May 14--Tragedy is an experience of chaos. Most great tragic actors eventually realize that truth. Whether it's Oedipus the King or Hamlet, these great characters aren't so much making decisions as trying to keep their heads as the world explodes.
I wouldn't call John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," which Writers Theatre is producing inside the Glencoe Union Church, a tragedy in the classic sense of the word. But I would call the central performance from the remarkable actress Karen Janes Woditsch a great tragic performance.
That's because Woditsch shows us a nun, raised on absolute rights and wrongs, who has suddenly become aware of chaos, in the form of priests preying on young boys. This explosion of, well, "Doubt," has thrust Sister Aloysius into a panic, fueled both by her feeling of impotence within the hierarchical structure of the church and her acute sense of the drastic consequences of inaction.
In the Writers production, you can read all of that on Woditsch's face.
Woditsch's world-class work in "Doubt" -- I neither use that description lightly nor make similar claims for the rest of the production -- is one of several pieces of distinguished acting that have caught my eye in just the last few nights of going about my reviewing business.
In the hilarious comedy "Bad Jews" at Theater Wit, Ian Paul Custer, an actor who has floated beneath a lot of radars to date, is also playing a character beset by chaos -- in this instance, in the person of his judgmental cousin, Daphna, a woman determined to attack the secular ways of Custer's Liam.
Liam is mad at the beginning of the play, and he only gets madder. But what Custer clearly understands is that his guy mostly is trying to stay on an even keel as everything in his family, not to mention all his plans for the future, seems suddenly to fall apart.
Like Shanley, the unstinting playwright Joshua Harmon is interested in religious battles, but his weapons are comedic and his battlefield the American family, placed under stress. And Custer shows us a level of vitriolic panic that's exceptionally funny to watch. You should check him out in this show.
Over at the Goodman, in director Henry Wishcamper's production of Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes," the fine actor John Judd is playing Horace Giddens. Like the Sister in "Doubt," Horace is a kind of internal whistleblower, the one man who can stop the various diabolic doings of Regina and her brothers. If you've seen this play before, you'll recall that Horace is a very ill man. Horace can handle the Hubbards. His own mortality is another matter.
I was struck by how defiantly unsentimental Judd is in this role and by how clearly he shows you a man facing the worst kind of chaos, otherwise known as the realization that he is about to die. Judd's Horace fights for life with a fury, and the intensity of his battle with his own body creates the most powerful and authentic moments of this production. It is unexpected, which makes it all the more potent.
"The Project(s)," the deeply moving new piece at American Theater Company about the history of housing projects in Chicago, is an ensemble work, full of fine acting. But I've had Kenn E. Head stuck inside my skull since I saw this superb show last week.
Head, a veteran, simmering Chicago actor capable of sudden bursts of shocking intensity, plays several roles here, mostly characters who, to press my theme yet further, are trying to survive as chaos envelops their lives and, in this case, the very apartment building in which they live.
Most of the characters in "The Project(s)," which was drawn from oral histories, are just trying to maintain the equilibrium, even as atrocities arrive on their balconies, in their hallways and inside their broken elevators.
Life is full of sudden horrors and unbearable losses, wheresoever we may live or work, and to whomever we may be related. We're lucky in Chicago to have actors who can help us better understand the pain and worth of that struggle.
Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
