Bonnie Metzgar has taken the artistic reigns at About Face Theatre and her choice of performance artist Taylor Mac’s “The Young Ladies Of…” as the opener of her first season is a loud declaration that Metzgar isn’t afraid to take a risk. Instead it seems that she will demand that GLBT theater in Chicago not be dumbed down as it so often can be. Taylor Mac is anything but safe and nothing if not complex. The play is about Mac’s complicated relationship with his absent father, but he is so much more than just a postmodern drag queen with daddy issues. Through letters he wrote to his father after his death and hundreds of letter he found written to his father by young Australian women answering a personal ad while he served in Vietnam, Mac finds a way to make one man’s struggle to find self-identity and acceptance universal and uniquely personal. And he does it all with a ukulele. “The Young Ladies Of…” is a brave start to a new era for About Face. (William Scott)
At the Hoover-Leppen Theatre at Center on Halsted, 3656 N Halsted ,773.784.8565, through October 26
