David Isaacson performs "The Current Economic Crisis in the American Financial Sector, or: Giacomo Casanova Explains It All for You" as part of "Two Story Animal" February 13-14/Photo: Kristin Basta
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Beau O’Reilly masterminds the especially invigorating fringe Rhinoceros Fest this year, which is curated and produced by his Curious Theatre Branch. He also adds to its diversity of the festival with this show comprised of two readings, one his—”Keith and Anna and Boriley”—and one that changes every week (week three featured Cecilie O’Reilly, a brilliant voice-coach reading, along with Marie Gillespie in an Annie Proulx story that didn’t quite fit with the actors’ own poems performed before and after). Beau O’Reilly’s true-story monologue, delivered Spalding Gray-style, is an occasionally very funny, sometimes quite cliched story of sex, drugs and a self-destructive love triangle in the mid-seventies. The story isn’t original, but what refreshes is O’Reilly’s masterful, modulated delivery, which is by turns droll deadpan, idiomatic chatting and some moments of pure (if at times incomprehensible) poetry—”she wore those dance hall lights like she was made of velcro,” O’Reilly declares of his lover Anna, and while one might be at a loss as to what he means, it’s revitalizing to sit in a room with a true storyteller and not really care. It’s the intimacy that Rhino’s all about. (Monica Westin)
At Prop Theatre, 3502 N. Elston, (773)539-7838. Through February 14.
A Story for Everyone: A Review of "1776" at Broadway in Chicago “1776” took our Founding Fathers off their pedestals and revealed them as clay-footed human beings who passionately squabbled over something as fundamental as American independence. Directors Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page have a fresh take.
