"No More Dead Dogs" ★★½ Through June 19 at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.; $22-$30 at 773-975-8150 or theaterwit.org

If a kid in school picks up a book — “Old Yeller,” say, or “Where the Red Fern Grows” — and sees a dog smiling away on the front cover, it's a pretty good bet that, by the final chapter, the pooch in question will be munching Milk-Bones in the sky. The canine life expectancy in young adult literature is roughly comparable to that of a lead held by the Bulls in a playoff game.

In Gordon Korman's book “No More Dead Dogs,” now adapted for the stage by William Massolia of the Griffin Theatre Company, a high school kid named Wallace (the dry Ryan Lempka) decides that he has had enough of dogs being killed off in service of prepubescent tears. And thus he sets out to express this truth in a report written for his teacher, Mr. Fogelman (Jeremy Fisher, who could dial it back a tad). Unfortunately for Wallace, the book “Old Shep, My Pal” happens to be one of his teacher's favorites — and to the chagrin of his pals, Wallace finds himself in detention and off the football team, which needs him. A lesson ensues in how the truth, while desirable in most circumstances, sometimes requires shading.

If you have a kid between about 8 and 13, you'll likely have fun together at director Dorothy Milne's lively production (although Massolia's adaptation badly needs a clip and a trim; if this were “Old Yeller,” we'd be good and ready for the critter to croak). Unlike a lot of shows aimed at kids, this one teaches what you might call relative thinking — its message is that it's never a bad idea to challenge a cultural work that's being pushed on you, or how your emotions are being manipulated. That's the kind of armor that one does not easily acquire from Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, and it gets more useful every day.

Griffin Theatre said Thursday it will stage the first made-in-Chicago of the Broadway musical "Spring Awakening." Jonathan Berry ("Festen") will direct.

The show will run at the Theatre Wit space from Nov. 27 through Jan. 8, with an opening slated for Dec. 8.

Griffin will also produce "The Pact," a new play by artistic director William Massolia about two soliders who vow that if one dies in action, the other will take his own life back home. That premiere, also directed by Berry, is slated for January.

One futher show in the Griffin season is still to be announced.

This fall, Griffin plays to move into its own space in a renovated police station on Chicago's North Side.

Griffin Theatre said it plans to open its new Griffin Arts Center (housed in a former Chicago police station) in two stages, stretching into 2015.

The first stage of the renovation of the building, located at 1940 W. Foster Ave. and pictured above, is underway. It will result in an 80-seat black-box theater that will be ready for shows in 2012.

Thereafter, Griffin, which will also have its offices in the building, will start work on a 120-seat mainstage theater, replete with a fly system and traps under the stage. That theater is projected to open in 2015. The box office in the new theater will be located in one of the old cells. Griffin is in the midst of a $3.2 million capital campaign to complete all this work.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Port" ★★★½ Through Feb. 26 by Griffin Theatre Company on the West Stage of Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.; Tickets: $22-$32 at 800-838-3006 or www.griffintheatre.com

English playwright Simon Stephens, a compassionate young spokesman for working-class characters, and a gifted chronicler of the difficulties of escaping our place and those that put us there, has found a strikingly sympathetic home among Chicago's storefront theaters. The loyal audiences that value such institutions seem to innately understand Stephens' gritty, truthful work. And the Chicago actors who perform there seem to be able to find the core.

Stephens' plays — which, I think, have been undervalued in New York — are best experienced in intimate settings where you can stare deeply into the actors' faces. Stephens creates intensely sympathetic characters who find themselves buffeted by life, mostly through no fault of their own, and whose troubles you can easily take on as your own. Just so long as you are sitting close.

Chicago has seen three fine productions of Stephens' works in recent seasons, including Jonathan Berry's poignant 2008 Griffin Theatre production of “On the Shore of the Wide World” and Robin Witt's powerful Steep Theatre production last year of “Harper Regan,” an intensely moving play about a sad-eyed middle-aged woman and the strictures of past choices. At both of those shows — and at Berry's artful and honest new production of “Port,” staged for Griffin in rented digs at the Raven Theatre — I've sat among rapt audiences that have barely moved a muscle all night long.

If you were touched by Kendra Thulin's Harper, you'll surely feel the same about Caroline Neff's Rachel Keats, a young woman born in a grotty town that clings to her young soul like kudzu.

THEATER REVIEW: "Company" ★★½ Through Nov. 14 at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes; Tickets: $22-$32 at 773-327-5252 or www.griffintheatre.com

Griffin Theatre and director Jonathan Berry — a young man of ambition and exciting ideas — have taken a big bite out of “Company,” the prismatic and conceptual Stephen Sondheim musical from 1970 about the perils and pleasures of upper-middle-class life in Manhattan, and the horrors and (maybe) necessity of marriage for the needy urbanite staring down middle age.

