January 1st, 1970

A courteous, comely young woman named Lemon (Ward-Hays) sits rotting in a well-to-do sitting room. She passes the time reading about the crimes at Treblinka and weaving disturbingly charming arguments for the Nazis as “refreshing.” Peeling back the layers of a childhood that could create such a lovely monster, Aunt Dan asks a cold and subtle question: Are we just less honest about our complicity in the world’s horrors than Lemon?

Lemon’s memories are populated with brilliant creatures spewing articulate hatred. Even as you recoil from Dan’s worship of Henry Kissinger, you can’t dismiss her arguments entirely. Barrie, exquisite as always, presents this Svengali with a disarming sensuousness; a mix of faith and pent-up sex, she could be an escaped nun from Black Narcissus. Written nearly 25 years ago by Shawn, trafficker in unpleasant truths, Aunt Dan boasts a prescient assessment of neoconservatism taken to an extreme, but it refuses to dismiss the far right as stupid. Sounds gloomy, but it’s filled with sick laughs. The ensemble is an excellent pack of beasts, from Ron Kuzava as Lemon’s frothing American father to Caitlin Emmons’s amoral call girl, stalking the stage for prey. It’s rarely such fun to hate everyone onstage.

Heath Hays’s set design extends the sumptuous feel of the Chopin’s basement lobby directly into the playing area, as though Lemon and the audience are having a drink together. It’s a comfortable place. Luckily, the play isn’t.

- Caitlin Montanye Parrish, Time Out Chicago

January 1st, 1970

Our narrator is Leonora, nicknamed in childhood “Lemon”—a cheerfully neurasthenic invalid who freely admits to a past restricted by a likewise sickly youth, obliging her to entertain us with memoirs of her acquaintances. These include her blustery father, her submissive mother, and an eccentric family friend named Danielle—the “Aunt Dan” of the title—who fascinated a pre-adolescent Lemon as adults not one’s own kin often do. Among Dan’s adventures are a tale of her brief affair with a gold-digging gamine ( who cold-bloodedly murders the policeman harassing her protector ) , and later, an impassioned defense of Henry Kissinger—moments etched so indelibly in Leonora’s memory that years later, her recollections will lead her to some rather disturbing assessments of her society.

Yes, we are right in the thick of Wallace Shawn territory now, replete with long monologues, stories-within-stories and a line of argument as convoluted as its conclusions are perverse. A realm where, if we are to follow the playwright’s logic, we must not only listen carefully to every word, but devise our own rebuttals to his characters’ outrageous assertions—for our play’s agenda includes no comforting raisonneur to guide us toward dissenting views.

This BackStage Theatre production focuses our attention by casting us as, literally, flies on Leonora’s parlor walls. We are seated on furniture not unlike that which she occupies ( flanked by an array of the fruit and vegetable juices that comprise her sole diet ) , arranged as if decorating the room in which she receives visitors—an illusion heightened by the absence of boundaries, physical or imagined, dividing lobby from auditorium in the Chopin’s basement space. Also keeping Shawn’s words—and there are a lot of them—progressing at a brisk pace are an assembly of actors whose elocutionary skills have been honed to razor sharpness, creating immediately engaging individuals of palpable originality. And when nothing but bodies-in-motion will do, Dan’s account of naughty Mindy’s erotically charged homicide is replicated with a vivid sensuality that set several opening-night playgoers to muttering in dismay.

Indeed, it’s a brave audience who can allow itself to be gulled as our author demands—first seduced by a bevy of alluring personalities ( led by stars-in-rise Brenda Barrie and Rebekah Ward-Hays as the title personnel ) , then confronted by the monstrosity of their opinions. But if we are to circumvent the atrocities that beguile our introspective hostess, we should welcome Shawn’s challenge to our complacency.

- Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City Times

January 1st, 1970

“Aunt Dan” makes all sides of the political spectrum uneasy. Conservatives won’t be fond of its specific linking of Henry Kissinger with violent immortality. Liberals will be queasy about the way Shawn makes such a careful case for the necessary horrors done in a nation’s name. In many ways, the character of Aunt Dan (here played by Brenda Barrie) is not unlike Col. Jessep in “A Few Good Men.” She argues that we can only able to be nice because men like Kissinger are out there doing essential things that aren’t nice at all. It’s just that we don’t like to handle that particular truth.

But real essence of “Aunt Dan” is its focus on the influence wrought by those with whom we are intimate when we are young. Aunt Dan was one of Lemon’s Anglo-American parents’ best friends during their Oxford days. Lemon and Aunt Dan have many chats. One could think of this play as a cautionary tale, reminding you to be careful about who gets to say what to your children.

Backstage certainly doesn’t shrink from the play’s scenes of sexual play, its probing of the line where free love becomes just another youth-poisoning transaction. Caitlin Emmons is fearless as Mindy, essentially an upscale hooker not unlike the one that took down Eliot Spitzer. And Anita Deely is quite moving as Lemon’s mother, a woman who lacks the force of personality to compete with the amoral but enigmatic Aunt Dan.

Barrie is hardly the usual type for Dan. But she has a very compelling (and shrewdly chilly) take on this dangerous character, and we surely believe that Ward-Hays is powerless in her grasp. Mostly notably, the tick-tock intimacy of Reeder’s domestic-like staging only enhances the power of the play.

I’d argue that Barrie could be yet tougher. And I think Ward-Hays could go more for the jugular in the crucial final monologue — when we really don’t need to be let off the hook. And a few of the actors slip, on occasions, into the realm of the overly broad. But if you’ve never seen “Aunt Dan,” and you prefer some intellectual bang for your theatergoing buck, you’ll surely be compelled down here by an impressionable young woman, the dangerous stories she gets told, and the horrific end result.

- Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune