Word: steppenwolf
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...Space A psychiatrist's comfortable world is shaken when he encounters several patients with similar tales of alien visitation. Writer-director Tina Landau's wondrous production for Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre is a magical mystery tour, packed with inventive sound and lighting effects, that explores cosmic questions of mankind's place in the universe while staying grounded in the spiritual quest of one vulnerable man, played marvelously by Tom Irwin...
That is exactly what Don DeLillo envisions in his vivid 1988 novel, Libra, which has been adapted and staged by John Malkovich for Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe. Oswald is variously buffeted by communists who hate Kennedy, CIA renegades bent on a better Bay of Pigs invasion and Mafia overlords whose motives are as shadowy as their methods. As history, the explanations are no more satisfying than any others. As literature, the portrait of Oswald's strange world -- especially his bizarre mother -- is richer, spookier and eerily funnier than anything else on the subject...
...Song: Born to Be Wild, Steppenwolf...
...DIFFICULT TO call agitprop against South Africa hard-hitting; how many pro-apartheid plays get mounted in the U.S.? But THE SONG OF JACOB ZULU, which Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe brought to Broadway last week, redeems its overlong preachments with Eric Simonson's deft direction and K. Todd Freeman's luminous acting of the title role, especially a final monologue in which he unsentimentally uncorks the rage that drove a minister's son to terrorism. What makes the show unique is the unearthly beauty of a capella songs by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the group highlighted on Paul Simon's Graceland...
...There's a current fascination with disfigurement," Yeston says, "not only of the face but of the soul. The Phantom is the outsider, the Steppenwolf. In many ways he captures a central irony of our times: it's the one who has the imperfect appearance who has a kind of moral perfection." The superiority of the wounded: it is a metaphor that speaks -- no, it sings -- to every loser in love or in life...