Word: theatered
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Even in his hometown of Chicago, Keith Huff was hardly a playwriting superstar. Though the author of about 50 plays, many of them produced at respected Second City theaters like Steppenwolf and Chicago Dramatists, he still needed a day job--editing for a medical website--to help support himself, his wife and their 8-year-old daughter. Yet now he's a Broadway hot ticket. True, he has a couple of big movie stars to thank--Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, who were somehow persuaded to star in his play A Steady Rain. But they're only helping affirm...
...Apple this season. The second major play to open on Broadway this fall is another Chicago product: Superior Donuts, Tracy Letts' follow-up to August: Osage County, his multi-award-winning family drama that stormed Broadway nearly two years ago and is now on a national tour. Chicago theater's most celebrated export, David Mamet, will be represented on Broadway with two works this fall: a revival of his 1992 drama Oleanna and a new play, about black-white tensions at a law firm, titled Race. Meanwhile, hot Chicago director David Cromer--whose moving, teacup-size revival of Our Town...
Chicago, of course, has been a major force in American theater for some years. The Steppenwolf Theatre burst on the national scene in the 1980s, introducing plays by Mamet, Sam Shepard and others, popularizing a high-voltage performance style and spawning stars like John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. The city's biggest resident theater, the Goodman, has produced everything from major revivals of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller to last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Ruined by Lynn Nottage, while a growing roster of smaller off-Loop theaters have nurtured experimental works like 2007's critically acclaimed musical version...
...owner and the black kid who comes to work for him, and Oleanna, Mamet's scathing account of a bogus sexual-harassment charge that was too polemically freighted back in 1992 and has the added disadvantage of seeming dated today. But collectively, they showcase much of what makes Chicago theater so distinct and vital. The City of Big Shoulders produces big-shouldered theater as well--thematically ambitious, emotionally juiced, socially impassioned. It's a contrast to the hothouse quality of so much current New York theater: wispy memory plays, absurdist satires, Manhattan-centric relationship dramas, many written by gay playwrights...
...military details obscure a more significant, if less glamorous, theater of conflict: infrastructure. It's telling that India has demanded that China cease work on the $2 billion Kohala power plant in Pakistani Kashmir. (The 62-year dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir is as sensitive for India as Tibet is for China.) The plant is part of a systematic effort by China to assert its presence on the rim of the subcontinent, where India has long been the acknowledged superpower. In both Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the Chinese are funding new ports. The Chinese Foreign Minister visited Nepal last December...