Valmont and Merteuil plan their campaigns like generals on the battlefield. The greater the challenge the greater their elation when they finally destroy their victims. It’s chilling stuff, and also fascinating, like watching a pair of Iagos systematically wreak havoc, for sport.

        In “Liaisons,” Valmont and Merteuil wreck the lives of a virtuous married woman named Madame Tourvel and an unworldly 15-year old girl named Cecile Volanges. There is collateral damage among other characters but those two ladies are the ones hunted, and brought down. The older woman dies of a broken heart and the teen-ager will likely spend the rest of her life in a convent.

        Valmont is the chief agent of destruction. He’s highborn and good-looking, a man of the world to his fingertips. It’s fascinating to watch him lay siege to the virtue of the pious Madame Tourvel and seduce young, and willing, Cecile at the same time. He operates like Richard III winning the Lady Anne over the coffin of the lady’s murdered husband. It’s pure evil but it works.

        The original novel was totally without humor or sentimentality. There is much sophistication and urbanity in the play, populated almost entirely by members of the educated French aristocracy. There is also some black humor, but the Remy Bumppo production comes across as a romantic comedy until the story darkens toward the end. The opening night audience laughed often at the machinations of Valmont and Merteiul and how they reeled in the suckers. But this is a “Liaison” largely defanged of its crucial decadence and nastiness.

       Nick Sandys is one of Chicagoland’s best leading men and a natural choice for Valmont, with his suave manner and good looks. But Sandys’s Valmont is too likable. An audience who doesn’t despise the character is missing out on the chief emotional kick of the play. Rebecca Spence is more successful at conveying the duplicity beneath the warm façade of Merteiul but Valmont is the heart of the narrative and Sandys takes us more into the world of “The Philadelphia Story” than the immorality of French aristocrats just a few years before the hand heavy of the French Revolution takes its revenge on their class.

        The acting is solid among the supporting players, notably Linda Gillum as the fatally gullible Madame de Tourvel and Drew Shirley as Valmont’s droll valet and partner in crime. Margaret Katch is good as the 15-year old, ripe for her introduction to the wonderful world of sex by a master. Janice O’Neill is good as Cecile’s mother, a woman who allows Merteiul to guide her and loses her daughter as a result. The remainder of the capable cast consists of Paul Hurley, Annabel Armour, and Sienna Harris.

        David Darlow’s directing properly locates the play’s droll side, but where is the evil? Emily Waecker’s costumes capture the elaborate Baroque look of late eighteenth century France. This is a rich looking production, abetted by the scenic design of Alan Donahue and the property design of Nick Heggestad. Michael Rourke designed the lighting and Jason Knox the sound. Sandys stages one of the more convincing, and dangerous looking, sword fights I’ve ever seen on a stage.

        Audiences exposed to “Liaisons” for the first time likely will come out of the theater well satisfied by all the ingenious plotting among a  wealthy society with too much time on its hands. But an amusing and entertaining evening could have been enhanced by a healthy dose of venom.

        “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” runs through May 2 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50.  Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.              March 2010

        “The Island” is a grimly realistic frontal attack on apartheid, with none of the understatement of “Master Harold.”

The two characters are John and Winston. They are cellmates serving long sentences in a maximum security prison for African political prisoners on Robben Island in the Atlantic Ocean about seven miles off the coast of Cape Town.

        The play’s first 15 minutes are a wordless rendering of the two men miming the backbreaking, and pointless, labor of loading and unloading sand from wheelbarrows on the island shore. The men are finally released for the day into their cells where they collapse, exhausted and injured. The dialogue begins, mostly concerning the two-actor performance of Sophocles’s Greek tragedy “Antigone” that John plans for an upcoming prison concert. Winston generates some humor with his reluctance to participate in a play he doesn’t understand and would require his portraying a woman, injuring his macho pride.

         The story takes an unexpected turn when John receives the news that his sentence has been reduced on appeal and he will receive his freedom in three months. After momentarily sharing John’s joy in his news, Winston bitterly expresses his jealousy that John will soon be a free man while Winston likely will languish in prison until his death. Finally, the two men act out their stirring version of “Antigone,” a subversive play that celebrates the bravery of the individual against the tyranny of the state.

