Clifford Odets is enjoying a bit of a renaissance of his work as the most recognizable of the Depression-era playwrights. While there are certainly similarities between the Great Depression and the so-called Great Recession that we are presently living through, there are also significant differences. For one thing, the level of support for strong intervention by the government had far stronger support then it does now. And ironically, there’s little doubt that the worst of the present economic crisis has been mitigated by the social safety net put in place during the last crisis of this magnitude.

Odets, writing at a time when family support was often the only thing standing between individuals and complete destitution, was particularly aware of the economic forces holding people together in opposition with the social pressures pushing them apart.

The Bergers are just such a family. Matriarch Bessie rules the house by alternating brute force and conniving strategy to keep her children, husband and father in line. Her cowed husband offers no resistance and her father Jacob’s radical ideas never translate into action. But her children are another case. Hennie refuses to marry and Ralph wants to get married to a totally unsuitable girl. But Bessie’s ammunition—neither child can afford to live on their own, and Ralph is dependent on his Uncle Morty (Bessie’s wealthy brother who apparently isn’t helping the family out much) for his job. It’s not until Jacob takes a drastic step that the cycle of Bessie’s dominance has a chance to be broken. And interestingly, rather than fleeing his family, Ralph ends up taking his grandfather’s place in the household—radicalized and opposing his mother’s will—but this time with the hope of some sort of action that Jacob never attempted.

This being Northlight, the designs are clean and well done, the acting solid and Amy Morton’s directing straightforward, but not revelatory in any way. This is not the place to go for a reimagined Odets. But that’s not what their audience is looking for anyway. It’s nice, however, to see veteran Chicago actors—particularly those who have labored in the storefront scene—getting the opportunity to do their thing in the better-funded environs of Northlight. Audrey Francis appears as the headstrong Hennie, working nicely between the character’s despair and the mask she wears to cover it. Lighting designer Keith Parham brings nice shadings of dimness and light to the Berger home (with the exception of one scene in which the lights inexplicably turn themselves on—possibly an error from the booth). Venerated Chicago actor Mike Nussbaum dominates the stage as the grandfather Jacob.

In the end, this is a great opportunity to see Clifford Odets’ work more or less as he probably envisioned it. It’s contemporary relevance isn’t enhanced by the production, but as a theatre professional, it will probably make you think about theatre vis a vis the present economic situation. When the Great Recession is well in the past, will there be any playwrights we point to as having illuminated this era the way we look back to Odets?

Awake and Sing, Northlight Theatre

Chris Jones, Tribune—“This was never a subtle play. And the narrative events therein—from pregnancy to betrayal to suicide to sudden self-actualization—happen with so little normalcy in between, the piece always plays best when the stakes are high enough that one crisis merely seems to will the next one into being. That's mostly how it goes with this frenetically paced production. But Morton finds room for some humor and human quirks. The redoubtable Mike Nussbaum, who plays Jacob, the moral conscience of the piece, delivers his feeble admonitions with the kind of raw, existential fear from which this veteran actor now draws with such truth.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“[B]ecause this production has been directed (and scraped clean of any hint of sentimentality) by Amy Morton—who made herself heard so notably at the dinner table in August: Osage County—the tumult feels close to civil war… As for love, you find it here only in the affection between grandfather and grandson. As for redemption, none is accorded to Bessie, whose self-justifying speech is too little, too late. And as for the play's political and social arguments? Just look around at our own ‘paradise lost’ and our hunger for optimism. Awake and Sing! is for now.”

Zac Thompson, Reader—“Amy Morton's gripping production for Northlight Theatre conveys the script's energy by adopting a combative spirit and the momentum of a speeding freight train. In group scenes the cast deliver their lines in quick, sometimes overlapping succession, creating a dizzying torrent of words and the exciting possibility of chaos. Maybe it was all the time she spent as one of the warring Westons in Tracy Letts's August: Osage County, but as a director Morton proves particularly adept at orchestrating a family argument—its crescendoes, repeated motifs, and arias of accusation and self-pity.”

Kris Vire, Time Out—"Awake and Sing! was written for Odets’s Group Theatre ensemble but could just as easily have been meant for Morton’s. The director and her ideal cast capture the claustrophobia of the Berger household (well served by John Musial’s cramped period set) while imbuing Odets’s lightly sketched characters with deepening color. They’re also expert at mining the humor layered in with the dour; this production makes a strong case that Odets’s influences included both Marx and Chekhov in equal measures.”

The Brother/Sister Plays, Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Chris Jones, Tribune—“[Playwright Tarell Alvin] McCraney's lush and gorgeous triptych—surely the greatest piece of writing by an American playwright under 30 in a generation or more—smolders. And similarly poetic, arresting, startling lines pop and bubble like the waters of the bayou around which McCraney sets his remarkable plays about the ordinary people of Louisiana—loving, dying, escaping, trying, failing, caring. These are a young man's raw, fearless, whimsical plays, written with an intellectual ferocity (and interest in gay themes) that emulates Tony Kushner. They are hipper than anything [August] Wilson ever cared to write. And yet they feel just as true, just as essential. And thus, it is a moment of generational transference.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“McCraney, 29, is an enormous talent, and a lucky one, too. These plays have already been seen in various incarnations in London, New York and beyond. But their Chicago debut at Steppenwolf Theatre is glorious on all counts—featuring a protean cast that works to breathtaking effect under the lean, gorgeously choreographed, wholly unified direction of Tina Landau and her design team.”

