Theater & Dance
Caller ID Walter Briggs befriends Dubach in the 2012 staging of The Glass Menagerie.
Burning Bluebeard and The Glass Menagerie
This winter, the Hypocrites are adopting a pair of much-loved recent shows for new stagings. Burning Bluebeard, first performed by the Neo-Futurists in 2011 and subsequently remounted in 2013 and 2014 by an ad-hoc group called the Ruffians, moves under the Hypocrites’ umbrella for a new holiday production. The wistful, witty piece, penned by the Neos’ Jay Torrence, memorializes the 600 victims of the 1903 fire at Chicago’s “absolutely fireproof” Iroquois Theatre during a holiday matinee. In the piece, six lightly singed members of the Christmas pantomime Mr. Bluebeard address members of the audience as though they are at the Iroquois on that fateful December day, with the goal of successfully completing the performance and thus negating the tragedy. As a slightly sinister clown who seems to be rooting for failure puts it, “The building was
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TIMEOUT.COM/CHICAGO December 2015–February 2016
fireproof. Its contents weren’t.” Director Hans Fleischmann’s acclaimed production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie was initially staged at Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. in 2012, before transferring for a long run at Theater Wit. Fleischmann plays protagonist Tom Wingfield, presented here as a scraggly, heavily damaged vagrant haunted by memories of his family. The cast also includes Joanne Dubach, reprising her turn as Tom’s painfully shy sister Laura, along with Hypocrites ensemble member Donna McGough as mother Amanda (a role she played in a 2005 Hypocrites production) and Zack Wegner as Laura’s gentleman caller.
Burning Bluebeard (through Jan 10) and The Glass Menagerie (Jan 22–Mar 6) are both at the Den Theatre.
Theater&Dance
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