Darko Tresnjak, a director who has worked frequently at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and other Chicago theaters, is the new artistic director of Hartford Stage, the theater announced Monday.

Tresnjak's work was seen most recently in Chicago at the Bank of America Theatre, a stop for the brief tour of Tresnjak's production of "The Merchant of Venice," starring F. Murray Abraham.

Meanwhile, Michael Halbertstam's production of "A Minister's Wife" opened Sunday night at the Lincoln Center to mostly favorable reviews. The show, a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's "Candida" with book by Austin Pendleton and music by Josh Schmidt, began life in Glencoe.

Its star, Kate Fry, is making her New York debut.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Heartbreak House" ★★½ Through June 26 at Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe; Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes; Tickets: $45-65 at 847-242-6000 or writerstheatre.org

Of the Shavian masterworks, few are as challenging to stage as “Heartbreak House,” surely George Bernard Shaw's least characteristic work and a 1919 piece that requires us to spend three hours in the company of self-indulgent people, all in service of a metaphor that lets Shaw point out what he saw as the European chattering classes' multifarious failures in the era leading up to World War I, most notably a tendency to keep on fiddling, indifferently, while the countryside around them bursts into flames.

Most Shaw plays are debates. This one is a parable. And Writers' Theatre in Glencoe is the current pulpit, with William Brown directing the sermon.

That's not to say “Heartbreak House” is without vivid characterizations. On the contrary, Shaw gathered a clutch of fascinating figures at the country estate of Captain Shotover (played by John Reeger). There's the eccentric old salt himself — a wacky inventor but no fool — and his two dangerously Bohemian daughters, Hesione Hushabye (Karen Janes Woditsch) and Lady Ariadne Utterword (Tiffany Scott), who entertain themselves with various men, including Hesione's hubby Hector Hushabye (Martin Yurek), a shallow fellow of broad appeal.

The main order of business here, though, concerns a young visitor from the less-monied class named Ellie Dunn (Atra Asdou), who arrives with her decent-but-struggling father Mazzini (Kareem Bandealy) and must decide whether or not to marry the rather brutish industrialist Boss Mangan (John Lister), a man whom she does not love but will (she thinks) offer her money and security.

This play has a great deal to say, of course, and I've long been compelled by Shaw's career-long fascination with the relationship between morality and power; more specifically, his basic contention that's there's not much use spending your life doing the right thing if what you are doing has little influence on the world at large. Progressives have long had a complicated relationship with the acquisition of power. Nobody understood that better than Shaw.

In Brown's production, the Dunns are re-cast as from India, replete with saris and accents. That's an interesting choice, although it does make some of the lines in the play sound strange — the people who gather at the Shotover home are, you might say, a gently racist lot, making several derogatory references to persons of other races. You have to wonder why they appear not even to notice the ethnicity of their guests. Still, I think that choice would be fine if the Dunns had retained their place within the all-important class structure of the play. But they don't. Asdou, who plays Ellie as a rather elegant and refined young woman, seems to miss her penniless gal's humble origins, which means that the stakes that surround her big decision don't rise as they should. You feel that this Ellie would be fine either way, frankly, and thus may as well have a husband she loves.

You don't fully see the argument (timely, given the Royal Wedding) that Boss Mangan is her one chance to both assert and take of herself.

This is certainly a visually gorgeous and exceedingly articulate production. Keith Pitts' spectacular set transforms the Women's Library Club into a verdant garden, and it avoids the trap of reaching for too many visual metaphors. Rachel Anne Healy's costumes are beautiful. And indeed, as a study of individuals, Brown's production is very successful. Woditsch, an actress whom Brown invariably uses to spectacular effect, provides the zest and energy of this production through her truly luminous Hesione, a portrait of an unrepentant sentimentalist. There is also a very wry performance from Scott. Reeger is in top form, approaching a point in his career where he really could take on some of the great senior roles (Lear, Prospero and the like), and his Shotover is a fine prequel of what he could do.

