Borealis is everything we’ve come to expect a House Theatre of Chicago show to be: Good-hearted, winsome, fantastical, funny, clever, sweetly indignant, charmingly messy, and just dark enough before the dawn. It adopts the crowd-pleasing idioms established by shows like the ensemble’s annual Nutcracker and carried through in last winter’s Hatfield & McCoy, which somehow managed to be delightful despite all the carnage it chronicled. But Borealis‘s energetic House-yness may be its biggest problem. The new play by Bennett Fisher spends so much time being all you expect that it gives short shrift to what it’s saying.
All of the above is vividly imagined, in a gamer’s universe sort of way.
Cozbi wrests the codex, for instance, from a disfigured hermit named Titus
whose weaknesses (loves cigarettes, hates fire) she exploits to her
advantage. Her journey toward Absalom is punctuated by confrontations with
ascending levels of corporate “asshats,” each of which has to be fought
through or finessed in the classic manner—and each of which gets its own
eccentric look and powers, thanks to director Monty Cole and costume
designer Izumi Inaba. Borealis features plenty of whimsically
differentiated adversaries, along with some surprising secret weapons. And,
of course, it manifests every one of those famous House virtues.
Through 10/21: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM (except 9/23 and 10/7, 3 PM), Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 773-769-3832, thehousetheatre.com, $20-$50.
