“Some families express their love through shouting, some through hugs and kisses,” writes Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins in the introduction to his promising new work, Miss Marx: Or the Involuntary Side Effects of Living. “This family loves through wit.”
Yet Dawkins’s script shows little interest in historical accuracy. The play opens in 1883, the year Marx died, as Eleanor performs in a fully staged production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In fact, the play didn’t open in London until 1889, and Eleanor wasn’t in it (though she did once take part in a private reading of the play that included Aveling and George Bernard Shaw). She returns home, where Engels lives (he didn’t), where Nim raised Freddy (he was raised by another family entirely), and where the effete poof Freddy (he wasn’t) is Eleanor’s bosom companion (whatever her relationship with the real Freddy, she called “the effeminate man” a “diseased form” in her 1886 essay “The Woman Question”). When she meets Aveling, he seems like the most idle man in London, not a biologist and noted early proponent of evolutionary theory.
Through 3/29: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 PM Strawdog Theatre Company 3829 N. Broadway 773-528-9696strawdog.org $28
