FIRST ANNUAL PLAYWRIGHTS’ PARTY
Stage Left Theatre
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Satirical Sketches” offers a quintet of politically correct segments that are sometimes amusing, sometimes dull, sometimes promising, and sometimes incomprehensible. With the exception of Jeanne E. Martinelli’s staged poem, Roots Grow Towards Their Water Source, these sketches rely heavily on audience participation–unfortunate, given the size of the audience Wild Onion had to pick from on the night I attended.
What Wild Onion calls its “in your face” staging grows tiresome after a while, especially when the audience participants aren’t really allowed to participate. The performers either yell at them, stare them down, tell them what to do, or cut them off in mid-sentence–not exactly playing fair. This method doesn’t really break down the fourth wall; it just puts it in a different place. I kept thinking of my mother’s Yiddish phrase, something like: “First time’s OK, second time’s all right, and the third time I’ll give you a hit in the head.”
Last weekend Stage Left Theatre opened its first children’s production, Kid Dinosaur, a musical comedy by Jim Houle with music and lyrics by Amy Wooley and Adam Wilner. It tells the tale of a young dinosaur who must convince the ineffectual Queen Tyranna to clean up her kingdom before Tyrell the Terridactyl tears down Raincloud Forest to make way for a new trash heap; along the way it offers a few musical numbers, comic sequences, and a hip 90s moral about recycling and the importance of listening to the voice inside us that tells us the right thing to do.
