Adverses Chicago novelist, poet and playwright Rey Andújar is equal parts philosopher, aesthete, and insurrectionist—all put to expert use in this savvy, ceaselessly inventive reworking of Euripides’s Electra. This time queen Clitemnestra is a power-hungry, pseudo-feminist nymphomaniac, while princess Electra is a wannabe Marxist revolutionary. Andújar’s stage world is impishly nonsensical (murdered King Agamemnon’s coffin has air holes cut in it), yet the malignant passions that consume everyone—jealousy, ambition, lust, revenge—are unsettlingly true to life. He combines Lorca’s erotic lyricism with Brecht’s politically engaged cynicism to create something urgent, idiosyncratic, and wholly contemporary. Directors Sándor Menéndez and Oswaldo Calderón stage the tragedy with perfect authority, assisted by a nimble, exacting cast who exploit every pulse in Andújarj’s intoxicating rhythms. It’s masterful. —Justin Hayford
The North Pool Khadim is a Syrian-born Muslim teenager attending a public high school somewhere in the US. Dr. Danielson is the school’s vice principal—and very possibly a sleaze. On the final day before spring break Danielson finds a minor reason to hold Khadim for detention, then uses the time (and the solitude, everyone else having cleared out) to pursue more dangerous matters. Well-wrought and judicious, Rajiv Joseph’s 2013 two-hander is a whodunit with a heart, exploiting our preconceived notions about people like Khadim and Danielson both to heighten its mystery and deliver its moral. James Yost’s 80-minute staging for Interrobang Theatre is competent but a little crabbed in that it gets us compellingly to the point yet fails to take full advantage of the psychic and physical violence inherent in the situation. Set designer Greg Pinsoneault does a great job of reproducing the classic school administrator’s office. —Tony Adler
Very Much Forever From a progressive pickup artist to an alien who enjoys intercourse with humans, the solo sketch show Very Much Forever offers more hits than misses. Scenes move rapidly from one wayward character to the next, assisted by the wisely included stagehand Stevie Shale, who doubles as a suicidal deer. Writer and performer Ben Larrison, known for his CTA Red Line PSAs featuring fake facts about squirrels (Project #SquirrelTruth), introduces us to a range of characters, including the perpetually cuckolded and the downright naughty. It’s dirty and offbeat, but that’s the Annoyance brand: dark and absurd, laughing through a wicked grin with a mad scientist’s look in the eye. Mick Napier directs. —A.J. Sørensen v
