“Bash” is the right name for the three plays that comprise playwright/screenwriter/director Neil LaBute’s unstinting examination of real-life evil, its wrenching banality and camouflaged charm. Opening Friday at Circle Theatre, this toxic trio of one-acts examines the ugly impulses that many may feel but few act upon. A young girl is either seduced by or seduces her junior high school English teacher. A church-going businessman in a Las Vegas hotel room tells a stranger how he kept his job by committing a crime so horrible that few tabloids could believe it. And in the title work, a yuppie couple’s anniversary weekend in New York is soured when the husband indulges in a homophobic “wilding” in Central Park. Orchestrating it all is director Jeffrey Cass. “The creepy thing here is how the audience wants to like these characters until they find out who they truly are and what they’ve done,” says Cass. “These characters can be the person next to you in the audience. Everybody harbors secrets that defy the clean slate we present to the world. We want the plays to feel inescapable. That’s why they’re performed without an intermission and with the actors just five feet from the audience.”
BASH runs through Sept. 12 at Circle Theatre, 7300 W. Madison St., Forest Park; $12; 708-771-0700.
POLITICAL MASKS 2004, AgitPop at HotHouse, 31 E. Balbo Drive; $15; 773-480-6763: A new theater begins life Saturday with a premiere by Chicago playwright Vincent Bruckert. Examining questions of security, patriotism, racial profiling and national leadership, the busy 70-minute drama, based on Bruckert’s work with Arab students at Chicago’s Truman College, depicts a fraternity president who decides to run for Congress. The author also throws in biological and chemical agents, an actor offered an unrefusable part, a sheriff and deputy who will rise to the occasion of national security, and two Northwestern University students who get busted for computer hacking–and for being Muslim. “The play looks at what happens when you’re arrested because of your culture of origin, because your race gives you a perspective that makes you identifiably different . . . ,” says Bruckert. “I want to look at what it means to be a brother, in the largest perspective.” Closes Oct. 10.
POPPIN’ AND LOCKDOWN 2: DANCE THE RIGHT THING, Factory Theater at Prop Theatre, 3504 N. Elston Ave.; $18; 312-409-3247: The hip is about to hop. Opening Thursday, this sequel set in 1989 continues the saga of break dancer Turbo, an enthusiastic firebrand who wants to free his neighborhood from drug lord Mendoza and his crack-selling goons. The drama, by Michael Meredith and Kirk Pynchon, inevitably comes down to a contest of dance domination as Turbo rescues his fallen Emma Goodheart from his chief rival–crack. Director Steve Walker explains the parody as “having fun with how Hollywood dumbs down serious social issues like poverty, crime and drug and uses it as cheap fodder for action kicks, co-opting real-life crises.” Closes Oct. 3.
