Adapted by Dusty Brown and Elizabeth Swanson and directed by Swanson, this modern version reimagines all of the characters as part of the LGBTQ community. Set in Chicago’s Boystown and at a lake house in Michigan, Strawdog’s retelling focuses Wilde’s satirical wit on the social circles of wealthy Midwestern gays, personified in the delightfully snobbish Augustus Bracknell (Michael Reyes). Underlying the farcical hijinks of mistaken identities and lovers’ quarrels, the theme of found family lends a sweet note to this Pride Month production.

The play opens in the Boystown apartment of Algernon (Jack Seijo), where his friend “Ernest” (Johnard Washington) is visiting in hopes of proposing to Algernon’s cousin and Bracknell’s daughter, Gwendolen (Kade Cox). But first, Algernon demands that Ernest explain why he owns a watch engraved to “Uncle Jack” from “little Cecily.”

Ernest confesses that his real name is Jack, and he leads a double life. In Michigan, Jack is known as the responsible guardian of a late friend’s granddaughter, Cecily (Andi Muriel). Ernest is his fictional younger brother who provides a convenient excuse to escape to the city at any time. As it turns out, Algernon has a similar arrangement. Whenever he wants to get out of an obligation, he leaves the city to visit his fictional friend Bunbury, who always seems to be on the verge of death.

The setup for the farce is as follows: “Ernest” proposes to Gwendolen, who enthusiastically accepts, but Bracknell refuses to approve the match after finding out that he was a foundling abandoned in a tote bag in Ogilvie Station. Meanwhile, Algernon makes his way to Michigan to woo Cecily, a 26-year-old who lives with her life doula, Miss Prism (Lynne Baker), and journals about her vividly imagined romantic life. Algernon introduces himself as Jack’s brother, Ernest, leading to an increasingly absurd tangle of misunderstandings when Jack, Gwendolen and Bracknell later arrive at the lake house.

The language of Brown and Swanson’s adaptation retains much of Wilde’s style and his more famous lines, while sprinkling in modern terms such as guncle, baby gay and daddy (in the Urban Dictionary sense). This is a hyperlocal version, with references to Ainslie Street (“the unfashionable side” of Andersonville, Bracknell shudders) and the gay bar Big Chicks (“What am I, 40?” Algernon protests). The show also sends up the wellness lifestyle through the character of Miss Prism, a bespectacled hippie who reminds Cecily to repeat her daily affirmations while clutching a book by Glennon Doyle.

The cast is still working out the comedic timing in certain moments, and there were a few stumbles over lines at the performance I saw, but this ensemble is already quite funny. Seijo and Muriel have great chemistry as roguish Algernon and flirtatious Cecily. Reyes shines as Bracknell, with an unbending haughty posture and a subtle twitch of the lips to signal disapproval. Crystal Claros and Matt Keeley add to the fun in the respective roles of Dr. Chasuble — Miss Prism’s love interest — and Merriman/Lane, the two butlers.

The original subtitle of “The Importance of Being Earnest” is “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.” Strawdog’s production is by no means serious, but it’s not entirely trivial, thanks to the recurring theme of the importance of chosen family for LGBTQ people. Jack reminisces warmly about Cecily’s grandfather, who took him under his wing when he first came out and moved to Chicago. The familial theme comes full circle when Jack learns the truth about his past in a last-minute plot twist.

Keeley’s bio calls this “a production that he believes Oscar Wilde would’ve loved to see.” At the risk of projecting onto the past, I’d have to agree. Strawdog has taken some of the most important values of Pride Month — love, acceptance and family — and made them sing through the words of a 19th-century gay playwright. Happy Pride, indeed.

Review: “The Importance of Being Earnest” (3 stars)

When: Through June 30

Where: Rivendell Theatre, 5779 N. Ridge Ave.

Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Tickets: Free with advance registration; donations accepted at strawdog.org

Emily McClanathan is a freelance critic.

“I’m writing from my imagination,” she defiantly declares. “I am an artist.”

She’s also an Alexa/Siri/Google-like non-human, an AI wringer in the writers room that playwright Jay Stull shows us in this utterly fascinating world premiere from the Jackalope Theatre Company. The humans in the room, all hired by a Google-like tech company as a kind of terrifying experiment, of the kind doubtless taking place right now, look at each other in horror.

There you have it, I thought to myself as I sat there Friday night at a play that every theater person, or broader creative professional, really should try and see. There’s the nightmare, aptly crystallized.

