Copyright 1999 by the Chicago Tribune)

Theater review.

`Ghetto," in the premiere of its English translation, is a revelation; and it is a triumph for Famous Door Theatre.

Joshua Sobol's drama of the World War II ghetto in Vilna, Lithuania, made its first, mixed impression at the 1986 International Theatre Festival of Chicago, in a production in Hebrew by the Haifa Municipal Theater of Israel. This new Famous Door production, dynamically staged by director Calvin MacLean and passionately enacted by its cast of 16 Chicago actors, brings incredible focus and force to Sobol's drama, capturing its multilayered theatricality with a virtuoso performance of song, dance, comedy and tragedy.

Basing his work on the true-life story of the Vilna ghetto, Sobol uses real characters and events, but they are presented in a non- real, surreal fashion.

This is only fitting, since "Ghetto's" story centers on a Jewish theater company that existed until the Germans eliminated the ghetto in 1943.

These actors, starved and degraded by the mad German officer who terrorizes them, are a ragamuffin lot, but they are encouraged in their work by the ghetto's chief of Jewish police, who believes that theater is good for the soul, especially under their circumstances.

Throughout the ensuing story, amid humiliations and executions, the talented actors carry on their work, staging their satire, knocking about in their slapstick and singing their songs (accompanied by four excellent musicians) in a hallucinatory vaudeville.

Key characters emerge in the telling: a timid ventriloquist who reluctantly becomes the company's artistic director (Jay Whittaker), the beautiful young singer he loves (Carrie Lee Patterson), a profiteering merchant who wants to deal with the Germans (Dan Rivkin), an aged librarian and historian who is uncompromising in his abhorrence of the Nazis (Larry Neumann Jr.) and the tragic figure of the chief of police (Roderick Peeples), who leads hundreds of his fellow Jews to slaughter in order to save thousands of other lives.

Above them all is the SS officer (Frank Nall) who has life-and- death control of the ghetto. Cultured, intelligent and brutal, he is a symbol of the Nazi insanity, toying with his victims and, in one remarkable scene of vivid irony, forcing the Jews to perform a spirited blackface rendition of "Swanee."

MacLean and choreographer Julia Neary, who also gives a bravura performance as a ventriloquist's dummy, have staged the variety numbers of comedy and song with great invention for their square stage in the Theatre Building, and the large cast plays with precision and passion in every quick shift of mood or style.

This is a thrilling production of a remarkable play.

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"Ghetto"

When: Through Dec. 19

Where: Famous Door Theatre at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.

Phone: 773-327-5252