36 stories by "Raymond Rehayem"
I try to accentuate the positive in even my most negative reviews, but seeing as how playwright Marc Camoletti is long dead and likely buried far from Newcity's target readership, I'm going …
By Raymond Rehayem "It's really close, I mean it’s about thirty minutes. Some people think it’s Muncie and that’s way far away compared to Munster which is just right next …
By Raymond Rehayem "Go Fuck Yourself" is surely the most provocatively titled of the five Beau O'Reilly one-acts featured in the 26th Annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival. O'Reilly got a surpr…
By Raymond Rehayem I am even less qualified to build a stage, rig lighting, or put up drywall than I am to put on some pasties and do burlesque. Actually I might look strangely alluring i…
By Raymond Rehayem Lisa D'Amour is a playwright and an interdisciplinary artist. "It's just a little bizarre that it's kind of two different fields," she notes when we discuss the distinctio…
I love Jesus. Could even say I’ve got a complex. Can’t really blame my Catholic school, they didn’t teach a damn thing about the scriptures. And admittedly a harsh history …
At the husband’s urging, a comfortably affluent couple (Robert Hardaway and Anji White) decide to rough it a bit for their holiday, and travel off the beaten path to strive for m…
by Raymond Rehayem Some folks wanna rock. Some folks wanna white Christmas. Dee Snider wants to spread rocking yuletide cheer. "Dee Snider’s Rock & Roll Christmas Tale" debuts this…
RECOMMENDED The indiscriminate momentum of violence drives the action and the banality of its coarse adherents provides the comedy in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” The humor in …
I am loathe to call any art masturbatory. What art isn't, really? So in a wholly unforgivable act of self-satisfaction, I hereby deem Christopher Chen's script for "The Hundred Flowers Proje…
RECOMMENDED Disclosure, before the sharks circle: I like to be amused. I'm generally not amused by art about art, whether it concerns its own making or whether it ruminates on or examines ot…
RECOMMENDED In the first act of "The Crytpogram" the comedic potential of David Mamet's easily recognized, clipped, stylized, supposedly conversational dialogue sometimes pops up from the mi…
RECOMMENDED “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” provide wonderful delight to readers across generations and endless inspiration to artists across disciplines. Right now (this is s…
RECOMMENDED In the couple of years since I saw "The World of Extreme Happiness" as part of Goodman’s New Stages festival, the humor has become a little sharper, the production has grow…
RECOMMENDED Oh this was barely bearable until everyone lost their bearings at the end. Strong finish, I mean"pushes all my misgivings about the show so far to the fore that it transcends the…
One and one and one is indeed three, but peppering a production with such notable equations doesn't add up to much when the play being staged is less engaging than this failed math pun I'll …
RECOMMENDED I once lived next door to an aspiring young arsonist. On either side of the house I shared with a different kind of flame, two homes were gutted with fire before the kid was caug…
By Raymond Rehayem Look, up on the Northwest Side, it's the Fifth Annual ChicagoFringe Festival. What was once the very outskirt of the Blue Line is now an emergent theater hood per festival…
By Raymond Rehayem Nope, Mary-Arrchie artistic director Richard Cotovsky doesn't spend three days non-stop in character as the late political prankster for whom his long-running theater fest…
By Raymond Rehayem "We're telling the real story… we see this stuff. We’re telling the grown-ups what’s really happening, the adults don’t really know. That’s becau…
RECOMMENDED Samuel Beckett was a genius, one of the great talents of the 20th Century like Ernie Kovacs or Thelonious Monk. So when a theater company does a fine job staging some Beckett, wh…
RECOMMENDED It's been thirty years since Ena Lamont Stewart's "Men Should Weep" was last produced in the USA and I'd wager a rampant run of stateside revivals is unlikely. It's steeped in a …
By Raymond Rehayem When a sex comedy by a highly lauded playwright hits the Chicago stage, I get the call from Newcity to devise the sort of feature you just started reading. Seems this pape…
Lacking the spark to start even the most readily extinguishable blaze, "A Small Fire" is monochromatically akin to a handful of ash. The direction from Joanie Shultz is sharp, the sound desi…
A not terribly interesting play about terribly important issues, “Death And The Maiden”"as seen in the current production at Victory Gardens"is most notable for a star turn court…