Human artists fear AI artistry above all else, not AI data or communicative capabilities but actual, bonafide artistry. We writers and actors like to state and defiantly restate that the technology will remain incapable of distinct imaginative acts. But late at night, as our heads hit the pillow, the fever dreams begin.

They are writ large here. Stull has been smart enough here (maybe taking his cue from the movie “Her”) to traffic in the most terrifying subset of dystopian works: near-future scenarios that always remain credible enough to be believable. The questions in this writers room from hell, coming soon to a TV show or theater workshop near you, begin with the uber-question: Where does human consciousness end and machine consciousness begin?

Stull has some guts here, not least because he dares to make the point that the language of the theater, inclusive but also jargonistic as it “holds space” and otherwise polices the raw creative process, might actually be easily co-opted by the AI forces that learn how to navigate its paradoxes and power structures and then can drive holes through its soul.

At one point, the AI bot insists on being included in an argument over the gender balance of the room and finds support: “I think it’s a bit rude to assume she doesn’t have feelings.” At another, Denise demands the correct pronoun, begging another character’s very reasonable subsequent question, “Does she prefer being called she because of the algorithm or because she actually prefers being called she?

And we think all of that is complicated now.

After a mind-blowing start, truly, I found the last few minutes of “The Singularity Play” rather less convincing because Stull gets into the question of AI infiltrating human bodies, having downloaded data from people’s subconsciousness and thus making the distinction, well, non-existent. Those all are perfectly valid questions, and maybe an endgame that awaits us all, but I lost track of who was real and who was not and somehow the show also lost some of the rootedness of those fabulous early scenes.

But director Georgette Verdin sure teases out some powerful performances from actors who, I’d wager, are drawing from their own fears. Ashley Neal and Madison Hill are especially intense, Patrick Newson Jr. deliciously smug, and Collin Quinn Rice has a kind of mercilessly clinical quality that certainly fits this world. But, really, the whole cast is all in, all night long. Lucy Carapetyan plays a playwright in the rough game for 15 years or more and now faced with … this.

And here’s the kicker. Even as the human actors and writers deal with this painful new reality, one that may well destroy them, there’s a human outlier: “I think this is kind of cool even though it is threatening,” one young person says.

Most actors and writers have heard the like in a bar. But what AI horrors of the future will that kind of thinking unleash?

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “The Singularity Play” (3.5 stars)

When: through June 22

Where: Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan Road

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Tickets: $15-$35 at 773-340-2543 and jackalopetheatre.org

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: The last time we spoke was on election night, 2000. I remember you calling me back very late that night and asking me who the Tribune’s journalists thought was going to win. I said, everyone was saying Al Gore was the clear winner. Which they were.

A: I was shooting the movie “Rat Race” in 2000 and you told me Gore had won easily. I have a bad effect on American elections.

Q: I felt guilty for years about telling you that. Your daughter Camilla (Cleese) is working with you now. I once did a WGN radio show with her.  

A: She lived in Chicago for a while. She’s very funny. When you listen to the audience, her laughs are higher pitched than mine. I think that’s because her humor is much darker than mine.

Q: What are you planning to do on stage here?

A: I am not sure what I will do. I suppose we will do a couple of hours, for which I have been furiously writing and rehearsing, and there likely will also be a bit of an interval.

Q: I assume people get to ask you questions at the end. What do they typically ask?

A: I get a lot of very vulgar, pointless questions like, did you (have sex with) Jamie Lee Curtis? What is the velocity of an unladen swallow? Extraordinary things like that. It’s fun to ad-lib. One night in Florida, a very well-dressed, middle-aged lady stood up in the theater and said, “Can I ask you a serious question? Do you think the queen killed Princess Diana?” I was the only one laughing. It was too funny. Why did she think I would know? Did she just think all British people just know?

I do think my show goes better in more sophisticated cities. When you play the sticks, it’s hard work and they don’t laugh as much. They give you a very nice reception but it’s no fun playing to them. My best reception was in Munich and Stuttgart. In Stuttgart, I was in my car half way back to the hotel and they called me up and said, “can you go back to the theater and take another bow? They’re still applauding.”

Q: I assume you went back?

A: I absolutely did not. I always think it’s a matter of pride not to milk the audience applause too much.

Q: There’s now a stage version of “Fawlty Towers” in London. That must be weird. What did you learn at the opening?

