Come on, feel the Illinoise!
East Side of Chicago? It’s in New York
THE New York theater often seems to speak exclusively in a British accent, so prevalent are London imports on Broadway stages. But this season the distinct flavor of the biggest city in America’s Midwest will make itself known, with Chicago-bred playwrights and directors involved in several major productions. Even a pair of big-time international movie stars - one British and one Australian - will be wrapping their vocal chords around the flat vowels and colorful argot of a pair of Chicago cops, as Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman supply the fall season its biggest jolt of star power in “A Steady Rain,” a taut two-hander by the new-to-New York playwright Keith Huff that is making the leap from a small Chicago stage to the Main Stem.
That jump might well become a fairly common feat of theatrical calisthenics. Chicago has long been a great theater town, as any theater lover who has spent time there knows. The city hosts a couple of the country’s most esteemed regional companies - the Goodman and the Steppenwolf - as well as a good half-dozen other major theaters, along with a collection of golden-age commercial palaces in the Loop. But it is also home to one of the most fertile small-theater economies in the country, a thriving network of tiny storefronts or spaces on the outer fringes of the city that continually feed actors, writers and artists who often graduate to the larger theaters. In some ways the city’s small-theater scene is more robust than Off Broadway, overshadowed as that territory often is by the glare of Broadway.
So it is perhaps not surprising that Chicago-born productions, and Chicago-bred artists, have been making powerful inroads on New York theater in recent years. The biggest bang came from the Steppenwolf, of course, where Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” sprang into brawling life two years ago before moving to Broadway. It became one of the longest-running new plays of the last decade, and in London it played a smash run at the National Theater. The play, which garnered just about every major American theater award along the way, is now on a national tour headlined by Estelle Parsons.
This fall Mr. Letts’s follow-up to “August” arrives on Broadway, once again with the original director, Tina Landau, and cast of the Steppenwolf Theater production on board. "Superior Donuts," which opens Oct. 1 at the Music Box Theater, is not the blood-dripping slab of theatrical meat that “August” was. Although an act of violence figures nominally in the plot, “Superior Donuts” is lightly dusted with sugar. It’s an affectionate, character-based comedy-drama focusing on a neighborhood in transition - the city’s Uptown district - and the relationships among a handful of men and women who frequent the local doughnut and coffee shop run by an ex-radical of Polish and Russian descent.
Michael McKean plays this withdrawn but amiable fellow, Arthur Przybyszewski, who strikes up a fatherly friendship with the brash young African-American man he hires to help out. The lively rapport between Mr. McKean’s wary Arthur and Jon Michael Hill’s ebullient Franco Wicks was among the most memorable pleasures of the Steppenwolf production, which I saw in Chicago last year.
While “Superior Donuts” affords New Yorkers a little bite of Chicago, revivals of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound” will give an up-and-coming director from Chicago, David Cromer, a chance to marinate in the pungent atmosphere of Brooklyn angst. The chronological bookends of Mr. Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, produced on Broadway in the 1980s, these two plays are seriocomic studies in the emotional dynamics of a middle-class Jewish family as seen through the eyes of the youngest son, Eugene Jerome, the aspiring writer standing in for Mr. Simon.
Mr. Cromer is best known to New Yorkers as the director of the hit revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” now on view at the Barrow Street Theater, in which he also starred as the Stage Manager. (He gave up the role to begin rehearsals on the Simon plays.)
Mr. Cromer’s career has largely developed in the Midwest, so he might be seen as a counterintuitive choice for Mr. Simon’s quintessentially New York plays, richly stocked as they are in Borscht Belty humor. But he has already proved the breadth of his range, garnering notice both for the stark, Expressionist new musical “Adding Machine” (seen Off Broadway in 2008) and finely wrought revivals of William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Picnic,” as well as “Our Town,” where the cosmic meets Main Street in Grover’s Corners, N.H.