Suffused with truth, freshness and creativity, it is a bite that most aficionados (a notoroiously picky group) of this spectacularly scored and inestimably wise piece will, I think, respect, should they head over to Stage 773 for this non-Equity production.

Many of us devotees are fiercely protective of “Company,” which can offer the most exquisite of theatrical experiences. In full disclosure, I should probably note that most of the music at my wedding came from its score. I have it that bad.

Chicago's Griffin Theatre will produce the Stephen Sondheim musical "Company," beginning Sept. 25 at Stage 773 (formerly Theatre Building Chicago). Jonathan Berry directs.

In the spring, Griffin will produce a world premiere adaptation of Gordon Korman's young-adult novel "No More Dead Dogs," adapted by Bill Massolia and produced at Theatre Wit. The third production on the slate has yet to be announced. But Griffin did say it has added the rising director Robin Witt to the ranks of its ensemble. 

- Chris Jones

The Griffin Theatre's 1998 production of "Ash Can Alley," with Eric Roach, Caroline Cygan, Jessica Young and Christopher Rose.

At an event last week celebrating Chicago's downtown theater district, Mayor Richard Daley took a moment to herald those who toil on Chicago's storefront scene, building theater in the neighborhoods. “You talk about guts,” the mayor said, admiringly. “You talk about entrepreneurship.”

But it sometimes takes more than guts. It takes support from the city.

Take, for example, the long-running saga surrounding the Griffin Theatre's attempt to build a new home in the long-vacant, former 20th District police station at 1809 W. Foster Ave. in the Ravenswood neighborhood's Bowmanville community. I first reported on this plan, which was supported by Ald. Patrick O'Connor, 40th, in January 2008. Negotiations had long predated that story. It's all still going on.

“We'd really like someone to make a decision,” said Griffin managing director Bill Massolia, a note of frustration in his voice.

THEATER REVIEW: "Stage Door"

Toward the end of the Griffin Theatre Company's hugely enjoyable and unexpectedly moving production of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's “Stage Door,” you start to ponder the ripeness of this deliciously juicy comedy for a Broadway revival.

Aside from the inequalities of who gets or doesn't get a Pulitzer Prize, few things rile the defenders of the legitimate stage more than the egregious encroachment of unqualified Hollywood stars on Broadway marquees. And that's exactly what “Stage Door” is about. The phenomenon isn't new. Celebrities were just as irritating in 1936.

Within the last week, I’ve twice found myself complaining about running time. I thought “Mistakes Were Made,” the hugely entertaining Craig Wright play at A Red Orchid Theatre, needed to lose about 15 minutes. And I thought “Stoop Stories,” the artful solo show by Dael Orlandersmith at the Goodman Theatre, needed to add at least that much. Which would mean both shows would clock in about 1 hour and 30 minutes. Was I positing some kind of ideal length for a show?

Not at all. Naturally, it depends on the show. I sat through three acts of “The Hostage” at Theatre Building Chicago last weekend and was never bored. Too much was going on. But running time is a fascinating thing.

Critics like me, who go to the theater almost every night of the week, have to guard against a dangerous bias in favor of short shows. Most workers like to get off early, and critics are no exception. Other people go to the theater at least partly out of obligation, such as to be a more enthusiastic spouse. Such faces often light up when told there will be no intermission.

In the late 1950s, the Irish genius Brendan Behan, who spent many of his formative years in prison, collaborated with the great populist English director, Joan Littlewood. The result was an English-language production of “The Hostage,” a play about the troubles that Behan had first penned in Irish. The show, which moved to Broadway, is regarded by theater historians as one of the seminal creations of the post-war era and a radical, bawdy, passionate, dangerous piece of theater that smashed conventional alliances, shattered traditional notions of Irish lyricism, and revealed the cost and absurdity of war with clarity comparable to Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage.”

If you ever say the roughly contemporaneous movie “The Entertainer,” Laurence Olivier’s masterwork, you’ll have a sense of the style.

“The Hostage” is set in a wacky Dublin whorehouse and revolves around the IRA’s abduction of a young British soldier in response to the slated execution of a young Irish boy held in a Belfast prison. It is very rarely produced. Here’s why. This intentionally alienating three-act show requires a huge cast, contains broad swaths of what one might charitably call meandering writing, reveals both English and Irish warts aplenty, and requires the adoption of a very complicated theatrical style that interlaces serious scenes with music-hall songs, farcical spoofery with painful realism, gorgeous poetry with crass pastiche. But this Anglo-Irish cultural polyglot—as imagined through the bottom of a bottle—is also a brilliantly inventive play. Behan was a dramatic poet of the first order. It’s just that it is almost impossible to stage him in a fully satisfactory way.

And thus Jonathan Berry’s new Griffin Theatre production at the Theatre Building Chicago is one of those stirring, only-in-Chicago nights where a cast of about twenty intense, eccentric and quite spectacularly diverse actors, all working just a few feet from your head, nearly bust a collective gut trying to realize all of the creative paradoxes inherent in this work.