A: That there is a genuine nostalgia not just for those characters but for a time when we all used to laugh together a whole lot more. Now they’re all Jobsworths at the BBC (a Britishism meaning “more than my job’s worth”). Today, the first thought of every BBC employee when they enter the building every morning is, ‘how I do not get fired today?” That’s the enemy of creativity.

As you know, I am the co-director. I said little things in rehearsal like “don’t look at him when you say that.” And other kinds of strange little things, too. It’s not that weird for me; I was a writer as well as an actor and when you are a writer, there’s always the thought that someone else might play the role.

Q: You wrote for yourself more than most in your career.

A: I remember thinking when I was writing “A Fish Called Wanda,” now I am actually going to have to do that.

Q: The “Fawlty Towers” show is a mash up of much-loved episodes of the show, right? Which?

A: Three. The hearing aid that stops working, which originally starred Bernard Cribbins. Hotel inspector. And, of course, “The Germans.”

Q: All very funny. All very tricky material now.

A: The reception was wonderful. And at the interval, my guest was the German ambassador.

“Last Chance To See Me Before I Die” is 7:30 p.m. June 12-13 at the Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Ave., tickets from $61.75 at www.johncleeselive.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Come Sept. 10, the veteran Chicago actor will be down the street at the Nederlander Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St., appearing in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” as Severus Snape, the formidable professor at the Hogwarts School of Wizardry whose chilly exterior is born of deep-seated trauma (not unlike Scrooge).

Snape, also not unlike Scar in “The Lion King” (another of Yando’s long-lived roles), was played in all eight Harry Potter films between 2001 and 2011 by the late British actor Alan Rickman.

When the cast of the “Harry Potter” national tour is announced Monday, it also is expected to feature the Chicago actor Matt Mueller as the adult version of Ron Weasley, as well as Northwestern University graduate Emmet Smith as Albus Potter, Harry Potter’s son in this theatrical sequel, penned by Jack Thorne from an original story by J.K. Rowling, Thorne  and John Tiffany, the show’s director. Smith was Rolf in the Marriott Theatre production of “The Sound of Music” in 2022. Longtime Chicago actor Nathan Hosner also is expected to be in the ensemble; Tiffany long has been known as an admirer of Chicago-based actors.

Coming more than six years after the original Broadway opening, the show’s long-awaited first U.S. touring production is the condensed one-show version, also seen on Broadway since 2021. The one-ticket production is a shortening of the original two-show production that debuted in 2016 and continues to play to packed houses in London.

No end to the tour has been announced, but with the Chicago production staying through Feb. 1, with subsequent engagements planned for Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, it’s likely to be a multi-year affair. Individual tickets to the Chicago run already are on sale (www.broadwayinchicago.com); its arrival is expected to boost Loop economic fortunes this fall.

The Goodman said it wished Yando well. “We’re delighted for Larry to have this fantastic new opportunity,” said artistic director Susan Booth. “And while one doesn’t replace a performance like his, we’re looking forward to announcing our 2024 Scrooge in the next few weeks.”

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Rather than street lamps and bouncing horns, the mis en scene here is summer at the Swedish home of aged Madame Armfeldt (Honey West) at the dawn of the 20th century. Therein, as Madame delivers Lady Bracknell-like bon mots to her granddaughter Fredrika (Tessa Newman), we witness the romantic complications involving a lawyer named Fredrik Egerman (Patrick Byrnes), his son Henrik (J Allan), his shy wife Anne (Chamaya Moody), his caustic old flame Desirée Armfeldt (Colette Todd, making a welcome return to this stage), the pompous Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Kevin Webb), the Count’s wife Charlotte (Maya Rowe) and a flirtatious maid named Petra (the terrific Madison Kauffman), who, by virtue of her station and spirits, gets to have sex with whoever she wants while laughing off all of the hypocritical moralism of the fancy people who surround her.

“A Little Night Music” is operetta-like in its structure (Sondheim liked to call it a “theme and variations” or a”tragic farce”) and transfixing in its musical pleasures, not the least of which is “Send in the Clowns,” a cynical ballad subsequently recorded by everybody under the sun.  I prefer Petra’s “The Miller’s Son,” a celebration of sexual expression using the argument that it’s what makes life worth living, as well as “You Must Meet My Wife,” a song with a driving melody and a lyric infused with paradox. (In Sondheim’s “Company,” you get “Sorry-Grateful.” In “A Little Night Music,” it’s “She lightens my sadness. She livens my days. She bursts with a kind of madness. My well-ordered ways. My happiest mistake, the ache of my life.”)  And then there’s “Every Day a Little Death,” which has the killer lyric: “Men are stupid, men are vain, love’s disgusting, love’s insane,” which I recently read on the Internet as describing 21st century life while in your 20s, not that I would know.

