The Curious Theatre Branch’s 15th annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe runs through 11/20 at the Curious Theatre Branch, 7001 N. Glenwood. Admission is $12 or “pay what you can”; for information and reservations, call 773-274-6660.
It’s not easy to negotiate the subject of motherhood–to chart a course between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of gleeful attack. Veteran solo artist Jenny Magnus makes the attempt in Cant, a 45-minute monologue (with songs). She deals with the subject by portraying various characters: good mothers, bad mothers, a self-absorbed young father, the hard-bitten mother of a mother, and a lactation consultant/nurse’s assistant. Magnus embodies her characters brilliantly, and her newness as a mother gives this piece its freshness, its emotion, its honesty, and–for better or worse–its indirection. (LM) Writer-director Shawn Reddy’s comedy White Suit Science–by turns satiric, sarcastic, surreal, and painfully sincere–begins as a discussion of Mark Twain, but turns into a fascinating postmodern analysis of whiteness and the ongoing whitewashing of history. (JHe) 7 PM
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Beau O’Reilly directs his own script about a therapist who moves to the east coast to keep tabs on her long-estranged college-student daughter. If the screwball plot sometimes seems like a Harold run amok, clever characterizations pique our curiosity throughout. (MSB) 7 PM
The spoken-word artists offer “stories (and stories inside stories) about guns and jails, and perhaps about stories themselves.” Lockhart also performs Laura’s Bush, a one-woman political lampoon by “Jane Martin,” the pseudonymous author(s) of Talking With . . . . 7 PM
