Wandering Through Chicago's Arts and Culture

BY ANTON CHEKHOV I have not seen a lot of Chekhov. Three Sisters and Marriage Proposal are the only two other plays I have seen by this playwright. In all cases, including the present one, I have been less than enamored by the production. I’m beginning to suspect that in all cases it is more a matter of Chekhov than the production, and it’s more a matter of the Slavic origins of the words than the acting. In translation the words simply don’t “sparkle” the way I expect them to in a first-class theatrical presentation. I’m beginning to suspect that the translation may be the key to presenting a program that is really alive with flesh and blood characters. While I used the definite article in the name of the play for this posting's title, I omitted it in the names of the two other Chekhov plays I mention in the opening paragraph. Russian does not have articles; they get along just fine without them, thank you. (English is one of the minority of the world's languages that us...

I found the text for this review stored on my hard drive during a house-cleaning excursion. I wrote it, but apparently didn't publish it. It's not very timely today, but I preserved it just so I could return some day to see what I may have thought about some experience. And What a Kingdom It Is! What would you do if you had to become a sex worker just to survive? What if your ability to earn your own way was so limited that you could do little else besides pass out leaflets and have sex with people you found unattractive? What if your choice was to panhandle and steal or sleep on park benches? If you’ve ever faced any of these kinds of choices, then you’ll probably find yourself nodding and even smiling a little as the denizens of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen struggle to maintain their place in the world during the gentrification of Times Square in the 1990s. Director Joanie Schultz brings Stephen Adly Guirgis’ vignette of one of New York’s seediest bars vividly to lif...