But when it comes to seeing this crew as a group who march together into the Apocalypse, and when it comes to seeing the Shavian woods rather than just the idle trees, the production is somewhat less convincing.

The cast does not fully cohere and sometimes looks more comfortable in the individual frames that Brown provides. And although Lister does take some real risks, the show otherwise lacks personal revelation. In the best, shiver-inducing productions of “Heartbreak House,” you always sense that Hermione and her lovely, sensualist crew suspect that the sand on which they fiddle is shifting. They just prefer to delude themselves. And who does not?

Kate Fry at Candida and Alan Schmuckler as Eugene in "A Minister's Wife" at Writers' Theatre in Glencoe in 2009.

Casting has been announced for the New York transfer of Michael Halberstam's Writers' Theatre production of "A Minister's Wife," the new musical based on George Bernard Shaw's "Candida." Penned by Austin Pendleton, Joshua Schmidt and Jan Tranen, the show is slated to open at the Lincoln Center in April.

Two members of the Chicago cast are going with the show: Liz Baltes and, in the lead role of "Candida," Kate Fry. New cast member include Marc Kudisch, Bobby Steggert and Drew Gehling.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Do the Hustle" ★★½ Through March 20 at Writers' Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe; Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes; Tickets: $46-$65 at 847-242-6000 or www.writerstheatre.org

On one level, “Do the Hustle,” the latest play from Brett Neveu, is a typically sparse and elliptical drama about a father-and-son team of Chicago con men. Small-time grifters who knock off convenience stores and library patrons for a few bucks, Eddie (Francis Guinan) and Sam (Patrick Andrews) are also engaged in an increasingly desperate battle for power and control, meaning they need to con each other as much as their marks.

But this 85-minute play, premiering at Writers' Theatre under the sympathetic direction of William Brown, is no mere crime procedural. It's a lot more personal than that.

“Hey, some of that s--- you said before,” says Eddie, critiquing his 18-year-old kid after the first con we see, “didn't sound like part of the play.”

And at another, even more telling moment, Sam fights back against his dad's telling him what to say: “I'm gonna do it in my own form and function, depending on how I feel,” the young hustler says, defiantly. “Once I get out from under.”

I'm not inside Neveu's head, and all decent playwrights (a category that includes Neveu) must put themselves in their writing. But it surely feels like “Do the Hustle” is really about a talented and restless writer, probing his own creative and professional state and firing off a few shots at the critics and industry types who have sometimes suggested that Neveu's love of the dramatic withholding of information holds him back — making his plays inaccessible and insufficiently clear.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Travels With My Aunt" ★★★ Through March 27 at Writers' Theatre, 664 Vernon Ave., Glencoe; Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes; Tickets: $45-$60 at 847-242-6000 and www.writerstheatre.org

The late English novelist Graham Greene — whose Hollywood-friendly works include “The Quiet American” and “The End of the Affair” — occupies quite a tricky spot in the literary culture of the 20th century. His stories are both quaintly picaresque — the kind of thing you might expect to see at Christmas in the back room of a North Shore bookstore — and surprisingly racy. It's reductive, I guess, but you might usefully think of Greene as P.G. Wodehouse meets “Mad Men.”

Anyway, that's the vibe at “Travels With My Aunt,” Greene's sophisticated and wry, but also gently scandalous, 1969 tale of a recently retired chap with the most colorful of maiden aunts. In its uber-intimate second stage behind Books on Vernon, Writers' Theatre is reviving the arch Giles Havergal adaptation that was all the trans-Atlantic rage in the early 1990s and was first seen in Chicago at Court Theatre in 1996. The gimmick here is that four male actors not only play all of the parts (there are around 25, ranging from fortune tellers to police officers) in Greene's story, but keep switching back and forth so that we get several different takes on the central character.