        The shifts in narrative direction turn “The Island” into a sequence of mini plays, each with its own dramatic tone. The moods various vary from resignation to anger to despair to jubilation to cautious hope to fierce courage. There are moments of comedy and an indelible passage in which John fakes a telephone call, using a tin can, to his home, hearing the latest news from his friends and family as Winston listens and fires his own questions, caught up in the fantasy of the situation. It’s a heartbreaking glimpse of the deprivation endured by men stripped to the emotional bone by an unjust political system.

        “The Island” is a play about the triumph of the human spirit, and more. It’s a very human story about two men bonding to survive their intolerable existence in prison. John’s pending freedom threatens to break that bond, but it endures, like the characters.

        LaShawn Banks (John) and Kamal Angelo Bolden (Winston) don’t so much impersonate their characters as inhabit them. Bolden made a big splash as the title character in the much applauded “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” at the Victory Gardens Theatre last year and his performance in “The Island” cements his standing as a premiere actor in town irrespective of race. His slow, stubborn, finally passionate Winston is the perfect foil for the more outwardly intelligent and articulate John. They make a remarkable pair under James Bohnen’s spot-on directing.

        The action is played out on a bare square platform that represents the barren prison cell, with only two mats and thin blankets and a water bucket for props. The Tim Morrison set, complemented by Rachel Laritz’s costumes, JR Lederle’s lighting, and Victoria DeIorio’s sound, establish the claustrophobic atmosphere of the prison setting.

        The Fugard Festival concludes in the spring with the Court Theatre revival of “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” another two-character play from the Fugard-Kani-Ntshona collaboration that has often been presented as a companion piece to the “Island.” By the time the Court production closes, local audiences should have a new understanding and appreciation of the dramatic skill and political bravery of Athol Fugard. Our exposure to some stunning acting adds to the Festival’s sense of occasion.

        “The Island” runs through March 7 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumpo.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.   January 2010

        The play was written in 2003 by French dramatist Gerald Sibleyras and translated in 2005 by the eminent British playwright Tom Stoppard, who vigorously stated that the English version is a translation from the French and not an adaptation. So spectators seeing his name in the program need not look for any imaginative blend of philosophical themes and dazzling theatricality in the Stoppard manner.

        What Stoppard’s translation does provide is the master’s flair for wit and delicious language flourishes. Indeed, ‘Heroes” is so thin as drama that one suspects Stoppard’s verbal infusions make the play better in English than it was in French.

        The premise of “Heroes” is almost ostentatiously simple. The time is autumn 1959. The place is the terrace of a French military nursing/retirement home. Gustave, Henri, and Philippe are French veterans of World War I. Henri has been in the home for 25 years, Philippe for 10 years, and Gustave for six months. There is a fourth character, a life size stone statue of a dog that Philippe insists is alive, or at least moves, which becomes a comical running gag.

        The three men have bonded because of their living situation but they have distinctly separate personalities. Gustave has a veneer of sophistication and is the cynic of the trio. Henri is the most mild mannered, taking harmless pleasure observing the young girls at a nearby girls school. Philippe is the most anguished, periodically fainting from the effects of shrapnel in his head. The man is afflicted by paranoid anxieties over the sinister machinations of Sister Madeleine, the off-stage nun in charge, and his fearsome in-laws.

        The men spend their time chatting, teasing, and exchanging insults, none of them cruel. Periodically they make plans to escape from the home, possibly to Vietnam but more likely to a row of poplar trees in the distance. But the audience knows the men won’t ever put their plans into effect. Essentially, they are just waiting to die.

        “Heroes” has the flavor of “Waiting for Godot” lite, in that the characters are waiting vainly for something meaningful to happen in their lives. They make plans that will never be realized and at the end of the play they are no better or worse off than they were at the beginning. Life is tedious, but there you are.

        Comparisons with Samuel Beckett may be excessively lofty for the Sibleyras play and there is no suggestion during the performance that the author has anything more in mind than giving three accomplished actors the comic wherewithal to show the spectators a good time. Nothing wrong with that. More ambitious plays have delivered less entertainment than “Heroes.”

