They wuz robbed

Our (affectionate) rebuttal to the Jeff nominations.
If your average acceptance speech is to be believed, it’s always an honor just to be nominated. If this year’s Jeff Award nominees (the city’s Equity theater prize) are any clue, it’s also an honor not to be.

This year, as if to ward off evil spirits, Jeff turned a cold shoulder on Chicago theater’s dark conscience, shutting out plays whose crime wasn’t a lack of quality, but cutting a little too close to the bone. (A few noble exceptions to this rule include the Court’s stirring revival of Fences and the Gift Theatre’s brutal The Good Thief.) It’s a rush to see the gleeful The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee welcomed to the fold, or the nuanced farcical work in Chicago Shakespeare’s A Flea in Her Ear get noticed, but consider the fine moody, morally complex shows that got the brush.

Grace. Not that Northlight Theatre has anything to complain about this season, what with 12 nominations. But not one of them was for Craig Wright’s beautiful but pitch-black drama about naive born-again Christians caught up in a real-estate scam that turns deadly. The Skokie company’s best play in years didn’t receive a single nod, neither for Dexter Bullard’s taut direction, nor for its excellent quartet of actors: Chaon Cross, Steve Key, Mike Nussbaum or the freakishly good Michael Shannon.

Clash by Night. No one probably left this Artistic Home revival of Clifford Odets’s little-seen shattered-marriage play feeling good about his or her own relationship, but most were at least agog at director John Mossman’s searing production and uncanny ensemble. Turning the socialist playwright’s personal little drama into something universal and slightly terrifying did the trick for audiences, but not for Jeff.

The Unmentionables. We know. Bruce Norris’s meanie satire The Pain and the Itch (which the Jeff committee justly named best new work last year) made his new damning play about American busybodies in Africa pale by comparison. But how can you overlook designer Todd Rosenthal’s lavish, “authentic” African home trimmed with barbed wire? Or the supporting work of Ora Jones as a corrupted government official, or better yet, cerebral actor Amy Morton in a one-time-only turn as a blowsy, air-headed trophy wife? Meanwhile, as usual, Anna D. Shapiro’s dead-accurate direction got snubbed. (And not to beat a dead filly, but with three separate directing categories and 18 nominees, is it really possible that not one has mammary glands?)

This was also the season Next Theatre presented Caryl Churchill’s brain-teasing cloning play A Number, starring a finely ragged John Judd as the year’s lousiest dad and cagey Jay Whittaker as his many offspring, with lighting designer Diane D. Fairchild’s eerie, flashing fluorescents upping the creep factor. Just as unsettling and more beautiful was Next’s take on Paula Vogel’s miserable-family carol The Long Christmas Ride Home, which, for all its fine production values, might be most memorable for Scott Iseri’s delicate, scraping live-guitar score and gently muffled soundscapes. Yet neither show got so much as a hat tip.

Finally, where were the season’s great antihero performances? Anish Jethmalani as the demon rock god in Lookingglass’s Bollywood blitz-out Sita Ram, Tracy Letts as both a self-important playwright and a self-deprecating theater listings editor (we wept) in Steppenwolf’s The Well-Appointed Room, Penny Slusher as the slatternly waitress who was the heart of Writers’ Theatre’s much-praised and otherwise nominated Bus Stop, and L. Scott Caldwell and Nikki E. Walker as tough-cookie survivors in the Goodman’s The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, Regina Taylor’s honest look at class-ascending African-Americans. (Their next-door neighbors in the same theater, Nambi E. Kelley and Ella Joyce, were both nominated for the Goodman’s more rose-tinted look at black life, Crumbs from the Table of Joy.) As for Mike Nussbaum’s tough-as-nails Shylock in Chicago Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, it was the year’s best performance, Shakespearean or otherwise. Would a kinder, gentler Shylock have been more appealing?—Christopher Piatt

Visit www.jeffawards.org for a complete list of nominees.