Caught Christopher Chen’s tantalizing hoax begins with a “preshow” exhibit of works by Chinese dissident artist Lin Bo (Ben Chang). He says a few words about his recent imprisonment, then is suddenly a character in a scene set in the offices of the New Yorker after an American academic has questioned the veracity of an interview he gave the magazine about his imprisonment. When “the play” ends, a real cast member conducts a “talkback” with ersatz playwright Wang Min (Helen Young), who spouts ingenious and impenetrable theories about cultural appropriation. Finally, the actors who played Wang Min and Lin Bo hang out discussing their performances. In moments it’s grad-school precious, but mostly it’s a provocative look at the mutability and exploitability of “truth.” Seth Bockley’s Sideshow Theatre production is as smart as Chen’s script. —Justin Hayford
The Cure A dreamlike, ensemble-devised dance-theater piece about sickness and healing in an age of industrialized medicine, The Cure features only minimal dialogue by Emma Stanton but conjures a powerful atmosphere through movement, choral harmony, and costumes. Most of the hour is spent in the Chicago Cultural Center’s lavishly ornamented Sidney R. Yates Gallery, as a limber and emotive cast of Walkabout Theater Company members wheel wooden gurneys across the echoing floor, twirl vials of colorful serum, and parody various doctor-patient interactions; performer Nigel Brown even presents a TED talk. In one memorable sequence, ensemble member Dana Murphy lies flat on a gurney as four castmates whip a bed sheet into the air above her, then tightly down over her body, then up again. For cryptic acts like these to feel as moving as they do takes some magic, and The Cure provides just the rare sort that will do the trick. —Max Maller
Out of the Blue The story surrounding Vladimir Zaytsev’s drama is more interesting than the thing itself. Staged in Moscow last year, Zaytsev’s by-the-numbers sexual coming-of-age story was a head-on challenge to Vladimir Putin’s repressive 2013 antigay “propaganda” law. Alexander Gelman and Organic Theater Company present it in repertory with Neil Simon’s Chekhov tribute, The Good Doctor, but free of dialect and detached from its cultural context, it loses its punch. There’s a lot of truth and compassion in Will Burdin’s performance as a teenager navigating the complications of gay life (girlfriend “beards,” zealot grandparents, shallow hookups); still, the script is such an overlong and dramaturgically clumsy affair that the most devastating moments become the most tedious. —Dan Jakes
Xanadu A tribute to American Theater Company’s late artistic director, PJ Papparelli, this energetic revival of the 2007 Broadway musical based on the campy 1980 flop Xanadu (Papparelli’s favorite movie) mines all that’s great about the material—the eccentric story, the silly pop hits, the myriad opportunities for late-disco-era nostalgia—while avoiding most of the pitfalls of the belabored book. Director Lili-Anne Brown packs the production with brilliant quadruple threats (They sing! They dance! They act! They roller boogie!), but Landree Fleming kills and kills as Clio (played by Olivia Newton-John in the movie), a demigoddess come to earth to inspire a dopey Venice Beach artist/hunk (well portrayed by Jim DeSelm). And Arnel Sancianco’s transformation of the American Theater Company space into a roller disco is sheer genius. —Jack Helbig v
