October 6, 2010
By Kris Vire
Modern warfare has erupted in an increasing number of plays on Chicago’s stages of late, from the Congolese clash of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning Ruined (which debuted at the Goodman in 2008) to the Liberian civil war of J. Nicole Brooks’s Black Diamond at Lookingglass (2007) to J.T. Rogers’s The Overwhelming, set against the Rwandan genocide (seen here in a 2009 Next Theatre production). The trend ramps up this season, beginning with this week’s Scorched at Silk Road Theatre Project. Here’s a look at the conflict to come.
Scorched
Silk Road Theatre Project, Saturday 9–November 7 Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad is described by CBC News as “a major force” in Québécois theater, but it’s only recently that his plays have been produced in English. This translation of his Incendies, about immigrant siblings who travel to their unfamiliar homeland to fulfill their refugee mother’s dying wishes, has echoes of the Lebanese civil war and of Sophocles, too. First produced to raves in Toronto in 2007, then to further acclaim in a Philadelphia production last year, it makes its Chicago debut at the Middle East–focused Silk Road under the direction of Dale Heinen (Caravaggio).
In Darfur
TimeLine Theatre Company, January 11–March 20A reporter and playwright, Winter Miller based her 2007 script on her experiences traveling to Sudan as a research assistant for New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Commissioned by Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater and Playwrights’ Center, In Darfur traces the intertwined stories of an aid worker, a journalist and a Darfuri woman at a camp for those displaced by the Sudanese government’s genocide campaign against Darfuri rebel groups. Nick Bowling directs the Chicago premiere.
Eclipsed
Northlight Theatre, January 13–February 20New York–based Zimbabwean-American playwright and actor Danai Gurira was the cowriter and costar (with her NYU classmate Nikkole Salter) of the 2006 Pulitzer finalist In the Continuum, about black women dealing with HIV diagnoses. Gurira’s newer work, based on interviews with the “wives” of a warlord in the Liberian conflict—kidnapped women forced to serve as sex slaves—premiered last year at Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. The Washington Post called Eclipsed “a surprisingly vivacious portrait of helplessness, of the entirely human impulse to adapt.” Alana Arenas and Tamberla Perry lead the cast of Northlight’s Chicago debut, helmed by Hallie Gordon.
Black Watch
National Theatre of Scotland, March 29–April 10Gregory Burke’s play about the historic Scottish regiment of the British Army is based on interviews with soldiers who served in Iraq in 2004, just as it was announced that the Black Watch would be folded into another regiment as part of a downsizing plan. Its first site-specific staging was in an Edinburgh drill hall as part of the 2006 Fringe; it’s since toured to cities around the world and to rapturous reviews (The New York Times called it “a necessary reminder of the transporting power that is unique to theater”). Finally appearing here as part of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s World’s Stage series, Black Watch will be mounted at Edgewater’s Broadway Armory.