Rhino report

The Art of Unbearable Sensations
The Magpies at Viaduct Theatre. By Shawn Reddy. Dir. Reddy. With H. B. Ward, Kathleen Powers, Guy Massey.

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This succession of carny-flavored monologues reflects writer/director Reddy’s fascination with the secret history of American entertainment. Mashing the experiments of Luigi Galvani and the neurological curiosity Phineas Gage with the sideshow spectacle of P. T. Barnum, Reddy imbues his investigations into identity and artistic failure with a giddy melancholy. While the piece features an all-star cast from the Chicago fringe, it might have benefited from a director less enthralled with Reddy’s own language. The richly considered monologues are sometimes delineated with a ponderous precision, as though every punchline required a complimentary map. Ward and Powers both to some degree play Reddy’s feints and red herrings too heavily. Massey, on the other hand, skates brilliantly across the surfaces of his phrenological monologue, proffering emotional discoveries like an inexhaustible bouquet. —John Beer

Elvisbride: Some Prepared Remarks to Clarify the Impending Jubilation
Curious Theatre Branch at Acme Art Works. By Jayita Bhattacharya & Matt Test. With ensemble cast.

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There’s gripping material aplenty in this lightly-plotted tale of Elvis impersonators scrounging at a down-home diner, even if the whole conceit feels stretched nearly paper thin. Elvisbride exhibits highlights ranging from keenly-observed dialogue between Elvis-imitating men and the better-adjusted women who love them, to a knockout display of unpretentious video art. Still, it’s hard not to wish the authors got an editor involved. When—out of nowhere—Colm O’Reilly appears via television to effectively reprise his role from The Strangerer as a hopelessly monotone, middle-aged lug, his description of a sinister illness titillates. Until it’s expanded, repeated, and returned to, ad nauseum. Luckily, there’s a balm for these tedious forays into redundancy: Test and Magnus’s catchy, Kurt Weill-lite score, which bops satisfyingly along, with beats slick enough to make the night worthwhile. —Christopher Shea

Histories Minor
Found Objects Theatre Group at Viaduct Theatre. By Mark Chrisler. Dir. Kevlyn Hayes. With Chris Wallinger, Andrew Schoen, Hayes.

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Prolific fringe absurdist Chrisler, whose plays often place historical and pop-culture figures in abstracted domestic situations, writes texts full of contradiction. Sometimes the contradiction is that his brain-candy premises get overwritten, killing the interest of the small group of chill, good-humored intelligentsia who might otherwise enjoy them enormously. Three short plays, then, may be an ideal first encounter with Chrisler. This troika of playlets, unified by buckets of water that play different roles in each, shows off Chrisler’s ability to dramatically humanize giant characters. We see pioneering gonzo journalist Nellie Bly, who exposed mental-institution conditions, exchanging Pinteresque philosophical barbs with a lunatic on the other side of her cell wall, and Civil War photographer George Bernard, who lost most of his work in the Chicago fire, holed up in his apartment talking to flames. And an amusing Durang-like look at globalized lecture culture kicks things off. —Christopher Piatt

Two More Things
Illegal Drama at Viaduct Theatre. By Adam Rosenberg, Michael Rychlewski. Dirs. Rosenberg, Scott Barsotti. With Rosenberg, Barsotti.

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Two monologues in which chatterbox characters work themselves into a lather jabbering on at length to silent scene partners make up this double bill of one-acts, to low-grade but enjoyable effect. Rosenberg’s Big Fat Duck, in which two yokels feed bread crumbs to ducks, features Barsotti spewing his homespun worldview all over his obviously irritated, wordless companion (Brian Collins). It’s a posture Barsotti has played before, and he again brings humor to the scenario, even if the premise of Rosenberg’s look at mindless, egocentric conversation gets exhausted before the monologue’s over. Rosenberg steps comfortably into actor shoes in the second play, Rychlewski’s Santa’s Helper, as a softy, been-there security guard who captures a masked suicidal jumper on a Loop skyscraper ledge and then recounts his own sob story. Rychlewski’s quiet play makes a gentle complement to Rosenberg’s more wiry one. —Christopher Piatt

Word Bath
Barrie Cole at Acme Art Works. Written and performed by Cole.

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Cole has chosen a well-balanced selection of humorous sketches for this concert reading. A marriage threatens to flounder on the husband’s obsession with haiku (“Look at these dishes/I need to wash them right now/Then they will be clean”); a reader encounters an unimaginably captivating book; three roommates speculate with amusement and anxiety on the packages accumulating in their upstairs neighbor’s apartment. Like her spiritual compatriot David Sedaris, she could be accused of wrapping her funny packages with too tight a bow; their will to quirkiness doesn’t always allow room for true heartbreak or revelation. And seventy minutes is a bit long for a solo reader. But throughout, the pieces display Cole’s eye for detail and her rhythmic gifts, and she performs them with a winning verve. —John Beer

Schedules vary; check timeoutchicago.com/rhinofest for complete listings.

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