The Body of an American Paul Watson, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his photograph of Somalis dragging a dead American soldier through the streets, has witnessed innumerable atrocities while covering war zones around the globe; he’s left with a crippling case of PTSD. Dan O’Brien, who’s written some poems and plays you’ve never heard of, has a brother who, as a teen, jumped from a third-story window and landed safely in a snowbank; as a result, O’Brien’s still upset. In this 2016 play, O’Brien spends 90 stupefying minutes drawing an equivalence between his and Watson’s struggle, chronicling his own efforts to write this undisciplined, overcooked play and leaving Watson’s own story underdeveloped. Jason A. Fleece’s swift staging for Stage Left has it charms, but go read Watson’s memoir instead. —Justin Hayford
Haymarket: The Anarchist’s Cookbook Underscore Theatre’s original musicalized treatment of Chicago’s Haymarket riot and its aftermath fairly bursts with promise, from Elizabeth Margolius’s imagistic staging to Erik Barry’s seductive lighting to Robert Ollis’s and Tyler Merle Thompson’s exacting musical direction. David Kornfeld’s haunting if somewhat derivative score cunningly fuses American folk and European cabaret. Throw in a stalwart nine-person cast who play nearly every acoustic instrument known to man, and you should have a smash. But Alex Higgin-Houser’s alternately overfocused (act one) and underfocused (act two) book and workmanlike lyrics turn much of the two-hour show clumsily diagrammatic. And the inconsistent effort to focus the show around Lucy Parsons, firebrand widow of one unjustly executed Haymarket “coconspirator,” ultimately comes to nothing. Glimpses of greatness abound. Rigorous reworking awaits. —Justin Hayford