Tony Adler, Reader—“But that's the triumph of In the Red and Brown Water in this marvelous Steppenwolf production directed by Tina Landau. At once stylized and raw, mythic and immediate, disorienting and disarmingly plain, McCraney's play did the work of tragedy, placing me outside my world even as it tore me up inside… [T]he play's power resides in McCraney's dialogue, which tells the facts of life in an out-of-time poetic language that's often funny and idiomatic but never stereotypically ghetto; in movement that's dancerly, and sometimes even danced, without oozing over into pretension; and in a phenomenal cast that finds perfect ensemble sync while leaving room for astonishing turns.”

Hughie & Krapp’s Last Tape, Goodman Theatre

Chris Jones, Tribune—“This current Chicago staging has come together with Broadway intentions pre-announced. This is not an obvious candidate for profitably commercial presentation. Both Falls and Dennehy eschew the more conventional rhythms of Hughie that would land more easily with audiences. And this show does not build, Death of a Salesman-style, into ever-greater crisis. It moves in precisely the other direction, from the public to the private, with Dennehy collapsing in on himself and allowing himself to be ever-more bound by the physical precision of the text. We will have to see how it all plays out. As I did in Stratford, I find this unusual evening of theater a rich and deeply worthwhile exploration, whatever the venue.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“[H]ere is the real news: If you've begun to take actor Brian Dennehy for granted (despite his exceptional performances in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman), you will never do so again after seeing him as Krapp. He is giving a knockout performance in this play—a work that is simply like none other in existence… [B]y now we are familiar with the actor's relaxed and realistic approach to O'Neill. So it is his alternately sharp, angry, blackly comic, mournful, deeply sensual take on Beckett that is the revelation here. Dennehy has simply never been better.”

Kerry Reid, Reader—“The genius in pairing these two pieces is that we're forced to ask ourselves which is worse: delusion or the lack of same? That dichotomy carries through in the beautifully realized sets, both designed by Eugene Lee… Erie has the ear of his night-shift confessor, and the younger Krapp had the comforts of women whose love he took for granted. Now in his final hours, Dennehy's Krapp paints a heart-wrenching portrait of what it means to see—or more accurately, hear—oneself as one truly is.”

Kris Vire, Time Out—“Brian Dennehy is 71, and his years on the stage seem to combine with the years he’s spent inhabiting these two characters to imbue them with an especially deep and honest humanity… The coupling of these two plays, so stylistically divergent on the page, was the actor’s choice, and they work together in ways a less-experienced performer might not have anticipated. In Dennehy’s lived-in performances, they burnish each other to a warm glow.”

Dennis Polkow, New City—“The constant level of high-quality theater to be had on both the Equity and non-Equity levels in Chicago is nothing short of astonishing, to be sure, but every now and then a performance comes along that manages to stand in a class all by itself. Such is the case with the double-bill of two one-act masterpieces by two fascinatingly different yet similarly iconic twentieth-century playwrights of Irish descent, Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, performed by a single extraordinary Irish-American actor—Brian Dennehy—who came up with the inspired idea of pairing and performing these two works together.”

Master Harold…And the Boys, TimeLine Theatre Company

Chris Jones, Tribune—“A significant problem with Jonathan Wilson's problematic new production for the TimeLine Theatre is that Hally is played by a young actor named Nate Burger, who reads on stage as 22 or 23 years old. That might not sound much of a difference from Hally's intended age of 17, but those are crucial years. On this wet and windy afternoon in his mother's Port Elizabeth tearoom in 1950, Hally stands on the cusp of deciding what kind of man he will be. The staffers Willie and Sam (played, respectively, by Daniel Bryant and Alfred H. Wilson) are fighting for nothing less than his soul. Although he's clearly a talented young actor stuffed improbably into a school uniform, Burger is miscast. Burger can't replicate standing on that teenage ledge—and the impact of the play suffers as a result.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“The TimeLine actors (neatly adapting South-African accents) move unerringly under Jonathan Wilson’s fervent direction. Burger, a senior at Loyola University, expertly captures Hally’s half-baby, half-man volatility. And Bryant, with his brilliant smile and high energy, captures his character’s quicksilver spirit. But it is Sam who is the moral center of this play. And Alfred H. Wilson—as a man of experience, inner grace and quiet anguish who is driven to explode—is ideal. He is a true gentleman and unheralded ‘master’ in this ‘bloody awful world.’

Albert Williams, Reader—“In casual conversation one rainy afternoon, the three reflect on subjects ranging from Harold's happy boyhood memories to the need for social reform to the art of ballroom dancing (Fugard's symbol for ‘a world without collisions’). Underneath the friendly banter, though, the poisonous reality of racism and political inequality simmers, ready to explode. Director Jonathan Wilson's fine cast—Alfred H. Wilson as Sam, Daniel Bryant as Willie, and Loyola University senior Nate Burger as Harold—skillfully handle Fugard's dialogue, which seems to ramble but in fact brilliantly keeps the tension rising, ebbing, and rising again.”

John Beer, Time Out—“Fugard’s stagecraft seems almost too polished, transforming the real lives of its characters into an illustrative anecdote about apartheid. Burger begins the production already racked with nervous energy; he never really establishes the rapport with Sam and Willie (Bryant) that the piece demands. Wilson and Bryant have some fine scenes alone, turning set designer Timothy Mann’s nicely drab café into a dance hall with the help of a mop, just as John and Winston make a prison their stage.”

Lisa Buscani, New City—“Wilson brings a Zen calm and dignity to Sam, Hally’s substitute father figure. Bryant captures Willie’s sly, soothing comedy as the tea room’s peacemaker. Newcomer Burger’s energy is refreshing, but his performative style prevents him from bringing subtle nuances to the role. Timothy Mann’s set is a wedding cake of 1950s pastels; Jonathan Wilson’s direction drives the pacing to its unfortunate climax and inevitable confrontation."