All this month, the theater writers from our "Onstage/Backstage" blog are compiling their favorites in 2010 Chicago theater. Today, Kelly Kleiman lists her top 5 actors of the year.
Sean Fortunato in Travels With My Aunt at Writers Theatre. Yes, yes, I’ve just seen this performance so it’s apt to come to mind; but believe me, I’ve been a fan of Fortunato’s at least since 2003, when in Northlight’s production of the musical At Wit’s End he played the founding editor of The New Yorker. (The New Yorker should have been so lucky.) In Graham Greene’s bizarre fusion of Auntie Mame and Under the Volcano, he manages to portray persuasively both a repressed middle-aged English banker and the banker’s madcap Aunt Augusta, complete with understated homage to the original Aunt Augusta, the one created by Oscar Wilde. Comic actors rarely get their due, so I’ve put him first. His comic chops are incomparable. Long may he wave.
A word to the wise from Matt Hawkins: To fly, first suspend disbelief. With your rediscovered courage (or stupidity), push yourself. The movement director of Lookingglass Theatre’s “Peter Pan (A Play)” says he spent the show’s first two workshop days teaching the actors “to play, and play hard. That point when play turns dangerous—how far can you push that?”
Playwright Rebecca Gilman has been named to the Goodman Theatre Artistic Collective, the fellowship of senior national theater veterans who form the Goodman's creative think tank reporting to artistic director Robert Falls.
