The title of Lynn Nottage’s early play announces its shameless ambition to warm your heart. Add in a movie-struck teenager, her shy sister, and her well-meaning but woefully repressive father, and “Crumbs from the Table of Joy” appears ready to mint its own money. Nottage has indeed assembled the elements of a thoroughly winning story: the members of the beleaguered Crump family, transplanted from Florida to Brooklyn in the 1950s, have their perspectives on religion, race, and the world shaken up when their bohemian and Communist Aunt Lily moves in. Unfortunately, all Nottage does is assemble the elements. Her writing is undeniably richly textured, but she allows her paeans to Harlem, bebop and Bette Davis to supplant actual action and character development, leaving us with a loosely related collection of incidents. Chuck Smith’s production at the Goodman wrings as much life as is to be had from the script: such vivid moments as when Lily (Ella Joyce), teenage Ernestine (Nambi E. Kelley) and German stepmother Gerte (Karen Janes Woditsch) gradually sync up their movements while dancing to the radio demonstrate that Nottage can create a striking image. And Kelley delivers a knockout performance as Ernestine, dreamy and studious, growing up torn by conflicting loyalties. But “Crumbs” teases the audience’s appetite without ever offering a fully satisfying drama. (John Beer)
Players 2022: The Fifty People Who Really Perform for Chicago In the return of the Players 50 list, we tried to honor those who came back, who've already been putting shows on stages, while crossing our fingers that those we've not heard from are just around the corner.
The Beauty Myth: A Review of "School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play" at Goodman Theatre Set in 1986 in the Aburi Girls Boarding School in Ghana, five teenagers gossip and primp as they prepare for beauty pageant auditions the following day. The social hierarchy of "mean girls'' is quickly established, as Paulina, the prettiest and best singer, alternately boasts about her superiority and denigrates her classmates for what she considers their inferiority.
