Inauguration

Wow. What an unbelievable day.

5 Years at U of Chicago

Who knew? A great ride....

Wisconsin Holiday

There was lots of cooking, presidents, and icy walk. And funny hats.

Solstice

Work Trip to NYC

What, no theatre? Well, I stayed at the W on Lexington, and food was the non-work focus for some reason. Avra (Greek), Po (for old time sake), and Pampano (Mexican seafood).

Book Club: The Quiet American

Dublin Carol

Happy Holidays everyone!

From Time Out Chicago. "Among Conor McPherson’s dark plays that make you nearly want to kill yourself—an anthology known colloquially as “the Conor McPherson plays”—there exists a shared ethereal quality that inspires producers to keep mounting them and audiences returning for more....

Dublin Carol, now in a tidy, conservative and affecting Steppenwolf production, is no exception. William Petersen plays John, a perpetually if casually drunk funeral director who’s kept his life low maintenance by abandoning his wife and kids and anesthetizing his soul on a slow bourbon drip. When his adult daughter (Wiesner) shows up with the news that his dying, cancer-ridden wife would like him to handle her funeral, he’s forced to pay the emotional piper.

Holiday Party with the Dean

A lovely evening at the Dean's house for his annual holiday party.

Midsummer Night's Dream International

This was completely enjoyable.

From Time Out Chicago:

"After touring the world, this subcontinental take on the Bard’s nicest comedy came to town just as the Mumbai terrorist attacks were erupting. The crystal-ball acuity is one thing, the quality of the productions another, but between the two, Chicago may be on its most relevant theatrical run in some time. This joyous reinterpretation adds a long feather to that cap.

Director Supple’s London-born show slaps polyglot readings of the venerable source into imaginative physical theater. Circus arts tend to undermine their settings, but the cavorting of spirits and fairies in ol’ Bill’s daisy-chain plot is as excellent a match as imaginable for the aerialist stunts on display.

This multitongued, symbol-heavy adaptation is sometimes an ingenious escape from archaic gibberish, but it’s just as often a stumbling block: Following Elizabethan English is hard enough without heavy accents and arbitrary foreign-language insertions. Yet the ritualistic heart of the proceedings, as profound a meeting of Eastern and Western magickal traditions as anything Aleister Crowley ever dreamt of, burns through these barriers, and the athletic cast of Indians and Sri Lankans perform with a skill and immediacy that transcends linguistic (and cultural) boundaries."

Radio Scottish Play

Love Ann Bogart, love SITI company, but this one didn't work for us.

When Hyde Park Rules America

David Brooks at the Gleacher Center.
You can watch the video here.

Thanksgiving in NC

The W's are now in Durham! With lots of space for teenagers! And lots of space for pie and turkey, oh my! We went to the Duke v. Carolina football game, saw Twilight, and visited with Mr. and Ms B and Mr. and Ms. L and their families in Raleigh.

Brothers Karamozov at Lookingglass

Ambitious, but not our most favorite thing we've seen at Lookingglass.

The Dean at the Women's Board

Post election, my Dean was at the Arts Club, talking to the University of Chicago Women's Board.

Kafka on the Shore

From Chris Jones's review in the Tribune:

"In dreams begin responsibilities," observes the hero of Kafka on the Shore, Frank Galati's inestimably cerebral, endlessly complicated, occasionally incomprehensible and quite beguiling new show at the Steppenwolf.

What a terrifying thought! In our world of personal overextension and professional crisis, falling asleep for a few hours is the only chance we get to actually evade responsibility. Now Steppenwolf is telling us that we're on the hook for our dreams? Oy.

But if you know your Freud, Oedipus and Hamlet, you'll know the centrality of the unconscious. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (on whose novel the play is based) argues that our dreams must be the moral template for our actions.

If you think hard about it—this show requires you to think hard about everything—that's a timely and potent political observation. Throughout history, plenty of people have claimed to have been innocently asleep while, say, one of their leaders bombed innocent people or looted the treasury. Murakami argues that dreaming ain't no defense.

Kafka on the Shore, which contains multiple, elliptical narratives and includes wild, supernatural characters like Colonel Sanders, Johnnie Walker and a talking cat, is about far more than the division of conscious and subconscious. Little is achieved by arbitrary summation of plot, because the piece has many and they don't all follow through."