THEATER REVIEW: 'Hickorydickory' ★★★ Through June 12 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave.; running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes; tickets: $32 at 312-633-0630 or www.chicagodramatists.org

One walks out of the world premiere of Marisa Wegrzyn's "Hickorydickory" newly certain of one little truth about this mortal coil: It would not to be good thing to know the precise moment we get to shuffle it off.

In Wegrzyn's play, a script that won her the Wendy Wasserstein Prize in 2009 and which currently is ticking through a long-delayed but consistently intriguing debut at Chicago Dramatists, a spunky 17-year-old character named Cari Lee (Joanne Dubach) articulates the horrors of having one's mortal clock lodged inside one's skull, revealing the precise time of death.

"When you know, you don't tell the people you love," she says. "It's like your skin gets heavier like wet clothes you can't really take off. Your lungs fill and empty, and you know exactly how many more times you'll get to sigh and laugh and cry. Nothing seems important because everything is important."

The sting there is in the tail: Surely, it would be thus. If you had to figure out your personal final countdown, how could you possibly discern what is important? You'd spent your life like a rabbit transfixed by headlights. I swear, the older I get, the more convinced I am that there are many things I am better off not knowing.

Nina Metz has the Chicago Tribune review for "Bordello" at Chicago Dramatists, a world premiere by playwright Aline Lathrop that chronicles the lives of women employed at a Nevada brothel. Read the ★★ review here.

She also reviews "Laika Dog in Space" by the Neo-Futurists, a play all-too-thinly based on the first animal in orbit, a stray dog launched by the Soviets in 1957. Read the ★½ review here.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Local Wonders" ★★½  Through Jan. 9 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave. $25-30 at 630-457-1074 or www.localwondersmusical.com.

The good people of the Great Plains are not overly given to introspection—the landscapes of Nebraska and Iowa have not been oft-immortalized in rhapsodic sonnets. Perhaps that’s why the writing of the poet Ted Kooser—which finds profound beauty and complexity in a land that retains the ruts of every covered wagon that once passed through on route to someplace else—feels at once forceful, fresh and potent.

Kooser, who was named Poet Laureate in 2004 and whose work is the subject of a new show in Chicago from the aptly named Full Sky Productions, is neither a pretentious post-modernist nor a romantic sentimentalist. Rather, he’s a clear-eyed, populist poet of the prairie and an extraordinary writer who understands the innate connection between the vicissitudes of life itself and the geography of the place in which that life is lived.

“We live in Garland, Nebraska,” goes one typically straight-forward line in “Local Wonders,” “and our nearest neighbors are Coyotes.” So it goes on from there.

If you hail from Iowa and Nebraska, especially the southeastern reaches (a persistently low-rise range that Kooser a tad facetiously, calls “The Bohemian Alps”), and you find yourself missing home this holiday time, then “Local Wonders” should offer some balm. As I watched the show Thursday night, I kept thinking how underexposed and under-read Kooser is in Chicago, the capital of the Middle West. “Local Wonders,” which is mostly based on a 2002 collection of Kooser’s essays, will certainly send you scurrying off in search of more of his work.

Penned by Virginia Smith and Paul Amandes, and directed by Smith, “Local Wonders” was first seen at the Nebraska Repertory Theatre in 2006. The essays that make up most of the show were penned not long after Kooser (who is still alive and well) received a diagnosis of cancer, and thus began to see his surroundings in a new light, infused by his sudden sense of his own mortality.

In the show, Amandes plays Kooser (many of the lines come directly from the poet’s own words) and the folk-singer Anne Hills plays Kathleen Rutledge, the former editor of the Lincoln Journal Star and Kooser’s wife. Amandes has penned a suite of songs that complement Kooser’s writing; Amandes and Hills perform them between the essays and poems and the little snapshots of the couple’s life together. James Robinson-Parran accompanies on piano.

It is tremendously rewarding to spend some quality time with Kooser’s writing, and it’s clear that everyone here is deeply dedicated to the work of their subject. But as a piece of theater, “Local Wonders” still needs a lot more work.

The idea of using Kooser’s diagnosis—and the weeks that followed—as the dramatic lynch-pin of the evening is very sound. But that theme tends to drop away as the show progresses, without answering all the questions raised. It feels like everyone backed away from getting too personal.And while Amandes’ songs—at once sweet, harsh and wise—are an ideal complement for Kooser’s words, they seem short, fractured and yet to fully embody what a song in a piece of musical theater really needs to achieve.

