Displaying items by tag: ERIC COBLE

Tin Drum Theatre Company is proud to announce the cast and creative team for Chicago premiere for A Dark Wood, October 15 - November 1, written by Eric Coble and directed by Steve Needham, at Studio 44 in the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. The preview performance for A Dark Wood is Thursday, Oct. 15 at 7:30 p.m. with the opening night performance Friday, Oct. 16 at 7:30 p.m. The performance schedule is Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. The Understudy Performance is Saturday, Oct. 31 at 2:30 p.m. There will be a post-show talk-back with playwright Eric Coble after a select performance date, to be announced. Tickets are $29 with $15 student tickets. Tickets go on sale Tuesday, Sept. 1  at TinDrumTheatre.com or by calling the Greenhouse Theater Company box office at 773.404.7336. 

“The Fix” was supposed to correct everything that had gone wrong with the country. Now, three members of a shattered family, Earthworm, Hummingbird and Armadillo, occupy different corners of a society in free-fall, each surviving in their own way. Earthworm squats in no-man’s land beside his only friend, desperate to cross the river border and begin a new life. Hummingbird hides in a boarded-up apartment, secretly reading books with a fugitive teacher who will do anything to keep both her — and the resistance — alive. Armadillo stands alone in her police armor searching for justice, or perhaps forgiveness. Which of them will make it to Paradise and what will it cost? Does such a place even exist?

A Dark Wood ensemble cast includes Renzo Vicente (he/him, Earthworm), Delaney 

Vallese (she/her, Hummingbird), Marlee Feacher (she/her, Armadillo), Carlos Andrés Mai (he/they, Montrose), Shannon Leigh Webber (she/her, Miss Vivian) and Raúl Alonso (he/him, Dipper).

The creative team includes Eric Coble (he/him, playwright); Steve Needham (he/him, producer/director),  Jason Palmer (he/him, production manager),  Sil Rivera (they/them, stage manager); Will Hughes (he/him, technical director and scenic designer); Kasey Wolfgang (she/her, costume designer); Emma Berry (she/her, lighting designer and master electrician); Zach Stinnett (he/him, sound designer) and Erin Alys (she/her, director of intimacy and movement). 

ABOUT ERIC COBLE, playwright

Eric Coble is an award-winning American playwright whose work spans sharply drawn dramas, audacious comedies and incisive social satire. Born in Edinburgh and raised on the Navajo and Ute reservations of the American Southwest, Coble brings a distinctive blend of wit, empathy and theatrical boldness to the stage.

His plays have been produced across the United States and internationally, including on Broadway, Off-Broadway and at major regional theatres. His Broadway debut, The Velocity of Autumn, starring Estelle Parsons and Stephen Spinella, earned Parsons a Tony Award nomination. Other widely produced works include The Giver (stage adaptation), Bright Ideas, My Barking Dog, Fairfield, The Dead Guy, Natural Selection and Southern Rapture, among many others.

Coble’s scripts have received an ATCA Steinberg New Play Award citation, the Governor’s Award for the Arts (Ohio) and multiple Edgerton New Play Awards. His work has been developed or produced by The Kennedy Center, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Class Company, Denver Center Theatre Company, Cleveland Play House, Alliance Theatre, Arena Stage and Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Known for his sharp comic voice and ability to illuminate the tensions and absurdities of contemporary American life, Coble remains a vital presence in the new-play landscape. He is a member of the Playwrights’ Center and a graduate of Ohio University’s MFA program.

ABOUT STEVE NEEDHAM, director

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Steve Needham is a founding member of Convergence-Continuum, which is still producing provocative black box theatre for more than 25 years.

In Chicago, Needham has previously worked in various capacities at The Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, About Face Theatre and Pride Films & Plays. He holds a B.A. in theater from Kent State University, a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from Cleveland State University.

At Tin Drum Theatre, he wrote the company’s inaugural play, Winter Garden about Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, and directed The Unseen by Craig Wright. 

Outside of his artistic pursuits, Needham is an attorney with a litigation firm located in the River North neighborhood.

ABOUT TIN DRUM THEATRE COMPANY

Tin Drum Theatre Company exists to disrupt complacency and reassert theatre’s civic purpose. Creating theatre that asks something of its audience, moving beyond comfort to provoke conversation and critical engagement. Tin Drum believes community begins where audiences and ideas collide, and where dramatic disturbances are created.

“Southern Rapture” quickly elicits loud guffaws from the audience, a heartening circumstancve, as it means playwright Eric Coble’s script is doing its job. Billed as a satire, it recounts the tumultuous week in real life leading up to the 1996 opening night of Tony Kushner's celebrated AIDS play, “Angels in America” in Charlotte, NC. But what might have been a tragic recount of small-minded efforts at artistic repression gets turned on its head, a potential tragedy mined for comedy, with an ending that is at once affirming and exhilarating.  

This show at Theater Wit, produced by three-year-old Tin Drum Theatre Company, is loaded with broad humor, and is something of a backstage comedy as well. For purposes of the script, Charlotte becomes a generic southern city, and Kushner becomes Anton Finewitz, and his vaunted work is transformed into “Rapture in America.” 

