Support Group for Men

However justified their current banishment from the spotlight, men are still half the population, and they are lucky to have a smart playwright like Ellen Fairey on their side. This premiere play assembles four—and later, more—of them in an apartment in Chicago's Wrigleyville district (the corner of Clark and Roscoe, if you want to be specific, as Fairey always is) where their attempts at conducting a quasi-Robert Bly consciousness-raising pow-wow are interrupted by the rowdiness in the street below.

Some of the funny stuff verges on sitcom antics—did I mention a gender-bending fugitive, a pair of neighborhood cops and some psychedelic superweed?—but these are men trying to be better men, and isn't that progress worthy of recognition?