Finding his way to Brighton Beach in the years before and after World War II is not a simple matter of hopping on the subway, but Mr. Cromer’s talent at drawing nuanced performances from actors bodes well for this theatrical double-header. “Brighton Beach Memoirs” opens Oct. 25, with “Broadway Bound” following on Dec. 10. Eventually they will alternate in repertory.
The double-barreled casting of two formidable action-movie stars in “A Steady Rain” ensures that Mr. Huff’s drama about the job stresses threatening the lifelong friendship of two Chicago-born police officers will be among the fall’s hottest tickets when it opens Sept. 29 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Mr. Huff is a newcomer to New York theater, making his Broadway debut in circumstances that are the envy of all aspiring playwrights. Celebrity allure aside, “A Steady Rain” comes from Chicago trailing accolades from the city’s top critics and is the work of a writer who has been steadily developing his craft at Chicago Dramatists, where the play had its premiere last year, for more than two decades.
David Mamet is Chicago’s most famous theatrical son, of course, and he will be richly and appropriately represented on Broadway and for that matter Off Broadway in this season full of gusts from the Windy City. First to arrive, by way of an amuse-bouche, will be “Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet” at the Atlantic Theater Company, which Mr. Mamet co-founded and which has been a sturdy shepherd of his catalog. Neil Pepe directs the two plays, “Keep Your Pantheon” and “School,” in a production starring Brian Murray and John Pankow opening at the Atlantic on Sept. 30.
Then comes the Broadway debut of Mr. Mamet’s “Oleanna,” the 1993 drama about a combative encounter between a female student and her male professor. The new revival, starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles and directed by Doug Hughes, opens Oct. 11 at the John Golden Theater. And Mr. Mamet also has a new play coming to Broadway this fall, with the potentially contentious (or not) title “Race,” opening Dec. 6 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.
The play’s subject matter has been kept under wraps, suggesting the incendiary, or perhaps just to stoke anticipation. On Page 12 an essay by Mr. Mamet reveals that the plot concerns a firm, staffed by black and white lawyers, that takes on a racially sensitive case. David Alan Grier and James Spader star in the production, which marks Mr. Mamet’s Broadway directing debut.
Source
THE New York theater often seems to speak exclusively in a British accent, so prevalent are London imports on Broadway stages. But this season the distinct flavor of the biggest city in America’s Midwest will make itself known, with Chicago-bred playwrights and directors involved in several major productions. Even a pair of big-time international movie stars - one British and one Australian - will be wrapping their vocal chords around the flat vowels and colorful argot of a pair of Chicago cops, as Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman supply the fall season its biggest jolt of star power in “A Steady Rain,” a taut two-hander by the new-to-New York playwright Keith Huff that is making the leap from a small Chicago stage to the Main Stem.
That jump might well become a fairly common feat of theatrical calisthenics. Chicago has long been a great theater town, as any theater lover who has spent time there knows. The city hosts a couple of the country’s most esteemed regional companies - the Goodman and the Steppenwolf - as well as a good half-dozen other major theaters, along with a collection of golden-age commercial palaces in the Loop. But it is also home to one of the most fertile small-theater economies in the country, a thriving network of tiny storefronts or spaces on the outer fringes of the city that continually feed actors, writers and artists who often graduate to the larger theaters. In some ways the city’s small-theater scene is more robust than Off Broadway, overshadowed as that territory often is by the glare of Broadway.
So it is perhaps not surprising that Chicago-born productions, and Chicago-bred artists, have been making powerful inroads on New York theater in recent years. The biggest bang came from the Steppenwolf, of course, where Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” sprang into brawling life two years ago before moving to Broadway. It became one of the longest-running new plays of the last decade, and in London it played a smash run at the National Theater. The play, which garnered just about every major American theater award along the way, is now on a national tour headlined by Estelle Parsons.
This fall Mr. Letts’s follow-up to “August” arrives on Broadway, once again with the original director, Tina Landau, and cast of the Steppenwolf Theater production on board. "Superior Donuts," which opens Oct. 1 at the Music Box Theater, is not the blood-dripping slab of theatrical meat that “August” was. Although an act of violence figures nominally in the plot, “Superior Donuts” is lightly dusted with sugar. It’s an affectionate, character-based comedy-drama focusing on a neighborhood in transition - the city’s Uptown district - and the relationships among a handful of men and women who frequent the local doughnut and coffee shop run by an ex-radical of Polish and Russian descent.