Michael Halberstam, artistic director of Writers’ Theatre. Read Writers' Theatre and Glencoe ready to take the next step (posted Sept. 2009)

Michael Halberstam, the artistic director of Writers' Theatre in Glencoe, has been awarded the 2010 Fichandler Award by the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

This regional award goes to different areas of the country on a rotating basis. There will be a free public event 6 p.m. Oct. 18 at the Steppenwolf Theatre, during which the director David Cromer will present Halberstam with his prize.

There will also be a panel of local directors discussing  Chicago-style stage direction, including Seth Bockley, Timothy Douglas, Gary Griffin, Kimberly Senior  and Dennis Zacek. Sheldon Patinkin moderates.

THEATER REVIEW: "She Loves Me" ★★★ Through Nov. 21 at Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe; Running Time: 2 hours, 25 minutes; Tickets: 847-242-600 or www.writerstheatre.org

Laszlo hit the jackpot with that one big and simple idea that we all wish we'd had: two feisty singles send passionate love letters to an unknown suitor only to discover that the object of their epistolary affections is a colleague they know, and don't much like, in real life. Ka-ching for Mikos! You can switch the era, the medium and the technology, and you've still got both built-in conflict and a romantic finish. In “She Loves Me,” you've also got some delightful tunes. And a deceptively tricky style.

David Cromer's revelatory production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" has now been extended through August 1 at the happy Writers' Theatre in Glencoe. 

And given the critical acclaim enjoyed by the show, a remount somewhere other than Glencoe would hardly be a surprise.

THEATER REVIEW: "A Streetcar Named Desire" ★★★★ Through July 11 at Writers' Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe; Running time: 3 hours; Tickets: $40-$65 at 847-242-6000 and www.writerstheatre.org. With Natasha Lowe as Blanche, Matt Hawkins as Stanley and Stacy Stoltz as Stella.

You enter the theater through the door to the bathroom, where Blanche DuBois soaks and Stanley Kowalski wipes off his sweat. Inside, Stella and Stanley's meanly appointed railroad apartment overwhelms the theater, like a giant, faded streetcar derailed in a sultry swamp.

Yet nothing ever stops moving in David Cromer's restless conception of desire, Tennessee Williams-style. Fans hum. Light bulbs swing. Memories float. Cats howl. Beds creak. Punches are thrown. Fiery jazz stabs the air.

Such is the astonishingly level of intimacy here. Such is the attention to the most precise little details. Such is the feast for the senses on offer in Glencoe.

Cromer, the breakout Chicago director who has been handed three Broadway shows inside two seasons, is inarguably now the definitive current interpreter of mid-century American poetic drama. And since the likes of William Inge and Williams floated up from a heartland that could no longer contain them, there's something apt in Cromer himself replicating their journey from Chicago.

If the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell was looking for a human example of his tipping-point theory, he could do worse than ponder David Cromer.

The Chicago director did honest, steady, truthful work around Chicago for many years. I wrote fondly about many of his shows, including, 10 years ago, his direction of the play “Orson’s Shadow.” I extolled what I’ve long felt was Cromer’s truly remarkably ability to take some hackneyed play, some gummed-up theater, some blocked-up actor and extract the most wrenching kind of human truth from all of the above.

“Orson’s Shadow” made it to New York. But Cromer’s career toddled quietly along. It can be tough for theater directors to catch fire. They usually only do one project at once. And they need time between. Especially when they are Cromer, who doesn’t rush things and who did his work in Chicago. New Yorkers had to get on a plane.

But then the theatrical excellence started to come at such a pace, it tipped.

There were two stunning Chicago productions of plays by William Inge — ”Come Back Little Sheeba” at Shattered Globe Theatre and “Picnic” at Writers’ Theatre. And then there was that “Our Town” in the basement of the Chopin Theatre. Cromer’s production for The Hypocrites (the off-Broadway transfer is still playing) was so extraordinary I’m placing it on my lifetime top-10 Chicago shows, even though I hope I’m yet far from the graveyard myself. But as Cromer so devastatingly revealed in that Wicker Park basement, you never know.