born without a white skin were forced to carry a reference book to prove the legality of their presence in a major city like Port Elizabeth. And at one point in “Sizwe Banzi is Dead,” the remarkable two-person play penned by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona and first performed in 1972, a man named Buntu opens up the passbook of one Sizwe Banzi.

Banzi can’t read, and therefore he had missed a notation therein. Telling him to get out of the whites-only area. And with that agonizing piece of new information dispensed to his humble but dignified character at the Court Theatre, the Chicago actor Allen Gilmore crumples before your eyes.

It’s a staggering moment — I can see it in my mind as I write.

Gilmore, an actor who has rarely had the attention his work in this town has long deserved, is a physically adroit and deeply empathetic performer whose body always fully expresses what’s in his character’s soul. And this is one of the two most important moments in the play (the other flows from when Buntu figures out that the only way for the proud-and-reluctant Sizwe to circumvent the rule is to kill himself off and take over another man’s body). All of Fugard’s drama crystallizes the myriad inhumanities of life under the Apartheid regime into simple human moments involving ordinary people. And you don’t get much more direct than being told you have no ownership over your own movements.

Gilmore shows us the air disappearing from a man’s body and the fight from his heart. It’s like watching a punctured human tire.

His determinedly optimistic pal, Buntu (played at Court, in spectacularly fearless fashion, by Chike Johnson), eventually puts it back. And as he does so, we understand the central dichotomy of this play. Some of us find it easy to keep our optimistic spirit in oppressive situations. Some of us have to be coaxed into asserting ourselves. The trick, the play seems to be saying, is to find that sweet spot between maintaining your dignity and honor, and doing what you have to do to survive.

The situation may be two men oppressed by apartheid, but the same rules can apply in your office.

THEATER REVIEW: "The Illusion" ★★★ Through April 11 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes; Tickets: $38-56 at 773-753-4472.

We’re all familiar with the play within a play, as when Hamlet’s players enact a prescient little dumb show called “The Mousetrap.” Everybody from Francois Truffaut to Harold Pinter to Mel Brooks has done a movie within a movie. And Tina Fey does TV within TV on “30 Rock” every week. But when it comes to the number of frames, the number of stories within stories, it’s tough to top Pierre Corneille’s “The Illusion,” a play from 1636 now in an intermittently beguiling new production at the Court Theatre.

The outside layer of this Chinese box of yarns has an elderly aristocrat (John Reeger), approaching death, seeking information on his estranged son from a creepy magician (Chris Sullivan) who lives in a cave with his Igor-like assistant (Kevin Gudahl). For his fee, the magician shows his client shadows of the life of his son (played by Michael Mahler), mostly involving battles of love and money that revolve around a sweet young rich girl (played by Hillary Clemens), her sundry rival suitors (Tim Kane and Kareen Bandealy) and her smart-and-spunky maid (Elizabeth Ledo).

In Charles Newell’s expansive new production, staged with the services of the real-life magician Dennis Watkins, those images come replete with what feels like a Baroque take on the illusions of David Copperfield. So we’re in a theater watching a guy watching illusions. And then the maid starts telling stories within the illusions. Then within the maid’s story, some guy tells stories of his own. At one point in this show, you can count at least five levels of frame.

A revisionist revival of “Porgy and Bess," the rarely seen but prescient 1935 musical with a score by George Gershwin, headlines the 2010-11 season at the Court Theatre in Hyde Park.

“Porgy and Bess,” slated for the late spring of 2011, will be directed by artistic director Charles Newell and features musical direction by his frequent collaborator, Doug Peck. In an interview Friday, Newell said that Court’s new ideas for the show (wherein performers and musicals will share the stage) had been the subject of much negotiation with the Gershwin estate, but that all approvals had been granted. “We’re very excited,” Newell said.

Court’s season will kick off this fall with a new production of “The Comedy of Errors,” directed by Sean Graney and using only six actors. According to Newell, the idea originated with Graney, who wanted to continue to explore issues of identity and disguise that he began with his hugely successful Court production of “The Mystery of Irma Vep.”

Later in the fall, resident artist Ron OJ Parson will direct a new production of “Home” by Samm-Art Williams (Parson directed a revival of this Nego Ensemble Company piece in 2008 in New York).

And in the early spring of 2011, Jessica Thebus will direct Sarah Ruhl’s adaption of “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf, a piece that was developed at the Piven Theatre in Evanston, before Ruhl became a famous playwright.

One additional show has yet to be announced.

THEATER REVIEW: "The Year of Magical Thinking" ★★★1/2 Through Feb. 14 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.; Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes; Tickets: $38-56 at 773-753-4472 or www.courttheatre.org

“Grief,” observed the writer Joan Didion, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

Ignorant as some of us may yet be, we will, of course, reach it. Few humans are islands, and thus it is as inevitable as our own demise. But since you can't know it, you can't ready yourself.

Didion made that point abundantly clear in her best-selling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” penned following a conflagration of trauma that involved Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffering a fatal heart attack, as the couple's only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was lying in intensive care after a bout of pneumonia had led to septic shock and a coma. When the book was published in 2004, Quintana was still alive. But in 2005, she died too.

That further aching loss is reflected in Didion's own dramatic adaptation. This one-woman drama is now in its Chicago premiere at the Court Theatre, with the remarkable Mary Beth Fisher playing Didion, under the careful direction of Charles Newell.

Didion's title is intentionally ambivalent. Listen to her talk of these events and you could construe her self-defined year of “magical thinking” as a year of rediscovered spiritual awareness or a year of necessarily fantastical denial, laid bare. But this is, fundamentally, a piece about what happens when a rationalist intellectual — a control freak, really — confronts that over which she has no control whatsoever. If you're that kind of person yourself, Didion here reveals some of what you are in for, although one hopes for more humane space in between.