Displaying items by tag: Hannah Antman

Kirsten Greenidge’s Morning, Noon & Night, currently receiving its Midwestern premiere at Shattered Globe Theatre, is an ambitious, mind-bending exploration of the “new normal” in post-pandemic America. Greenidge, a playwright unafraid of tonal hybridity, situates her story at the uneasy intersection of middle-class and magical realism. Under AmBer Montgomery’s direction, the production attempts to navigate the landscape of family connection, digital surveillance, and the psychic fragmentation wrought by living life through digital screens.

The play unfolds over the course of a single day in the life of Mia, a work-from-home mother teetering on the edge of burnout. Kristin E. Ellis anchors the production with a performance that captures both the brittle humor and simmering desperation of a woman expected to hold everything together. Her Mia is perpetually toggling—between Zoom meetings and grocery lists, between maternal patience and private panic. Ellis embodies the quiet terror of a generation of women asked to endure the unendurable with a smile.

Opposite her, Emefa Dzodzomenyo gives Dailyn a restless, electric presence. As the hyper-aware Gen Z daughter oscillating between existential dread and a yearning for authentic connection, Dzodzomenyo resists caricature. Her Dailyn is sharp, wounded, and achingly perceptive—someone who has inherited not only climate anxiety and algorithmic pressure but also the emotional residue of her mother’s exhaustion.

The supporting cast deepens the sense of a household under strain. Christina Gorman’s Heather, Mia’s friend and confidant, functions as both comic relief and quiet warning sign—her lingering pandemic anxieties and conspiratorial asides suggest how prolonged fear can harden into identity. Hannah Antman and Soren Jimmie Williams lend a jittery immediacy to Nat and Chloe, capturing the skittish vulnerability of teens shaped by social media’s relentless gaze. That said, both performers read slightly younger than I imagined the characters to be, which subtly shifts the dynamic; their portrayals emphasize innocence and volatility over the more self-aware cynicism often associated with girls of that age.

The production’s most striking presence is Leslie Ann Sheppard as Miss Candice, a “Donna Reed  - Father Knows Best” AI-generated avatar of curated perfection who steps out of the algorithm and into the family’s living room. Sheppard’s performance is chilling in its serenity. With a voice that soothes and a gaze that scans, Miss Candice represents not simply technology but the seductive promise of optimized living—an influencer deity promising order amid chaos. Her presence pushes the play from realism into something more speculative, even dystopian.

Jackie Fox’s set and lighting design effectively ground the story in its post-pandemic malaise. The living room, cluttered yet aspirational, feels very lived-in and slightly unraveling. The use of projections is particularly striking; at times the audience feels as though it is peering through a phone screen. Notifications flicker, curated images intrude, and the boundary between the digital and the tangible dissolves. The design serves as a digital mirror—reflecting how social media refracts reality rather than simply documenting it.

Yet for all its thematic ambition, the production occasionally exposes a disconnect between script and staging. Greenidge clearly has much to say about female rage, consumerism, intergenerational trauma, and the violence of constant connectivity. However, Montgomery’s direction seems to engage these ideas primarily at a surface level, with moments of genuine thematic revelation passing too quickly to fully resonate. The result can feel unintentionally algorithmic—significant insights obscured beneath repetitive beats.

Moreover, despite the performances and the evocative design, the stakes never quite rise to meet the play’s expansive conceptual ambitions. Whether this disconnect stems from the script, or the direction is difficult to determine, but the result is the same: the looming threat of digital colonization and familial fracture hover suggestively rather than landing with decisive impact. The danger feels atmospheric instead of urgent, diffuse rather than devastating.

Morning, Noon & Night offers a portrait of contemporary anxiety, capturing the low-grade dread of a culture caught between the longing for authentic connections and the seductive pull of curated isolation. Like the screens it interrogates, the play pulses and glitches—at times mesmerizing, at times disquieting—but always insistently present, morning, noon & night.

RECOMMENDED

When: through March 28th

Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W Belmont Ave, Chicago, IL 60657

Running Time: 90 minutes no intermission

Tickets:  $20  -  $60

773-770-0333

www.sgtheatre.org/season-35/morning-noon-night

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com. 

“Caveman Play” by Savannah Reich is a delightful confection that delves into weighty matters—the state of the earth, the fundamental challenges of civilized life—but avoids the angst.

In just 70 minutes, Reich takes us back to our primordial past, when humans first began to drop their roles of hunting and gathering food for sustenance—more aligned with their fellow creatures in nature—and settled down to become farmers.

She does this with a cast of four. Rocky (Jack Rodgers) and his wife Dandelion (Tess Galbiati) are a couple who are big advocates for the agrarian life, and are at work to promulgate its advantages to their community. Their cat, Douglas (played with droll deadpan by Evan Cullinan), resides taciturnly at a keyboard, providing musical accompaniment (and commentary) when required.

Ardently against this new-fangled agriculture drive is Rocky’s friend and hunter-gatherer advocate Chicken Feathers (a vibrantly funny Hannah Antman). She clearly has a history with Rocky, and shows up in time to catch the agriculture advocacy presentation, which has many familiar trappings of a modern office meeting to rally sales. The audience members, including some ringers, participate.

The case for agriculture includes the mixed blessings of the lifestyle: monogamy, life-long marriage, home ownership and the like. Reich also signals the out-sized burden “civilized” humans will place on the Earth. Chicken Feathers staunchly rejects all that, and poses charged questions at the rally about the wisdom of abandoning the free-form and less encumbered life of a hunter.

After the presentation, a vote is taken, and when agriculture wins, Chicken Feathers predicts nothing good will come of it, and it may seem she has been proven right over the eons. Chicken Features pointedly invites everyone down to the river for an orgy. Rocky is clearly torn, realizing that’s something else he must abandon.

The cat Douglas, for his part, never waivers. When asked where he stands on the matter periodically, he answers with a question: “Do I get food?” And he goes wherever the meal ticket requires.

Very well directed by Clare Brennan, "Caveman Play” runs through December 31 at The Edge Off Broadway Theatre in Chicago.