        The three scene stealers in the Remy Bumppo production are Mike Nussbaum (Henri), David Darlow (Gustave), and Roderick Peeples (Philippe). It’s always a joy to see Nussbaum on a local stage, and at age 85 he still has the capacity to deftly handle a subtly demanding role like Henri with understated humor and some poignancy. Darlow and Peeples are both outstanding, though a little young for their roles, especially in comparison on stage with the patriarchal Nussbaum. But they all work beautifully together, extracting all the play’s comedy as well as its more rueful emotions.

        The production fits handsomely within Tim Morrison’s realistic evocation of the terrace that is the play’s sole locale. Samantha C. Jones designed the period costumes, Richard Norwood the lighting, and Jason Knox the sound.

        The French title of the play can be translated as “The Wind in the Poplars,” but Stoppard changed the name because he feared English audiences might confuse it with Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s story “The Wind in the Willows.” His choice of “Heroes” is perplexing because the play doesn’t suggest that any of the characters was a hero in World War I and certainly they are not heroic in their present circumstances. But the issue of the play’s title is an insignificant blemish on a short but pleasurable evening of fine acting and considerable humor.

        “Heroes” runs through November 29 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $45. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars.      October 2009

        The action, for want of a better term, takes place in a converted English farmhouse on an autumn night in 1970. In the opening moment, Deeley and his wife Kate sit in their living room, with another woman standing motionless at the rear of the stage with her back to the other two. After a few minutes of banal dialogue between  husband and wife, the lighting suddenly brightens and the second woman joins the other two with easy familiarity.

        The third character is Anna, Kate’s best (and only) friend 20 years ago when both were youthful and poor in London. Anna now lives in Sicily in apparently luxury with her Italian husband. She’s returned to England to visit her old friend.

        The threesome engages in a roundelay of recollections of those days 20 years ago. Deeley met Kate in a movie house showing the classic “Odd Man Out” that led to their marriage. Deeley also met Anna in a London pub, or so he says. At first Anna says she doesn’t recollect any such meeting but eventually discusses it in detail. By the time the play draws to a conclusion, the audience must deal with a number of questions. Did Kate and Anna have a lesbian affair? Did Deely sleep with Anna? Has Anna returned to reclaim Kate, or to rekindle her relationship with Deeley?

        A play like “Old Times” tends to give an audience an inferiority complex. Surely there is some coherent significance to all this understatement, subtlety, and nuance. And if the viewers can’t figure it out, the fault lies with them and not the play. It takes viewers with a fierce faith in their own intelligence to state that the problem lies, not with their own discernment but with a drama that is mostly shadow and very little substance.

        The atmosphere of mystery, or pseudo mystery, is reinforced by the attitudes of the two women. Anna spends most of the play wearing an inscrutable smile that implies she knows much more than the audience. At the same time Kate sits on a couch staring blankly into the middle distance like her body is in the farmhouse but her mind and spirit are elsewhere, perhaps in that unfathomable past the three characters can’t seem to agree on.

        While Anna and Kate do their ethereal thing, Deeley grows increasingly agitated and eventually breaks down in sobs, a collapse that defies explanation based on what we have seen on the stage.

        The main problem with “Old Times” is that the characters are so insubstantial that we really don’t connect with them or their multiple conceptions of what happened 20 years ago. The play lacks that sense of menace that makes Pinter at his best so riveting. There is no real conflict, no indefinable feeling of sinister currents just below the calm surface of things. By the end of the play, the audience reaction may be summarizes in those two terrible critical words, “Who cares?”

        The Remy Bumppo revival plays the Pinter card for all its worth. Under James Bohlen’s directing, the cast delivers the Pinterian silences to the max. Jenny McKnight has that blank gaze down perfectly, as does Linda Gillum with Anna’s Mona Lisa smile. All the outward emotion in the play resides with Nick Sandys’s Deeley, who shouts and snarls and weeps while the two women look on casually.

        The physical production consists of Tim Morrison’s simple modern interior, Rachel Laritz’s costumes, JR Lederle’s ostentatiously dramatic lighting (called for in Pinter’s stage directions), and Victoria DeIorio’s suitably spooky mood-setting sound and original music.

        “Old Times” runs through May 31 at the Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $45. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.       April 2009