Going to a Place Where You Already Are A couple of years ago, the Pew Research Center confirmed that the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has risen significantly over the last decade. For a culture that already isn’t great at having conversations about end-of-life issues, that’s just a further wrench in how folks emotionally prepare for the inevitable. With shades of Calderón’s 17th-century allegory Life Is a Dream, Bekah Brunstetter’s 2016 drama follows an avowed atheist couple’s spiritual splintering after Roberta (Kathleen Ruhl) receives a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Her newfound faith is met with passive discomfort from her granddaughter and—inexplicably—totally unsympathetic condescension and a sense of personal betrayal from her husband. Matt Hawkins’s Redtwist Theatre production makes a clear-eyed case for faith even if Brunstetter’s script relies too heavily on a straw man to do it. —Dan Jakes
It Came From the Neo-Futurarium XII: Dawn of the Neo-Futurarium Nobody said it would be easy, but 12 years down the line, the Neo-Futurists are still out there bringing Chicago and its adjacent territories the finest in staged readings of terrible movie scripts. This year’s series begins with Caged!, a forgotten 1950 noir about a women’s prison. It seems to have not altogether awesomely been a propaganda movie about how going to jail makes you a lesbian, and the Neo-Futurarian rendition featured radiant off-the-cuff work from Ida Cuttler and the always-excellent Julie Williams, whom I’ve enjoyed in a number of storefront shows since last year. Next up is Face/Off (1997), which I actually like, followed by Suspiria (1977), and then the made-for-TV movie about venereal disease Someone I Touched (1975). Special mention must go to Dina Walters, whose preview for Face/Off was sublime. —Max Maller