The show parodies not just the reactionary forces that sought unsuccessfully to keep “Angels in America” from the stage of a rising southern metropolis. It also takes aim at the theater company, its governing board, local government, and the national media that spun the controversy into the unnuanced, dualistic divisiveness that seems to have solidified as a way of American life today. 

Andrew Bosworth as Reverend Dupree and Jenny Hoppes as Laverne Jackson protest the opening of "Rapture in America."

As “Rapture in America” barrels toward dress rehearsal, a big supratitle flashes the daily countdown to its local premiere. In an opening monolog to the audience, Marjorie Hooper proudly tells us, “The play’s won the Pulitzer, Tony, Drama Desk Award, an Evening Standard Award, the Rainbow Excellence Award and an ASPCA citation (that last one is a laugh line)—We’re one of only six theaters in the nation to get the rights to do the show outside of New York!” Indeed! 

When word gets around there will be full frontal male nudity in the show, the gears of progress run unevenly, and almost grind to a halt. Company director Marjorie Winthrop (Shannon Leigh Webber) attempts to insulate her performers from the backlash, which comes in the form of Reverend Dupree (Andrew Bosworth) and a town gadfly Lavern Jackson (Jenny Hoppes). Jackson has read the script and counted the number of mentions of “cocksucker” and other notable perversions to the Charlotte Town Council. (In a content warning to the audience, Jackson’s list includes “one penis,” which indeed appears in the second act at Theatre Wit.)

Theater critic Simon Larisher (Jordon Gleaves, left) conspires to promote "Rapture in America" with production director Donald Sherman (Michael Stejskal).

Charlotte Mayor Winston Paxton (Teddy Boone), ever even-tempered, tries to stay above the fray. His aspirations for transforming this growing city into a world-class metropolis have netted a symphony orchestra, a national sports franchise, and now, an important regional theater company, about to move into the big leagues. But the mayor is beginning to feel unsettled, praising the season’s opener, "The Odd Couple," and encouraging Marjorie to do something other than “Rapture.”

“There’s still gonna be plenty of art!,” the Mayor argues. “It’s just art we can all appreciate. Because that ‘Odd Couple’ was one of the goddam funniest things I ever saw in my life.” But Marjorie will have none of that, declaring the play "epic." 

It even dares to cut through the slavish devotion accorded "Angels in America" and Kushner himself, asking a if this two-part six-hour "epic" work might be too much in a town that likes to get home in time to catch Jay Leno.  

"'“Epic' meaning?" asks the mayor. "Three hours, two intermissions," Marjorie tells him. "And that’s just Part I. Part II is three hours too."
"Good lord, is this a play or a telethon?" asks the mayor, and the playwright punctures the unquestioned aura that seems to envelop Kushner and his fans. 

 Amid the brewing ontroversey, Marjorie conjures up a “bubble” for the players, a send up of that too precious psychobabble affectation that performers may have seen once or twice:

Marjorie: We’re in the bubble, say it with me.

Players: We’re in the bubble.

Marjorie: And what do we do in the bubble?

Players: We make art in the bubble.

Even theater reviewers get skewered in the no-holds-barred script: 

“When I have something to say,” says beleaguered Mayor Paxton, “I’ll talk to a real reporter.”

“I am a journalist,” Simon Larisher (Jordon Gleaves) retorts, to which the mayor replies, no, “You’re a theater critic!” Ouch! Larisher helps raise the profile of the imminent production in concert with the publicity-hungry production director Donald Sherman (Michael Stejskal).  

The playwright specifies just seven actors should play the 16 roles, and director Jason Palmer and the high-caliber cast carry this off wonderfully. Casting credits go to Teddy Boone. Particularly notable is Andrew Bosworth as the protesting preacher Reverend Dupree, and two of his nemeses: the playwright who has flown from New York into the fray, and company member Mickey Steadman, who will deliver the full monty. Bosworth plays the roles distinctively and we have no confusion.

Even more so for Mary Ann Bowman as the theater company board chair, the district attorney, and the over-the-top Nyla-Jean Geisy, a winged creature essential to the play within this play. Likewise for Gleaves, who carries off very well with the support of a good script four roles, including the TV host of “Night Line” and Franklin McManus, a highly effective lawyer given to flowery South Carolina colloquialisms.

Beyond its funny rendition of what it must have been like in Charlotte in 1996, “Southern Rapture” does something more. For me, it’s a reminder that we can recover from our seemingly intractable current state of social affairs. After all, we’ve done it numerous times in the last three decades, and even following the darkest of times in the 1950s with McCarthyism and the blacklisting of creatives. 

Back in the real Charlotte, “Angels in America” opened to record ticket sales, and the protests withered in the face of ticket-buyer preferences. Though the theater company that produced it saw its funding cut in retribution, a successor there commissioned this very funny “Rapture in America,” which feels cathartic all in all.

Now “Angels in America” is the stuff of celebrated revivals, and no one blinks an eye. So we do make it through these times of darkness, the forces of Steven Miller, Trad Wives and Andrew Tate notwithstanding. And we will recover from our current predicament too. 

Even with some clunkers among its running gags and jokes, “Southern Rapture” is highly recommended. It runs at Theater Wit through June 28, 2026.

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com.