Anything and Always . . . To say that Nic Wehrwein’s Anything and Always is a trite sob story fit for the slush pile at Lifetime would be to pile on one more cliche to an interminable 140 minutes full of them. A young victim of breast cancer, Courtney (Michelle Alejandra Limon) frolics in the afterlife as she did in life, crashing onto the stage with such vigor that the vibrations can be felt in the last rows. Her insipid counterpart is Art, interpreted by Wesley James as a monotone writer who grits his teeth and smiles whether he’s happy, sad, or mad. Limon’s charisma can’t save a play with dialogue that ranges from the self-evident (“I’m dead!”) to the bathetic (“Promise me you’ll write about this!”). The best moments come when its characters don’t speak, a credit to Limon’s embodiment of Mary Iris Loncto’s choreography. —Irene Hsiao
The Devil’s Disciple New Hampshire, 1777. The British occupation and the old Puritan ethic have each come under attack, the one by rebel forces of the Springtown militia, the other by the loose morals of a wily outcast, Richard Dudgeon (Gary Alexander). A case of mistaken identity thrusts Richard into accidental virtue, and brings out the diabolical side in his most Presbyterian of townsmen, the Reverend Anthony Anderson (Doug MacKechnie). There could hardly be a more ancient stage trick, but Shaw, last of the great Victorian rhetoricians, loads every twist and turn of the melodrama with a deadly accuracy of phrase that bristles even in a concert reading, ShawChicago’s trademark for 23 years. The cast, directed by Robert Scogin, is so good it hurts—you’ll wish you could see them do more, particularly Barbara Zahora, playing the minister’s overwrought wife. —Max Maller
Occidental Express It’s hard to imagine a director better suited to stage Romanian playwright Matei Visniec’s confounding, deadpan hallucinations than Istvan Szabo K. Crossing the Atlantic to tackle his third Visniec opus with Trap Door since 2011, the Hungarian director orchestrates this feverish inquiry into balkanization—geopolitical, interpersonal, and psychological—with more nuance and specificity than ever before, staging the fragmentary, ever-morphing scenes with whirling precision. His design team turns the small stage into an unsettled diorama of dismaying beauty, and the seven-person cast of Trap Door veterans display extraordinary fluency in Visniec’s indecipherable theatrical language. The result is 90 minutes of masterful perplexity, as shadowy, clownish figures race in and out of their own troubled histories in failed attempts to create (or, unaccountably, erase) anything genuine. —Justin Hayford
