Our eight picks for theater
Terminus
A found text of AIDS activism, revived
An actor on his role in Pullman Porter Blues
Previews 9/12-9/15. Through 10/6: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6875, interrobangtheatreproject.org, $25.
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It doesn’t get more straightforward than this: if you want old people, Jews, and jokes, that’s what you’ll get. But the anticipation for Old Jews Telling Jokes is more than just a craving for boilerplate borscht belt. Cowriters Daniel Okrent and Peter Gethers are already media lions: the former was the first public editor for the New York Times, the latter described by Vanity Fair as “the biggest name in publishing you’ve never heard of”—he was president of Random House Studio, edited everyone from Jimmy Carter to Harry Belafonte, and authored the Norton the cat trilogy. Their production is inspired by a website of the same name, which hosts videos of . . . well, you can probably guess. Okrent and Gethers decided that onstage, rather than tell a bunch of jokes sequentially, they’d turn each into a small play featuring the same set of five actors, with bits paying tribute to the history of the medium and some of the biggest names in Jewish comedy. The revue had a successful off-Broadway run and comes to the Royal George with a cast featuring Second City and SNL alum Tim Kazurinsky. The only downside: if my parents go, they will probably repeat all the jokes back to me for the next year or so. —Tal Rosenberg
It’ll be interesting to see what adapter-director Heidi Stillman can do with Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical story of sexual awakening, rampant passion, and pedophilia (with a dash of incest), in which everything but the sex takes place offstage. The setting, not coincidentally, is Indochina, around 1930. The protagonist is a 14-year-old French girl whose stranded, opium-addled family has been impoverished and debased by the corrupt colonial system that brought them there; her lover is a wealthy, soon-to-be-married 27-year-old Chinese playboy. Duras, who wrestled with similar themes in her screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour, wrote this story first as a novel, The Lover, and reworked it in The North China Lover as an impressionistic series of scenes for an ostensible film. Even for Stillman, who’s recently done some of the most creative theater in town, bringing it to the stage will be a challenge. Rae Gray plays the young girl and Tony winner Deanna Dunagan is the older Duras, in whose memory it all unfolds. —Deanna Isaacs
Bring Me the Head of James Franco, That I May Prepare a Savory Goulash in the Narrow and Misshapen Pot of His Skull
In staging Anton in Show Business this season, 20% Theatre Company takes a stab at an old mystery: Who is Jane Martin? An acclaimed playwright whose career spans decades, Martin is the Salinger of the theater world—nobody’s seen her. In fact, anybody’s best guess is that she’s a pseudonym for Jon Jory, longtime head of the Actors Theatre of Louisville and a frequent director of Martin’s plays.
A genuine off-Loop phenomenon, the original Famous Door Theatre Company production of Hellcab lasted a decade, from 1992 to 2002, and spawned a movie (Chicago Cab) featuring a full-out glut of Chicago-bred actors, including Laurie Metcalf, John Cusack, Harry Lennix, Gillian Anderson, Michael Shannon, Tracy Letts, and on and on. Last year Profiles Theatre mounted a 20th-anniversary revival that must’ve done good business, because they’re bringing it back for another holiday-season run this year.