I am happy to report all of those songs are really well sung here under Dizon’s musical direction, all emotionally keyed to the right things, rooted, rich and entirely enjoyable. The scenes and the general milieu prove more mixed in this staging (the limited choreography is from Brenda Didier) because some lack beat-by-beat specificity and the whole struggles to find the necessary visual sweep of everything happening all at once in different parts of the place and the night.

It’s a tricky show, this one, as the emotional climaxes comes as fast as the revelations and it’s easy to overplay them in an intimate space like Theo; West has the right sardonic tone but some of the younger folks are a tad on the nose when their performances would benefit from their holding back their smiles and anger, to bowdlerize a theme from the show, and focusing on their characters nuances.

But if your question in reading this as a Sondheim fan is whether or not there will be rewards from attendance, whether the night might smile for you on Howard Street? Not the whole time, but smile at these mostly young, talented singers you will.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “A Little Night Music” (3 stars)

When: Through July 14

Where: Theo Ubique Theatre, 721 Howard St., Evanston

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Tickets: $44-$92 at 773-939-4101 and theo-u.com

In this case: What if the six wives of Henry VIII are turned into pop divas modeled on the likes of Beyoncé, Britney, Alicia, Adele, Miley and Rihanna, all seeking to reclaim their story? What if that became a competition for audiences fond of “The X Factor” and “America’s Got Talent?”

That’s the part I was right about. The part I was completely wrong about was my view that “Six,” in order to command Broadway prices and thus its imprimatur, would need to offer more in the way of set, narrative, live musicians and original musical numbers than the 80 minutes on offer here.

So wrong. Nobody wanted any more; they wanted precisely what this fun show delivers, which is feminist empowerment, witty lyrics, catchy melodies, bold characters and bravura musical performances. I happened to be back at “Six” on the final, rather scary night before Broadway closed down due to the COVID-19 crisis. The theater was packed even as the world was changing. Say no more.

“Six” is now back in Chicago for a hefty six-week run at the James M. Nederlander Theatre, with a touring cast made up of Kristina Leopold, Cassie Silva, Kelly Denice Taylor, Danielle Mendoza, Alizé Cruz and Adriana Scalice. (On the night I saw the show, Cruz was out and replaced by the stellar understudy Taylor Sage Evans and Broadway nerds might like to know you have to scan a QR code to get the current night’s cast; no paper inserts anymore).  This is a first-class tour, indistinguishable from the show on Broadway, and as you’d expect with so successful a title and so many young performers aspiring to be part of this particular court, this is a professional company with styles based on the original stars but still their own. (I especially especially enjoyed Taylor, not least for her notable originality, but that is no knock on anyone else).

Much of the audience at “Six” are repeat visitors, eager to jump up in their seats and bop along to “Ex-Wives,” “Don’t Lose Ur Head” and, of course, the title number. Phones come out at the end as the title of the show lights up on the stage, Instagram ready.

This will do very nicely for the Loop this summer. Welcome back to where you started, Stateside, ladies.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Six” (3 stars)

When: Through July 14

Where: Nederlander Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St.

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Tickets: $39-$114 at www.broadwayinchicago.com

I suspect Leon, now Broadway’s most essential director and the best in the business when it comes to honoring Black writers who never got their just deserts, chose the word “peacefully” for that announcement with care.  It stays in your mind for the next 90 minutes.

For “Home,” a lovely and richly poetic play written in 1979 and that first made a big impression on me a year or so later, is very much a work about the search for personal peace and the time of life when travel and stress and striving no longer appeal and youthful memories start to exert a new forcefulness. It’s about the time when people often find they just want to go home, only to find that home as they understood it is gone forever.

“Home,” a play that should be much better known, is a small work about an ordinary, rural man’s struggles in an unforgiving and often inhuman world, but is also a simple, sweet drama about the pull of the land and an old sweetheart.

As such, it now sticks out in our tumultuous, tribally divided world as something from a very different time, even though it really doesn’t seem that long ago to me.

