Rajiv Joseph’s DESCRIBE THE NIGHT, now in its Chicago premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is a sprawling exploration of the blurring of fiction and fact, censorship, and the quest to preserve truth. In that vein of “truthiness,” DESCRIBE THE NIGHT also brings fictional representations of historical figures and entirely fictional characters together. It’s also a test of my (admitted lack of) knowledge about 90 years of Russian history; it was only AFTER seeing the play that I realized Jewish writer Isaac Babel, Russian secret police officer Nikolai, and his wife Yevegenia were in fact real people. 

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LaDarrion Williams’s world premiere play BOULEVARD OF BOLD DREAMS has a fascinating premise transporting audiences to February 29, 1940 in the hours before Hattie McDaniel became the first Black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The play finds Hattie at a bar at the Ambassador Hotel, where she encounters bartender Arthur Brooks, who aspires to be a Hollywood film director, and Dottie, a cynical maid. While based on real events, the play’s encounter is fictional, and the interiority of Hattie’s thoughts here is in large part the imagination of the playwright. That said, the vision for the play isn’t meaty enough to sustain its one hour and forty minute run-time. 

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TONI STONE is a memory play—in more ways than one. Lydia R. Diamond’s play is indeed structured in non-linear (and yet, still mostly chronological order) as the titular Toni Stone recounts her memories as the first woman to regularly play professional baseball. It’s also a memory play in the sense that it captures a moment in history that many audiences may not know before they see the work. In real life, Toni Stone played for the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro League team, in 1953. The play itself never references that year—or any dates in Toni’s timeline—outright (the program merely lists the setting as “1920’s-1940’s USA.”) Instead, Toni weaves between different moments in her life, diving in and out of them—much like she might dive to catch a ball in the outfield (although she played second base).

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To say Alexis J. Roston’s performance as Billie Holiday in LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR AND GRILL is a masterclass in acting and singing is no exaggeration. Roston gives the kind of lived-in, seamless performance that only comes from knowing the material intimately well, and indeed, it’s a role she’s played many times before. For Mercury Theater Chicago’s current production, she’s now co-directing with Artistic Director Christopher Chase Carter. It’s clear that Roston put a lot of work into making this performance happen, but the result is true stage magic. Roston is no doubt putting her all into her portrayal of Billie Holiday, but she makes it all seem effortless. 

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As implied by the title, Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home is a narrative of homecoming. The play’s protagonist and narrator, Janice, remarks at the top of the show that she doesn’t often talk to her family back home in the fictional town of Beacon, Kansas— in fact, she shares that she only calls her mother on the first and third Sundays of every month, seven out of 10 bank holidays, and during medical incidents. But then Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman of the African-American Recognition Committee in Beacon calls Janice and asks her to speak at an upcoming public event in honor of her father. Janice must metaphorically reckon with her homecoming and her childhood in Beacon.

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Steppenwolf presents a new twist on the well-trod territory of the dysfunctional family drama with Vichet Chum’s BALD SISTERS. As far as dysfunctional families go, too, the family in BALD SISTERS doesn’t have the most baggage. That said, Chum’s characters still have plenty to contend with as sisters Him and Sophea mourn the loss of their mother. The play is a meditation on the circle of life, but I appreciate that BALD SISTERS is an exercise in subtlety as far as family dramas go. As a result, some of Chum’s scenes meander and don’t seem to have a purpose within the context of the play, but I like that BALD SISTERS has themes that wash over audiences rather than hit them over the head.

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Porchlight Music Theatre invited audiences to take another bite of musical theater history with Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s THE APPLE TREE. The musical, composed of three one-acts centered on the theme of temptation, was the season opener for the Porchlight Revisits series. As usual, Porchight Artistic Director Michael Weber introduced the show with a brief educational talk on THE APPLE TREE’s history.

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Though it took Alice Childress’s 1955 play TROUBLE IN MIND nearly 70 years to make its Broadway debut at Roundabout Theatre Company last year, the play is remarkably prescient. Director Ron OJ Parson helms TimeLIne’s production of Childress’s play about racial and gender dynamics on the Great White Way. TROUBLE IN MIND focuses on Broadway actor Wiletta Mayer, a middle-aged Black woman cast in the “anti-lynching” play CHAOS IN BELLEVILLE. While the show has a predominantly Black cast, Wiletta soon discovers that the play’s white male director has little concept that CHAOS IN BELLEVILLE is a deeply problematic and misrepresentative play. 

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Rebecca Gilman shows her deftness at writing “slice of life” plays in SWING STATE. In this latest collaboration with outgoing Goodman Theatre Artistic Director Robert Falls, Gilman introduces four characters at a crossroads in a small town in rural Wisconsin during summer 2021. It’s marketed as a play about the pandemic, and indeed, SWING STATE contains some references to the COVID-19 pandemic, masks, and vaccines. Ultimately, though, SWING STATE is a pure character study with the notions of pandemic and extinction of the human race in the background, and notions of mortality and despair in the foreground. Yes, it’s a post-pandemic play, but really it’s just allowing us to peer into the lives of these characters at a moment in time. That’s not to say that Gilman’s play isn’t moving, but I found the overall execution to not be as overarching as the set-up purports. 

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Mercury Theater’s CLUE is a comedic delight of a production. The laughs flow freely and easily in this stage adaptation of the farce-meets-murder-mystery based on the iconic 1985 film by Jonathan Lynn and Sandy Rustin, with new material from Hunter Foster and Eric Price, and original music from Michael Holland. Director L. Walter Stearns’s ensemble lands each and every moment, maximizing the laughs but maintaining the integrity. These actors understand the assignment of both farce and murder mystery: The characters in CLUE take themselves and the outrageous situations of the play deeply seriously, and the ensemble finds the comedy in playing those truths. It’s a near masterclass in how farce should be performed. The fact that the play is only 90 minutes also means the stage adaptation doesn’t overstay its welcome: There’s just enough time to set up the mystery, play the antics, and send audiences home after a delightful, hilarious time.

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