Editor’s Note: Due to illness in the cast, the remainder of performances for this show have been canceled. Please contact the company for information on refunds.
Feel like you’ve been living in hell the past several years? The Conspirators understand. In their latest offering, Commedia Divina: It’s Worse Than That, writer Sid Feldman concocts a Dante-esque excursion through recent history. The conceit is that we’re actually witnessing a compassionate minister, Father Virgil (Alex George), and a MAGA-in-training, Malady (Christine Watt), in 2016 as the latter shares her eight “visions” from the future, which just happen to include an economy-destroying pandemic, transphobia, and insurrection. Arguably, each takes away exactly the wrong lesson from these visions: the minister believes that understanding and communication are always possible, while the MAGA dame pushes for even more extreme actions against immigrants and other marginalized folks.
Commedia Divina: It’s Worse Than That
Through 11/19: Fri-Sun 8 PM, Otherworld Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, conspirewithus.org, $25
The company draws on the heightened broad-as-a-barn-door political commedia dell’arte style popularized over 30 years ago here by John Cusack’s New Crime Productions (Feldman was a producer for the company). Thirteen actors and one musician, under Wm. Bullion’s nimble direction, assume a variety of roles in the short scenes making up this dystopic inferno, their faces covered with grotesque black-and-white makeup. Perhaps predictably, some of the over-the-top antics feel strained from time to time. (I found myself grateful for the stylistic palette cleanser of a video depicting stretches of closed storefronts in Wicker Park, set to “Ghost Town” by the Specials, as a change of pace from the live freneticism.) But overall, the Conspirators have a firm handle on this style, and the show ends with an appropriately chilling warning of how recent history may well repeat itself if we don’t pay attention.