Michael McKean plays this withdrawn but amiable fellow, Arthur Przybyszewski, who strikes up a fatherly friendship with the brash young African-American man he hires to help out. The lively rapport between Mr. McKean’s wary Arthur and Jon Michael Hill’s ebullient Franco Wicks was among the most memorable pleasures of the Steppenwolf production, which I saw in Chicago last year.
While “Superior Donuts” affords New Yorkers a little bite of Chicago, revivals of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound” will give an up-and-coming director from Chicago, David Cromer, a chance to marinate in the pungent atmosphere of Brooklyn angst. The chronological bookends of Mr. Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, produced on Broadway in the 1980s, these two plays are seriocomic studies in the emotional dynamics of a middle-class Jewish family as seen through the eyes of the youngest son, Eugene Jerome, the aspiring writer standing in for Mr. Simon.
Mr. Cromer is best known to New Yorkers as the director of the hit revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” now on view at the Barrow Street Theater, in which he also starred as the Stage Manager. (He gave up the role to begin rehearsals on the Simon plays.)
Mr. Cromer’s career has largely developed in the Midwest, so he might be seen as a counterintuitive choice for Mr. Simon’s quintessentially New York plays, richly stocked as they are in Borscht Belty humor. But he has already proved the breadth of his range, garnering notice both for the stark, Expressionist new musical “Adding Machine” (seen Off Broadway in 2008) and finely wrought revivals of William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Picnic,” as well as “Our Town,” where the cosmic meets Main Street in Grover’s Corners, N.H.
Finding his way to Brighton Beach in the years before and after World War II is not a simple matter of hopping on the subway, but Mr. Cromer’s talent at drawing nuanced performances from actors bodes well for this theatrical double-header. “Brighton Beach Memoirs” opens Oct. 25, with “Broadway Bound” following on Dec. 10. Eventually they will alternate in repertory.
The double-barreled casting of two formidable action-movie stars in “A Steady Rain” ensures that Mr. Huff’s drama about the job stresses threatening the lifelong friendship of two Chicago-born police officers will be among the fall’s hottest tickets when it opens Sept. 29 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Mr. Huff is a newcomer to New York theater, making his Broadway debut in circumstances that are the envy of all aspiring playwrights. Celebrity allure aside, “A Steady Rain” comes from Chicago trailing accolades from the city’s top critics and is the work of a writer who has been steadily developing his craft at Chicago Dramatists, where the play had its premiere last year, for more than two decades.
David Mamet is Chicago’s most famous theatrical son, of course, and he will be richly and appropriately represented on Broadway and for that matter Off Broadway in this season full of gusts from the Windy City. First to arrive, by way of an amuse-bouche, will be “Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet” at the Atlantic Theater Company, which Mr. Mamet co-founded and which has been a sturdy shepherd of his catalog. Neil Pepe directs the two plays, “Keep Your Pantheon” and “School,” in a production starring Brian Murray and John Pankow opening at the Atlantic on Sept. 30.
Then comes the Broadway debut of Mr. Mamet’s “Oleanna,” the 1993 drama about a combative encounter between a female student and her male professor. The new revival, starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles and directed by Doug Hughes, opens Oct. 11 at the John Golden Theater. And Mr. Mamet also has a new play coming to Broadway this fall, with the potentially contentious (or not) title “Race,” opening Dec. 6 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.
The play’s subject matter has been kept under wraps, suggesting the incendiary, or perhaps just to stoke anticipation. On Page 12 an essay by Mr. Mamet reveals that the plot concerns a firm, staffed by black and white lawyers, that takes on a racially sensitive case. David Alan Grier and James Spader star in the production, which marks Mr. Mamet’s Broadway directing debut.
Source