Don’t Start the Riot Without Me, Chicago’s Political Impromptu Theater Company, at the Greenview Arts Center. Doing political satire for 8 audience members in a theater built for 200 is difficult enough. But without keen political insight and an eye for the absurd, it’s impossible. In his Chicago debut, playwright and director R. Mark Whitehead tries to pen “a political farce much like our government” but spends too much time aiming at obvious targets: Clinton’s waffling, Stephanopoulos’s inexperience, Perot’s penchant for pie charts, Dole’s third-personitis. He also devotes half his play to a rather nonsensical subplot in which Daley fils mobilizes a massive police force to capture the returning Massachusetts delegate who “really” started the 1968 convention riot. Curiously, Whitehead imagines our mayor as a rough-and-ready gangland mastermind rather than the intellectually parboiled palooka we know and love.
