December 31st, 1969

Playwright Zak Berkman’s overwrought, convoluted play starts as a story about the latent violence in America’s culture war as sexpot right-wing radio star Lauren marries mixed-race liberal journalist Sweet and ends up murdered. Then it becomes sci-fi pulp as Sweet teams up with Lauren’s hyperconservative, bird-watching father-in-law to track down women who’ve had plastic surgery in order to look exactly like Lauren. After taking the long way round several more barns, Berkman tries to shoehorn everything into a cautionary tale about the importance of female self-confidence. It’s hard to know why accomplished director Jason Kae would find this play worth his time, but he works his usual magic and draws psychologically detailed, emotionally convincing performances from his Backstage Theatre cast. The guy’s a genius.

- Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader

December 31st, 1969

“Beauty on the Vine” **

Sex appeal and politics—the strangest of bedfellows, where a good figure and a photogenic face have become the fast-track to something. Success? Infamy? What?

“Beauty on the Vine,” by Zak Berkman, centers on a talk radio host in the Ann Coulter mold: Hot, blond, smart, and barking mad. “She’s like a porn star for fascists,” goes one of the play’s better lines. Who she is and what she really stands for—she’s laying the groundwork for a feminist reclamation of the GOP from its religious stranglehold—rarely rises to the level of actual human being. You could say the same of other talk show hosts out there.

But I’m not sure what Berkman is really railing against here. Plastic surgery and low-grade racism are also on the menu; modern society may have lost its mind, but Berkman doesn’t advance the conversation beyond the obvious. While the set design needs to be bumped up several notches, Jason Kae’s production for Backstage Theatre Company does feature a terrific performance by Brenda Barrie as the talk show host. She’s like someone from “The Hills,” with a cunning brain.

Through Nov. 23 at the Raven Theatre Studio, 6157 N. Clark St. Tickets are $20 at 800-838-3006.

- Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune

December 31st, 1969

Lauren Chickering is a woman so lovely and charismatic that when she was in high school, two of her less captivating classmates hired a plastic surgeon to make over their faces in her image. As an adult, Lauren becomes a right-wing radio host, supremely successful and highly influential with teenage girls because she is pretty (an important quality in radio) and because she says the sort of awful, pop-Nietzschean things that are, at least in this play, so popular with today’s youth. Eventually, Lauren is gunned down. We suspect at first that her killer is a fan, enraged perhaps by Lauren’s marriage to a multiracial bleeding heart (who also happens to be the play’s mealy-mouthed narrator). The widower’s encounter with one of Lauren’s surgically enhanced doppelgängers raises hopes of a reenactment of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but then we realize, no, it’s just a setup for the revelation of Lauren’s real killer. You’d think a story this far-fetched would be told with some acknowledgement of its soap-operatic absurdity, but playwright Berkman is dead serious. We’re meant to walk away thinking about celebrity and individuality and how girls are forced to forsake exceptionality for conformity, but mostly you’re just struck by how little on stage resembles the world we live in. Director Kae coaxes a game performance from lead actress Barrie, but it’s a disappointing start to BackStage’s ninth season, especially considering the successes of its eighth (How I Learned to Drive, Waiting for Lefty, Bloody Bess).

- Zac Thompson, Time Out Chicago