Alone, With Friends Steve (Jonathan Rivera), the awkward star of Lee Peters’s new play, is gay, lonely, and miserable. He’s always around straight boys (he feels safe with them) but he wants to know—are they really his friends? Is Alex (Ben Page) a friend, or do they just hang out? Conveniently, they’re both getting over breakups; but trading bong rips in Alex’s gross apartment and brooding over mayonnaise sandwiches about how their exes could possibly have left them doesn’t feel all that genuine. How about Greg (Henry Steinken), that jock from Steve’s fraternity who just keeps handing Steve his ass in beer pong? Or David (Chris Lysy), who’s always showing up at the bar—cute, secretly gay, perhaps, so possibly? Searching for stable definitions of friendship in unstable times, it’s a wistful and funny play, if occasionally dull. —Max Maller
The Gin Game S.L. Colburn’s 1977 two-act two-hander, about two prickly senior citizens who forge a friendship of sorts while playing gin in a retirement community, is by turns funny, moving, and way too drawn-out. Even when performed by top-flight eminences of a certain age—Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in the 70s, Charles Durning and Julie Harris in the 90s—the play drags and disappoints. Here it’s performed by Chicago stalwarts (and real-life married couple) Paula Scrofano and John Reeger and directed by Ross Lehman, but while the actors comedy and heart into the thin material, all their sweet, quirky sparking only makes the play’s rough, unresolved ending seem all the more a cop-out. —Jack Helbig
