“The Brother”

Written by John Hancock

Showing: Hancock Productions at Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont, through Nov. 18

Tickets: $30

Contact: (773) 327-5252

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

To this day, 54 years later, the brother in “The Brother” remains the poster boy for betrayal. To save his life and wife, David Greenglass informed on his sister Ethel and brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg, trusting dupes who in 1953 were infamously electrocuted as the spies who gave the bomb to the Russians. Of course, thanks to Nazi-hater Klaus Fuchs, the Russians already had the secret to building the bomb. The witchhunt that made scapegoats and sacrifices of the Rosenbergs was engineered to placate the public fury over how quickly “our” bomb belonged to the world.

New disclosures from classified files, Russian and American, reveal that Julius, an ardent Communist who felt no country should possess the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, really was a traitor. But Ethel was out of the loop. She would have avoided arrest if David’s wife Ruth hadn’t made up a story about her typing David’s clandestine data.

Sadly, innocence can be as conditional as guilt. This new drama based on “The Brother” by Sam Roberts (here played with suitable curiosity by Bill Bannon) concentrates on David Greenglass. The perfect proof of the “banality of evil,” he’s played by Steppenwolf star Robert Breuler with hangdog casualness, shrugging off his sins as he tries to explain away the deal he cut with the likes of Red-hunter and closet case Roy Cohn (an oily Will Shanklin). A 10-year sentence sure beats death.

More journalism than theater, this world premiere “spy thriller” by director John Hancock plays like an illustrated lecture. Full of flashbacks based on interviews between Roberts and a skulking, evasive and occasionally regretful Greenglass, it’s never less interesting than the story itself but, alas, seldom more so. What we get is a family feud that took on national notoriety. Purity is impossible here but there’s a kind of residual nobility in Ethel Rosenberg’s final hours. While Julius (played with honest directness by Anthony Tournis) literally fought his fate, Ethel (a haunting Justine Serino) refused to name names to save her life. The fact that she had no one to name retroactively proves her relative innocence without detracting from the decency of her refusal to bargain with her butchers.

But bargaining is all that Breuler’s Greenglass can do well.  The name “Greenglass” refers to an imperfection that colors glass green. His own stain was survival itself, the dirty deeds people do to save their hide if not their soul. It’s hard to learn anything edifying about a scumbag who orphaned his two nephews to save his wife from suspicion. This play will stop no presses as it reveals the rationales of a rat.

“The Book of Liz”

Written by Amy & David Sedaris

Showing: The Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln Ave., through Sept. 30

Tickets: $12–18

Contact: (773) 865-7731; www.cicomedy.com

By Web Behrens

Contributing writer

The Sedaris name is enough to guarantee an audience at any event these days, which works to the advantage of Chemically Imbalanced Comedy, currently reviving siblings David and Amy’s “The Book of Liz.” But, despite the efforts of this enthusiastic but green troupe, it’s hard not to consider the Law of Diminishing Returns on this oddball comedy.

The drolly preposterous tale—from its sanctimonious start to the warped finish—follows the misadventures of Sister Elizabeth Donderstock, a beleaguered member of an Amish-like community who runs away to discover herself after her leader, Reverend Tollhouse, demotes her from her duties as cheeseball chef. Liz’s cheeseball, it seems, is the chief revenue generator for the insular religious community of The Squeamish (that name is one of the show’s more painfully obvious jokes). The reverend tosses Liz aside because he’s eager to score points—and probably score in the bedroom—with a new arrival, the strangely charismatic Brother Brightbee, who covets the all-important cheeseball-making title. (And that’s just the zany set-up! Wait for the Cockney-accented Ukrainians, the 12-steppers’ diner, the endless sweating...)

It might not seem fair to compare Chemically Imbalanced’s young cast and cash-poor production to the 2001 New York premiere, but that’s pretty much unavoidable. Amy Sedaris didn’t just co-write the thing: It was a vehicle for her onstage too. Three other performers in multiple roles spun off of her protagonist turn—a much smarter approach than the one adopted here by director Angie McMahon. She utilizes 14 actors, not just four, though few of the characters are fully-fledged enough to justify such a waste of an actor’s time. It doesn’t help that the pace occasionally ambles when it needs to trot.

At any rate, this isn’t a witty show in the vein of David’s “Santaland Diaries”—it’s much more akin to Amy’s sometimes sadistic “Strangers with Candy” yuks. As such, McMahon allows her cast to play it all quite broadly, with mixed results. Pulling it off best are the putty-faced Brian Kash as Brightbee (who’s could out-sneer Dubya) and Nathan Petts as a sarcastic gay waiter. Meanwhile, Sarah Rose Graber conjures up a believably naïve, charmingly sincere Liz for everyone else to play against. Still, when you see the amusing range displayed in two bit parts by Chris Froseth, it makes you wish for a cast one-half or one-third the size, which would give everyone better opportunities to show their chops.

“War”

Written by Roddy Doyle

Showing: The Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph St., through Oct. 7

Tickets: $15–20

Contact: (312) 742-8497; www.dcatheater.org

By Web Behrens

Contributing writer

In one of her “Eunice” sketches on the classic Carol Burnett variety show of the 1970s, Eunice (Burnett) thinks it’ll be hoot to play the board game Sorry with her husband Ed (Harvey Korman) and Mama (Vicki Lawrence). Things predictably take a mean-spirited turn as the players “sorry” each other back to home base, and soon enough, long-suffering Eunice has a temper tantrum. Start to finish, it’s probably about 10 minutes of smartly paced, funny comedy. (Would somebody post it on You Tube already?)

The key was brevity. Burnett, her co-stars, her writers—they all knew how to leave the audience wanting more. (If your only recollection of the Eunice clan is from the dreadful “Mama’s Family” sitcom, which expanded the playlets to half-hour format and reduced it to a ghost of its former self, then that only proves the point.)

One wishes Roddy Doyle had gotten the memo. In his alleged comedy “War,” the noted Irish writer delivers a large cast of mostly unsavory types competing in a monthly trivia contest at a Dublin pub. That might be fodder for an amusing one-act, but the thing stretches out for more than two hours. It’s a shame that Seanachai Theater Company picked this 1989 play for its downtown showcase at the Storefront Theater (courtesy of the city of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs).

It’s never a good sign when the people on stage—a hefty ensemble of 16—are laughing more than those of us on the other side of the lights. Then again, somebody shouldn’t be marketing this thing as a “rollicking comedy,” especially given the tense home-life scenes of one of the hotheaded competitors, George, who treats his wife even worse than his friends. (At least actor Michael Grant does an admirable job in trying to make George appear 3-dimensionally human.)

Director Karen Kessler isn’t at a loss for ideas, including a stylized sequence that mixes clever, Keystone-Cops-style choreography with Victoria DeIorio’s sound design for a fresh, time-lapsed effect. Coming relatively late in the game (near the start of act two), though, it feels wildly out of place. We needed this kind of touch at the start.

As predictably as Ed and Mama ganged up on Eunice 30 years ago, the rivalry between the top-scoring teams escalates into cruelty and threatened violence in this bizarrely unfunny play. Repeated rounds of Guinness pints, keeping pace with rounds of questions, don’t dampen certain tempers. Perhaps it would help us laugh along if the audience, too, were being liberally served.