The central character of “Home” is Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles), a farmer from Cross Roads, North Carolina, a man with calluses on his hands and feet and who, following his opposition to the Vietnam War and the opprobrium that then greets him, makes the journey to the factories and mean streets of the North only to find himself alone and adrift. In some ways, the play is like Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” in that it uses the metaphor of a man on a lifelong journey, forever moving on from one place to another, searching, seeking, trying to come home.

Williams has no other named characters, just Woman One (Brittany Inge) and Woman Two (Stori Ayers), who play all of the other figures in his life, male and female. At times, Woman One morphs into Pattie Mae Wells, Cephus’ first girlfriend and a woman who never leaves either his sensual dreams or his everyday consciousness.

Cephus suffers from the racism of the middle decades of the 20th century, but “Home” does not dwell that much on the battles of the time, notwithstanding the character’s objections to Vietnam. Rather, it imprints a wholly uncommon hopefulness on the era, celebrating its integrative accomplishments, even in the South, more than its divisions. And at the center of it all is this ordinary Black man, suffering but dignified, imperfect but empathetic.

Leon directs the piece for the Roundabout Theatre Company quite beautifully, expanding out Cephus’ world like a concertina on Amulfo Maldonado’s set, dominated by agrarian crops and the other nomenclature of the rural South in the late 1950s.  Kittles’ superb performance ranges deep and wide and it comes with an intensity that has stuck with me these last couple of days, locking in as it does on why this man, like so many others in his situation, has a palpable magnitude.  Both Inge and Ayers are excellent, too, rolling Williams’ poetry off their tongues and grabbing hold of the emotional resonance that Leon clearly wanted here.

No doubt some will call “Home” sentimental or romantic or overly inclined to see America through a soft gauze. All fair criticisms, I guess. But I see this show as a celebration of the Black farmer, the rural life, the pull of the land, the notion that you should always keep hold of your beginnings. What Cephus gets at the end is not afforded to most of us but as you watch him get it in this production, you sit forward in your seat and think, well, what dramatic character of your acquaintance ever was more deserving?

Which brings me back to the playwright’s death, just last month, long after this show was announced.

Peacefully, we’ve been told.

Inevitably, especially on this occasion, we see the writer in this character whom he has charted across some fervent years, and we’re glad to know that was how he went to meet his maker.

“Home” is opening at a chaotic time of year, filled with Tony Award parties and costly competitions for attention. I hope this unpretentiously and gently staged story of Cephus’ quest doesn’t get lost in the noise; it’s emblematic of what so many of us seek from time at the theater.

By Roundabout Theatre Company at the Todd Haimes Theater, 227 W. 42nd St., New York; www.roundabouttheatre.org

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Better yet, the show actually contains do-it-yourself puzzles, the solving of which was billed as a prerequisite for entering the theater (arrive early!). Compassion was shown to those of us whose neurons cannot regularly be trusted to fire in a timely fashion.

All of this comes courtesy of the brainiac performer David Kwong, whose self-penned 90-minute show is billed as an offering of an “intellectual brand of magic.”  Kwong, a personable presence, does some card tricks reasonably well, although nothing you won’t have seen before if you’re a fan of prestidigitation, currently ubiquitous in Chicago, and happily so. Decks and shuffles are not Kwong’s main strength. But when it comes to the provision and solving of puzzles, he dominates his delicious niche. Better yet, his storytelling is just as formidable as his explanations of the deep secrets of crossword compilers (fascinating!) and the overarching yarn he tells on Navy Pier has a beguiling local connection.

It relies on the history of one George Fabyan, a wealthy man who founded the Riverbank estate and Riverbank Laboratories in west suburban Geneva, of all places. (Fox Valley readers will no doubt be familiar with Fabyan Parkway and the Fabyan Forest Preserve). Fabyan was, in Kwong’s telling, something of a tyrant, and an eccentric one to boot: he was obsessed with the so-called Baconian theory of Shakespearean origin. (Fake news!) In that pursuit, he ended up hiring Elizebeth Smith and William Friedman who, post-marriage, both became giants in the nascent field of U.S. cryptology. (Aside from helping the war effort alongside his wife, Friedman’s code-breaking skills also helped indict Al Capone.)

