The Compass The audience is the jury in this interactive courtroom drama devised and directed by Michael Rohd for Steppenwolf for Young Adults. At issue is whether a teenager can be held responsible for calling in a bomb threat to her school when a powerful decision-making app on her phone told her to do it. As in a TV procedural, Rohd carefully parcels out information to keep us guessing, and as in a classroom exercise, the action often pauses so that facilitators can lead us in small-group discussions. The show certainly engages the audience, but the pressure to render a verdict stymies efforts to handle the issues with any nuance. Rohd criticizes technology for encouraging snap judgments, then encourages us to make a snap judgment. —Zac Thompson
New Country This wild and crazy comedy is set inside a Nashville hotel room on the eve of famous country singer Justin’s (Michael Monroe Goodman) wedding. You may know playwright Mark Roberts from his work as a TV writer and showrunner (Two and a Half Men, Mike & Molly). But he’s also an actor and onetime stand-up, and it’s Roberts himself who appears as Justin’s drunk and disorderly uncle Jim. Uncle Jim is a world-weary rascal with a shaggy foot-long beard and a rather apathetic-looking blow up doll tucked under his elbow. You don’t need to love country music (much less new country, which Jim hates) to love him, or to love this play. Roberts leads a fantastic ensemble, including the heartbreaking Sarah Lemp as Sharon, an ill-used woman from Jim’s past who wants revenge, and Chicago veteran Frank Nall as Paul, his manager.—Max Maller
Zoyka’s Apartment Chicago owes Bluebird Arts for presenting this 1925 “tragic farce” by Mikhail Bulgakov. A true Russian genius, Bulgakov had the unique advantage and the vast misfortune of practicing satire in the early decades of the Soviet era. Stalinist culture made his work at once possible and unpublishable. His great novel, The Master and Margarita, is now well-known in the West, but not works like Zoyka’s Apartment—a potentially wicked piece about a bordello operating out of a Moscow housing block. I say “potentially” because, while Bluebird has made a fascinating selection, the production (directed by Luda Lopatina Solomon from an English-language adaptation by Yasen Peyankov and Peter Christensen) is clumsy and approximate. The situation isn’t clearly defined, layers of subtext are never reached, and something’s got to be done about the way two Chinese characters are portrayed. Only Doogin Brown, playing the brothel manager, seems aware of the demands of the script and how they might be fulfilled. —Tony Adler
