Well, this is peculiar. If I remember correctly, Steppenwolf Theatre spent a significant part of last season trying to poke its mostly white, mostly aging, mostly bourgeois audience base in the eye with an array of well-sharpened sticks. Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over delivered a blow against a pale-skinned power structure designed to make life nasty, brutish, and short for urban black men. Taylor Mac’s Hir portrayed the boom-generation American male as a beast rendered harmless only as long as he’s kept in a drug-induced stupor. And Young Jean Lee played patrons into her Straight White Men with a hip-hop preshow cranked to PTSD-triggering decibel levels before turning us over to a pair of guides who did their condescending best to strip away our smug sense of privilege.
Though it goes unnamed in the play, the institution Henry (Francis Guinan) helps guard must be New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, because that’s where you’ll find the Rembrandt painting he admires above all others, Aristotle With a Bust of Homer. He communes with it when he’s alone in its presence, rhapsodizes over it to Madeline (Karen Rodriguez), a young woman copying it for a class, and Dodger (Ty Olwin), a punky street artist having his first day on staff. Normally punctilious—not to say reverential—on the job, Henry finds himself distracted by a crisis at home: his longtime domestic partner, a poet named Simon (John Mahoney), is dying of cancer. Grief over that imminent loss makes him reckless enough to give in when rebellious Dodger pushes him and Madeline to touch the Rembrandt. With their actual fingers.
Through 11/5: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Wed 10/4, 10/11, and 10/18, 2 PM Steppenwolf Theatre 1600 N. Halsted 312-335-1650steppenwolf.org $53-$98