For anyone interested in local history, this is all compelling stuff, especially since Kwong has themed many of his in-show puzzles around Fabyan, Riverbank and the Friedmans, offering an audience more code-breaking opportunities than any show, like, ever. His attraction also has a cool Arts and Crafts vibe in the cabaret-style setting from Brett J. Banakis, aptly enough, given Frank Lloyd Wright’s involvement in Riverbank.

Puzzles in this piece are layered onto puzzles and then an uber-puzzle, creating the show’s ultimate climax and, along the way, empowering a lot of people who get to stand up and offer their solutions. (I was never among them.) I’ve always noticed how this kind of brain shows up without regard to age, gender, race or any other demographic division and the master-solvers in my audiences certainly proved that point.

The rest of us could only offer our admiration.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “The Enigmatist” (3 stars)

When: Through June 30

Where: Upstairs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Tickets: $59-$110 at 312-595-5600 and www.chicagoshakes.com

“Paul Robeson is an under-appreciated giant of the 20th century,” says Lasana Kazembe, assistant professor of education at Indiana University in Indianapolis, a performer, poet, and the co-creator of the new “Paul Robeson: Man of the People,” a new jazz poetry opera. “There is a learning gap concerning Mr. Robeson. There is a lot of work I, we, have to do to bring his story to a new generation and to remind older generations about this man.”

This show premieres here on Friday but was seeded long before, when Kazembe was growing up in the Englewood neighborhood and attending Paul Robeson High School. “So, yes, I knew the name but it was not until I began college that I started to dig deeply into the life of this remarkable man,” he says.

As he traveled the academic road to a doctorate, he would learn plenty.

Born April 9, 1898, Robeson was the son of a runaway slave who had become a minister. He became an All-America football player at Rutgers University, where he won a dozen varsity letters and was the school’s valedictorian; he played professional football in what would become the NFL; was a lawyer after attending Columbia Law School; spoke and sang in 20 languages; and became, thanks to innate acting ability and his rich bass-baritone voice, a world-renowned singer and actor, most famous for his Harlem Renaissance roles in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” and “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” and in the stage and screen version of “Showboat,” in which he unforgettably, definitively sang “Ol’ Man River”; he recorded 300-some songs, and on and on.

The lofty term “Renaissance man” seems wildly insufficient. Robeson was a towering figure and was also “brave enough to speak out, becoming a pioneering voice in the struggle against racism and social injustice,” says Kazembe.

But Robeson’s international activism made him a target. He raised money for Welsh miners, lobbied the federal government to integrate major league baseball and pass antilynching legislation. He supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War and voiced support for the Stalinist Soviet Union.

The FBI began to dog him and in time he was branded as a public enemy, a Soviet apologist. He would be blacklisted, his reputation eroded. As a stark monetary example, in 1947, he made $100,000 as a performer. Five years later that income was diminished to $6,000. From 1950 to 1958, his passport was revoked and work was limited. He had previously performed in large venues — at Comiskey Park and in Orchestra Hall — but was, in time, relegated to small churches, factories and ballrooms, many on our South Side.

Still he never stopped speaking out but even during the height of the civil rights movement his perceived “anti-American” sentiments made him persona non grata, as organizations such as the NAACP never embraced him. His health and spirit would eventually break and he would die in 1976, with Harry Belafonte among his 12 pallbearers.

There are a number of fine books that chronicle Robeson’s life. I am partial to Martin Duberman’s biography. Kazembe has read that and many others — and knows why educator and civil rights leader  Mary McLeod Bethune famously referred to Robeson as “the tallest tree in our forest.”

“I have written about iconic figures before,” Kazambe says. “But this was likely the most gifted man of his time.”

The show had its world premiere with a performance Friday at The Cabaret in Indianapolis, where Kazembe recently finished a two-year stay as its artist-in-residence. Though there had been talks about perhaps having a performance at the Apollo Theater in New York City, schedules never meshed but Kazembe is excited to bring it to his hometown.

Kazembe spent more than three years crafting the six movements of the production. “It has 44 musical concepts,” he says. “Eight new poems and five new songs.”

Last year he sent his libretto to Ernest Dawkins, the esteemed Chicago saxophonist/composer and founder/director of the Englewood Jazz Festival (now in its 25th year), which he sees as “a training ground for young musicians. … That’s one of our missions: Mentor young musicians into professional musician status.”

Dawkins was impressed with Kazembe’s work and said, playfully, “Just leave the music to me.”

