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Time travel is hardly a stylistic innovation in theater these days. One pretty good new off-Broadway play, Clybourne Park, dramatizes the racial changes in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood by twinning two scenes 50 years apart: the arrival of the neighborhood's first black family in 1959 and the invasion of the first gentrifying white couple in the now all-black neighborhood in 2009. But When the Rain Stops Falling goes far beyond such schematic parallelism. Bovell's time-hopping structure is intricate but surprisingly natural - never strained or purposely obfuscating. Rather, as in the works of Faulkner...
David Cromer - the Chicago-based director who won acclaim for his recent off-Broadway revival of Our Town - handles all this with sensitivity and solemnity. (This is a real rara avis in New York theater: a play without laughs.) A cast of mostly Americans (among them Mary Beth Hurt and Victoria Clark) conveys the British and Australian milieus with as much authenticity as you're likely to find on these shores. The play is unrelievedly bleak but with a denouement of unexpected hope: a moving, almost revelatory evening of theater, and easily the best new play of the year...
Kathleen Austin, CHICAGO...
Adding new ammunition to the debate over gun control, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments March 2 in McDonald v. Chicago, a case challenging the constitutionality of Chicago's handgun ban. If, as is expected, the Justices rule in favor of 76-year-old Otis McDonald--who says he fears for his safety without a gun--they could lay the groundwork for gun-control laws to be loosened across the country. Firearms account for about 30,000 deaths each year in the U.S. The city of Chicago maintains that its 28-year-old handgun ban saves hundreds of lives...
...Soul of the New Machine Back when Obama was still just a Chicago pol, few would have mistaken him for the leader who would help give birth to a new clean-energy economy. In the late 1990s, the future President described himself as a "strong supporter" of downstate coal interests, voting in the Illinois legislature for billions of dollars in loan guarantees for new dirty power plants, and for a bill that condemned the Kyoto Protocol...