Bleacher Bums This genially rowdy made-in-Chicago comedy—created by and for the fabled Organic Theater Company in 1977 at the instigation of ensemble member Joe Mantegna (now star of TV’s Criminal Minds)—focuses on a cadre of Chicago Cubs fans inhabiting the cheap seats at Wrigley Field during a game between the Cubs and the Saint Louis Cardinals. Responding to the unseen action on the ballfield below, a motley crew of day-game regulars cheer the home team, heckle the opposition, and challenge each other to increasingly high-stakes bets. The play—here presented by Open Space Theater in its revised 1998 version—is a pretty flimsy piece of storytelling, but it’s an engaging collection of quirky character sketches, engagingly played by a nine-person cast under Nich Radcliffe’s direction. —Albert Williams
Dead Children Playwright Robert Tenges’s Dead Children, a new production from the Side Project in collaboration with Chicago Dramatists, works around memories of events too painful to discuss candidly without risking everything. Most of the time what the characters do instead is make fragile, evasive chitchat—it’s how they survive. Tom (Erik Wagner) is deeply vulnerable, his mother having done unspeakable things to him as a child. It affects his posture: whether talking or listening, his twitchy bald head leans forward, eyes down, like a meek lollipop. He and his wife, Renata (Kirsten D’Aurelio), are splitting up (“We’re not physical,” Tom says). Renata, an underachieving daughter, is now caretaker of her mother, the same woman—grown gray and forgetful but still just as nasty—who burned her with a scalding plate of mashed potatoes as a child. It’s a pretty raw play, though one with performances that, under the direction of Adam Webster, are also pretty extraordinary, especially Victoria Gilbert as Mary Jo, Tom’s high school sweetheart. —Max Maller
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Some of the actors in this revival of William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s 2005 Broadway musical are less than fabulous singers, and the production itself, as evidenced by the simple set and costumes, is low-budget, but that hardly matters when the comic acting is as first-rate as it is in this production. Everybody in this sweet little show finds the funny in their quirky, neurotic characters without turning them into goofy cartoons and losing the laughs. And they do this without mocking these gifted if annoying spelling-bee kids or overplaying the comedy—by making us like their characters first, as Jason Geis does in his hilarious portrayal of the gifted if annoying William Barfee (though it seems unfair to single out Geis in an ensemble as tight and talented as this one). Erin Elisabeth Smith provides the smart musical direction. —Jack Helbig