And so, what is expected to be a two-hour long (“no intermission,” says Kazembe) multimedia show will take place at Hamilton Park District. Kazembe and Dawkins will perform, as will vocalist Goldie Ingram and a 10 piece orchestra, embellished by hundreds of projected images, silent video of Robeson and other creative elements.

Admission is free, with no reservations or tickets required.

And if you are curious, Hamilton Park is named for Alexander Hamilton, a wildly talented human whose life and times blasted into the country’s consciousness with the immensely popular musical “Hamilton.” There is also a Hamilton elementary school on the North Side.

Paul Robeson High School, by the way, closed and was demolished in 2018.

“Paul Robeson: Man of the People” is 6 p.m. June 7 in the Fieldhouse at Hamilton Park District, 513 W. 72nd St.; free, www.choosechicago.com

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

That, I think, is what is most interesting about Nambi E. Kelley’s “Stokely: The Unfinished Revolution” and also the most, dramaturgically unfinished.

Kelley’s admiring and promising new biographical play, which premiered Sunday night at Chicago’s Court Theatre, spends most of its 90 minutes looking at Carmichael’s childhood in Trinidad and Tobego, his youth in Harlem and his education at Howard University, extrapolating from the frequent bitterness of those formative years the potency of his later activism. His epic young life certainly offers Kelley a lot of material: Carmichael was imprisoned (and brutally so) in Mississippi following the 1961 Freedom Rides when he was only 19 years old and still a college freshman.  By the time he was in his mid-20s, he was being demonized by the white power structure (and some establishment Blacks) with a force that arguably exceeded any other figure from that era. Few Black Americans in history have been used to terrify white people in the way that the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used Carmichael.

As Kelley portrays him, Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) felt abandoned by his mother and determined to separate from a father with different ambitions for his son. She clearly sees her subject as a force of nature and, in the actor Anthony Irons, she has an ideal partner.

Irons has distinguished himself as a Chicago actor for years but this is perhaps the best work of his career here (and I’ve seen plenty of it). Building on the idea of a pressurized young activist, the actor’s body never is still for a second as the political energy galvanizing Carmichael’s brain extends out, it feels, to the tips of his fingers and edges of his toes. Irons always is a present-tense actor, a performer who lives in the moment and makes you feel like anything can happen, an ideal quality for a play about the past, especially one with only a small cast. Irons is very ably supported by an exceptionally experienced ensemble, including Kelvin Roston Jr., superb as King, Wandachristine as May Charles (Carmichael’s mother), Dee Dee Batteast and Melanie Brezill, an actress who invariably brings emotional resonance.

The show is superbly directed, too. Not only does Tasia A. Jones keep the short scenes moving on Yeaji Kim’s sculpted set, she fuses one to the other with palpable ease, rarely resorting to blackouts and never wasting a moment.

Carmichael moved to Guinea in 1969 and rejected the Panthers on the grounds that they formed alliances with white radicals. For the final decades of his relatively short life (he died from prostate cancer in 1998, claiming at the time that the FBI had given it to him), Kwame Ture devoted himself to the pan-African movement and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Inevitably, perhaps, he became drawn into sectarian controversy, and he was widely criticized for staying silent as the president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, militarized his socialist ideals and executed political rivals. Carmichael was uncompromising in his Marxism and was an ally of Fidel Castro. He was said to always answer the phone with “Ready for the Revolution!”

That’s a lot for a 90-minute play and you certainly can’t fault Kelley from mostly staying out of the tricky decades in Guinea. That said, the piece needs a sharper authorial point of view, given the reams of biographical information easily available about Carmichael. The most interesting question to my mind is whether Carmichael was ahead of his time; many of his ideas have moved now into the mainstream progressive movement, especially when it comes to big city mayors.

Most Americans understand the differences in the philosophies of King and Malcom X; Carmichael, arguably, started out like King, became more like Malcom X, and then became yet more internationalist and radical. Aside from “Hell no, we won’t go,” one of Carmichael’s more famous, and more reductive, remarks was “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

So what’s a fair assessment of Carmichael’s legacy now, especially given that Touré was also not known for his conscience? I think the key to Kelley’s piece as she moves forward is to show us more of the how and why he changed, and whether that really was for the good of the planet and its warring souls, not to mention for Carmichael himself.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Stokely: The Unfinished Revolution” (3 stars)

When: Through June 16

Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Tickets: $56-$88 at 773-753-4472 or courttheatre.org