Amandes and Hills don’t have a fake note in their bodies, but Hills is more a folk-singer, a distinguished one, than an actress. And the show is still too loose and casual. One suspects that everyone involved is a bit too much in love with Kooser’s work for their own good—and it leads to a kind of beatification of their man that this actual work eschews.

In other words, the piece needs more of the darker, more complex side of Kooser. It needs more tension, more bite, and more theatrical urgency. If one is to see a marriage on a stage, one wants it to be truthful—here Hill’s Kathleen spends most of her time gazing admiringly at her wise husband.

Perchance this director and these actors might do better to step down from the actual staging and performing of their piece and concentrate instead on deepening its structure, adding to its potentially lovely score, finding the right visual metaphors and discovering more of the wonders in what could be a really gorgeous tribute to the Midwest and a great literary Midwesterner.

THEATER REVIEW: "The Invasion of Skokie" ★★★ Through Oct. 10 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $32 at 312-633-0630 or www.chicagodramatists.org

In 1977, the National Socialist Party, a derivation of the American Nazi Party, announced its intent to hold a march in Skokie. That odious provocation crystalized an incendiary debate. On the one side was freedom of speech: the ACLU-backed right of any group of Americans to assemble in a public place of its choosing and say what it wants to say. On the other was the seemingly competing right of Americans to live peaceably in their community, free from fear, intimidation and attack.

And, as everyone at the time well knew, Skokie was no average community. As political scientist Philippa Strum noted in a book about the controversy, one-sixth of the Jewish citizens of predominantly Jewish Skokie in 1977 were either directly related to Holocaust survivors or were Holocaust survivors themselves.

Steven Peterson, who grew up on the North Shore, sets his intense new play, “The Invasion of Skokie,” one year after the neo-Nazis had been granted the right to march by the U.S. Supreme Court and were planning to put it into practice somewhere around Touhy Avenue in the summer of 1978. Chicago Dramatists staged the world premiere on Friday night. George Van Dusen, the current mayor of Skokie, was in the audience.

The action in Peterson's play takes place in the ordinary backyard of a middle-class Skokie family and revolves around the central question of how far you should go to protect your family, your neighborhood, your faith.

THEATER REVIEW: "Jade Heart" ★½ Through May 30 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave.; Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes; Tickets: $25-30 at 312-633-0630 and www.chicagodramatists.org. With Gordon Chow (Duan), Christine Bunuan (Jade), Ginger Lee McDermott (Brenda), and Melissa Canciller (Mei).

In Will Cooper's new play “Jade Heart,” many fights take place between a girl adopted from China and her single American mother. In one of those mother-daughter battles, pitched when the central character of Jade is a rebellious teenager, her frustrated mom threatens to send her back to China.

And at that point, you sit back in your seat, simply not believing that the character, presented as a fundamentally decent mother, even in such a stressed circumstance, would actually say that.

Other variations on that theme come out of the mouth of Brenda (Ginger Lee McDermott), the mother in question. She tells Jade (Christine Bunuan) that she was taken out of China before “even a smidgen of Chinese” had a chance to take hold. She says some mean things about the assumed actions of Jade's unknown birth mother. And when a Chinese woman comes over to tell Jade stories, she gets kicked out, with mom saying things like “we've had enough Chinese for a day.”

Marisa Wegrzyn's "Hickorydickory," a play that imagines everyone has an internal clock showing the time of their death, will appear on the 2010-11 slate at Chicago Dramatists. Wegrzyn is the 2009 winner of the Wendy Wasserstein prize. 'Hickorydickory" opens in May, 2011.

Also on the new Dramatists slate:

• "The Invasion of Skokie," a play by Steven Peterson, set in Skokie in 1978, on the eve of the Neo-Nazis march on the town. Opening in September.
• "Bordello,"  a play by Aline Lathrop set in a Nevada Brothel on customer-appreciation night. Directed by Meghan Beals McCarthy, "Bordello" opens in March.

 
Chicago playwright Keith Huff's 2007 play “A Steady Rain” starred Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig on Broadway last fall.

