The story of Billy Elliot is deeply appealing: During the 1980s, as Maggie Thatcher wars with the powerful coal-mining union as part of her campaign to destroy British labor, an eleven-year-old miner’s son stumbles into a ballet class and discovers an unlikely love of dance. Naturally, this appalls his tough…

Caryl Churchill is not a playwright who repeats herself. She doesn’t have an immediately identifiable writing style or revert to certain kinds of characters or situations. Although her work tends to be politically aware, highly original and inventive in terms of stagecraft, each play is distinctly different. A Number, first…

Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…

Rose Fleishman, a Jewish refugee from Austria, runs a delicatessen in Chicago, and right across the alley is a pub owned by Lady O’Riley, a dour Irish widow. Rose sells gefilte fish, Lady salmon loaf. Separated by centuries of history, culture and religion, the two women are coldly formal toward…

Jean Cocteau, famed writer, director, designer, filmmaker and creator of the classic film Beauty and the Beast, supposedly wrote Indiscretions — originally called Les Parents Terrible — in 1938, during eight opium-hazed days. The central figure is Yvonne, an irrational, suicidal, diabetic woman who terrorizes her husband, George, and completely…

Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…

Victor, a wealthy American newspaperman – that’s a contradiction in terms, of course; Victor inherited money from his newspaper-owning dad – is living the expatriate’s dream in 1961. A devotee of Papa Hemingway, he gallivants around Europe with his mistress, Louise, and owns a cafe in Paris where he employs…

Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…

You may have heard Plato’s theory about the origin of love — the round creatures, male-male, female-female, androgynous, who originally populated the world and were riven in half by an angry Zeus, doomed to spend the rest of eternity searching helplessly for their mates and their own lost souls. But…

It’s near the beginning of Five Course Love, and we’re in a gaudy barbecue joint with a big “You’ll (Heart) Our Wings” sign on the wall. The sound system — as always in the Garner Galleria Theatre — is set way, way too loud, so that it distorts both high…

Ruined. One of the most troubled and lawless places in the world right now is the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and if everyone’s life there is hell, Congolese women, raped and mutilated by the thousands, are condemned to the lowest circle. In attempting a play about the plight…

Set in a doughnut shop in a rundown section of Chicago, Superior Donuts centers on the growing friendship between the defeated and deflated owner, Arthur Przybyszewski, an aging hippie who avoided the draft by fleeing to Canada and still feels guilty about it, and Franco Wicks, a black youngster who…

Fiction. In the first scene of Fiction, two people argue and flirt in a Paris cafe. They seem entirely familiar with each other; their argument, though heightened and intensely clever, still has the comfortable, teasing, accustomed rhythms you expect of a conversation between lovers. But in the second scene we…

Fiction. In the first scene of Fiction, two people argue and flirt in a Paris cafe. They seem entirely familiar with each other; their argument, though heightened and intensely clever, still has the comfortable, teasing, accustomed rhythms you expect of a conversation between lovers. But in the second scene we…

At its heart, Cabaret has a problem. The brilliant songs, by John Kander and Fred Ebb, will send you home humming. There’s a lot of seductive dancing, as well as a sexy-druggy coupling between lost little Sally Bowles and Clifford Bradshaw, the (relatively) innocent visiting American, and a sweetly sad…

The 30th of Baydak is a small, sweet, gentle play about a large, ragged and ugly topic: dictatorship. And since this is a Buntport production, bringing back a show it originally presented in 2003 as part of the company’s ten-year retrospective, naturally it tackles a particular kind of dictatorship. When…

Fiction. In the first scene of Fiction, two people argue and flirt in a Paris cafe. They seem entirely familiar with each other; their argument, though heightened and intensely clever, still has the comfortable, teasing, accustomed rhythms you expect of a conversation between lovers. But in the second scene we…

One of the most troubled and lawless places in the world right now is the Democratic Republic of Congo, suffering the malign aftermath of colonial rule, riven by inner conflict, the site of proxy wars involving neighboring countries, and made particularly dangerous by the presence in its soil of rich…

Fiction. In the first scene of Fiction, two people argue and flirt in a Paris cafe. They seem entirely familiar with each other; their argument, though heightened and intensely clever, still has the comfortable, teasing, accustomed rhythms you expect of a conversation between lovers. But in the second scene we…