You'd never know to look outside now, but we're right on the brink of summer. "Summer"—you remember. Not switching on the porch light until after 8 p.m. There are soft breezes by the lake instead of Captain Ahab-strength gales. You can have canned beer that doesn't freeze your fingers, and picnics with sparkling chilled wine.
You can also take off your clothes to play outdoors—well, maybe not all your clothes, but dressing in shorts and sandals and skimpy tank tops to engage yourself in healthy exercise, or to enjoy the sight of other scantily clad people engaging in healthy exercise. Theaters in Chicago are likewise looking to raise a sweat, whether by romping with big—uh, swords aloft or with body-grapples of the more gentle kind.
National Pastime Theater's Naked July Festival annually celebrates the beauty of unclothed bodies, bringing back the popular Living Canvas dance troupe (who perform garbed only in lights and video pics), augmenting a production of Oscar Wilde's Salomé—the latter featuring, in addition to history's most famous striptease, a buck-nekked King Herod and John the Baptist. The roster for 2011 also includes the Beast Women cabaret cuties, an art show, a Hedwig-Priscilla-Rocky-and-Fritz film festival, several special events and, possibly, a dating game with a hypnotist playing cupid. (June 24-Aug. 6. For final schedule information, phone 773-327-7077.)
The Homosexuals recounts the adventures of an itinerant gay youth at his first queer party. Playwright Philip Dawkins promises that this About Face production—described as a 21st-century riff on the groundbreaking 1960s drama, The Boys In The Band—will boast plenty of "the usual undies, hot dudes and erections." (June 20-July 24; 773-871-3000)
The provocatively titled Pornography (July 28-Sept. 3; 866-811-4111) and The Naked King (June 3-June 23; 773-871-3000) entice, but do they deliver? The former is Simon Stephens' diatribe on how the Internet robs us of our humanity, but Steep Theatre director Robin Witt, while hesitant to give too much away ("A girl's gotta hold something back"), assures us that having an online porn addict among the play's characters guarantees a portion of "sexual content." Also, the Organic Theatre Company is holding everything back as regards their latter adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes.
For those desiring spectator-sport sweat, there are still three left of this season's eight productions of Romeo and Juliet—and before you dismiss Shakespeare's Greatest Hit as soppy chick-lit, remember that our hero runs with a gang (or 15th-century equivalent thereof) with all the same-sex loyalties that accompany such allegiances.
First Folio's dramatic environment is the neo-gothic romantic period, where formalities quickly give way to necrophilic laudanum-fueled nightmares culminating in bursts of violent passion—or so, proclaims director Nick Sandys—along with "boys in poet shirts, girls in gossamer dresses and a Byronic Mercutio casually corrupting anything that moves." (July 6-Aug. 7; 630-986-8067) The Illinois Shakespeare Festival in Bloomington offers a more traditional interpretation of the popular Elizabethan teen weepie—although one should look for D.C. Wright's swordplay to provide a burst of pulse-pumping testosterone (June 26-Aug. 6; 309-438-2535). Also, Shattered Globe's bar-hopping interactive Down and Dirty Romeo and Juliet proposes to smooth the course of true love by allowing audiences to offer advice to the immature lovers and their confederates (currently playing in an open run; 773-770-0333 for times and locations).
Summer's not just star-crossed hets—a short drive to the western suburbs takes you to Oak Park Festival Theatre's double ticket of the almost all-male Henry IV and Henry V, replete with "band of brothers" orations and battlefield farewells (June 11-Aug. 20; 708-445-4440). If that's all still too much costume pageant, there's always Broadway In Chicago's touring production of West Side Story. Can you get more sweaty than a rumble in The Heights (July 19-Aug. 14; 800-904-0391)?
Finally, there are the shows that blend sex and violence: Group fertility rites are at the focus of Euripedes' 2,500-year-old tragedy, adapted by Oracle Theatre's Jamie Bragg into The House of Bacchus, a modern shocker about an orphan boy's rise to power in the sordid world of gay brothels and hustlers (June 25-Aug. 6; 773-244-2980).
Women also sling steel and body fluids this summer: the fiery Babes With Blades swash buckles in The Double, Barbara Lhota's comedy about the early days of cinema (Aug. 19-Sept. 24; 773-904-0391). For you chop-socky fans, the intrepid Dewdrop continues to avenge her beloved—and unfaithful—lesbian lover in the tarentino-esque Soul Samurai until June 5 (773-975-8150).
Redtwist's revival of Bug, Tracy Letts' locked-room study of lovers infected with all-American paranoia, is the first local production since its premiere in the mid-1990s, where it went on to become a movie directed by William Friedkin (May 27-June 26; 773-728-7529). However, on a distinctly different note, the folks who brought you Boobs and Goombas! return to Gorilla Tango armed for a Dungeons & Dragons-styled burlesque entitled—are you ready?—The Fellowship of the Boobs (June 2-Aug. 25; 773-598-4549).
Be sure to wear your Ray-Bans, now. All that bare and gleaming skin can be downright dazzling.