Of all the sudden Chicago success stories I’ve encountered, few have been as dramatic as what has happened these last few weeks to Keith Huff.

Huff, you may recall, is the longtime Chicago playwright who penned “A Steady Rain,” the Chicago cop drama that blew me away when it premiered at the Chicago Dramatists in Sept. 2007. “A Steady Rain” went on to become the big hit of last fall’s Broadway season, thanks mostly to the presence of Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig in the two roles.

Huff had to suffer his play being derided in New York as a star vehicle. That was hardly an accurate reflection of its Chicago history. At Dramatists, it was performed by two actors who looked like cops, for an audience perpetually peppered with real Chicago police officers.

But don’t cry for Huff. Right now, this talented Chicago playwright is writing the screen version for (most likely) Jackman and Craig. Thanks to the help of his new, high-powered agent, he also has sold a pilot to HBO. Entitled “The Brothers Buczakowski,” it’s a take on “The Brothers Karamazov” set in a Chicago building supply yard. If that flies, and if it flies here, it could be very good for Chicago actors and technicians.

If you think of yourself as the nice, reliable sort, and if you’ve ever been rejected for, traded in for—or maybe even divorced for—a flashier and more dangerous model, then many parts of Mia McCullough’s psychologically focused and intensely personal new drama, “Lucinda’s Bed,” will likely feel both accurate and unsettling. Similarly, if you were the one who craved excitement, the fool who kissed off that nice person in favor of the human equivalent of a thrilling but impractical Porsche, then McCullough has your number here, too.

In fact, the triangular “Lucinda’s Bed,” now premiering at the Chicago Dramatists under the direction of Jessi D. Hill, is focused on a rather ubiquitous dichotomy that faces its smart and self-examining title character throughout her life: how to reconcile her need to be nurtured with her lifelong desire to feed the handsome monster that resides under her bed.

• 'Steady Rain' has lost none of its punch at Royal George (review posted March 06, 2008)
• Count 'em: A record 5 Chicago shows are headed to Broadway (posted Sept. 9, 2009)
• A Chicago actor with a sense of humor (posted June 5, 2009)

NEW YORK — In the Broadway production of Keith Huff’s “A Steady Rain,” Daniel Craig, the man known for playing 007, is required to transform himself into Joey, a Chicago cop with a craggy face, mousy spirit, a demeanor as gray as a Midwestern sky in February, and a youth spent letting his best friend and future partner beat him up three times a day. Peering out confessionally from the stage of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, this guy tells us he didn’t complain because losing that friendship “would hurt more than anything.”

James Bond would throw a martini in the face of such a hinterland loser, but Craig shows up for his Broadway debut in a shapeless suit, sporting a tasteless mustache, a crude comb-over, a flawless Chicago accent, a psychologically battered visage and a remarkable weariness to his soul.

James Bond and the Boy From Oz are not regular visitors to the Cook County courthouse. But then, Thursday was an unusual day at 26th and California.

Around noon, the movie stars Daniel Craig (the current Bond, left) and Hugh Jackman (a Broadway star and the most recent host of the Academy Awards, below) arrived at the Cook County Criminal Courts at 2600 S. California Ave., unannounced.

Before long, deputies' hearts were a-twitter. "They came in, best we can tell, with everyone else and walked around pretty nondescript," said Cook County Sherriff's spokesman Steve Patterson, adding that the court was not told of their arrival in advance. The actors confirmed their identities when asked. 

Craig and Jackman were traveling incognito on a Chicago research trip for their upcoming Broadway play, "A Steady Rain." Penned by the Chicago writer Keith Huff and first seen at the Chicago Dramatists theater, "A Steady Rain" is an intensely realistic play about two born-and-bred Chicago police officers trying to deal with the pressures of their job.

Craig (an Englishman) and Jackman (an Australian) are playing those police officers. In short, they were spending time scoping out Chicago cops in their natural habitats. According to a New York spokesman for the play, the visit to Chicago had been kept a closely guarded secret to allow the actors time and space to do the requisite research for their roles. It's no secret anymore. By late Thursday night, innumerable tweets had reported Jackman and Craig sightings at various iconic Chicago locales.

 If only Jackman and Craig had announced themselves in advance, Patterson said, there were several female courthouse deputies "who gladly would have provided a personal tour."