![]() Select Chicago credits include Ironbound, Good People (Jeff Award nomination), her own solo show It Ain’t No Fairy Tale (LA Weekly Award – Solo Performance), Hysteria, Our Town, and Whispering City (Steppenwolf) Love’s Labours Lost, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry IV (Chicago Shakespeare Theater/Royal Shakespeare Company) Go Away Go Away (Jeff Award – Principal Actress) and Slavs! (European Rep) and many years of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (Chicago and New York City) as a Neo-Futurist. Lusia is so happy to be at Northlight where she earned her Actor’s Equity Card in their inaugural production at the North Shore Center, Atomic Bombers. 19 at Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie $25-$78 at 84 and Robin Witt, fresh from her recent triumph with Men Should Weep at the Griffin Theatre is at the helm. Instead, her play (seen and acclaimed in New York) focuses on the members of his family, who must come to terms both with the scale of the crime committed on their watch and with the total upheaval of their lives. Peet wisely does not focus on the man himself, or on some stand-in for the convicted trickster. But The Commons of Pensacola, which has not been seen before in Chicago, is about the fallout from the Bernie Madoff scandal. For legal and, perchance, aesthetic reasons, the names have been changed. But you could not apply that charge to the new play at the Northlight Theatre, written by the actress Amanda Peet. This is why we’ve seen such a rise in the prestige and currency of television. The Commons of Pensacola: One persistent critique of the American theater is that writers are too slow to react to current events. PREVIEW Theater for fall 2014: Looking local, Airline Highway to Native Son The Commons of Pensacola: With the recent death of Bernie Madoff’s last surviving son, Andrew, Amanda Peet’s play about the wife of a Madoff-like figure coming to terms with her husband’s crimes may have extra poignancy. ![]() PREVIEW 50 shows for fall: The game’s just beginning Peet’s drama is set on Thanksgiving, as Ruth’s daughters Becca (Lusia Strus) and Ali (Lori Myers) arrive for a visit that unleashes the demons buried just below the surface at Judith’s new Florida home. Whether you have a tie to Madoff or not, The Commons of Pensacola tells a compelling story of a family struggling with crippling guilt and trying to mend relationships that seem irrevocably broken. Every year, she gets reinvestigated and polygraphed,” Kimbrough says. But, you know, they’re still trying to find out what happened to all that money. ![]() ![]() “I have a relative who worked in Madoff’s office. …For director Robin Witt, the questions Commons asks are as significant as they are vexing: “What happens to a family that’s been destroyed from within? What happens when you’re so hated, when the things your husband or father has done are so heinous that you don’t even have the right to mourn his loss?”Īs Judith, veteran Chicago actor Linda Kimbrough has a personal connection to Madoff and the ruinous schemes that cost people their homes, their retirement and even their health. PREVIEW Bernie Madoff story inspired darkly comic Commons of Pensacola Their blistering mother-daughter firefight is a stunner. And director Robin Witt, who is enjoying a stellar year ( The Commons follows on the heels of her extraordinary helming of Griffin Theatre’s Men Should Weep), has gathered a cast of six that is pure perfection …Īs mother and daughter, Kimbrough and Strus, veteran Chicago actresses who can flip from tragedy to comedy in a single breath, are a match made in heaven as two women imprisoned in a web of love, loss, fear and need. Peet has managed to spin her story into an airtight 90 minutes full of memorable characters and painful truths. In fact, it is all these things, and more. A few might even call it an American tragedy. Others might call it a picture of the afterlife, or a study in collateral damage, guilt, denial and our uniquely 21st century form of tabloid narcissism. Some might describe The Commons of Pensacola - the tremendously accomplished first play written by actress Amanda Peet, now receiving a deliciously fierce Midwest premiere at Northlight Theatre - as a tale of survival. REVIEW The Commons of Pensacola homes in on shattered family
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