Absurdist Brilliance at Curious Theatre Branch

When Beau O’Reilly’s Talking About Godard, a brainy 90 minute play gets going, you want to see the sequel– the show is something like a  French New Waver primer meets Waiting for Godot set in Bucktown if it was Three’s Company(if they all were women). It's got so much packed into it, you leave wanting more. It’s a 90 minute work about three codependent women which premiered I think before the millennium, and it has always been an intellectual and very funny trip through non conforming female lives. These are not your stereotypical single ladies.  They are fascinating contradictions and interesting souls.

Set in a marginal apartment filled with art and suitcases (New York in the original production and Chicago in this revival) these women have lives that barely hold together, as they exude and expound on an existential discomfort with the way things are working out.  Reviving the piece with most of the original cast gives a layer to the production that encompasses and wades into  the whole idea of FOMO– when you are in your 20’s and flailing about there is a hope you will find yourself and settle.  But when you are middle aged woman having hook ups, or going to grad school in film in the digital age, there is an air of tragic inevitability that was not there when the characters,and the play itself, was so very young so long ago. Mortality is waiting in the wings.

Jenny Magnus as the chain smoking Helen, the artist longing for uncomplicated sex with some French guy, has come into her power as “the object of Desire”. Crissy, played by Kristin Garrison with seething rage, pines for Helen and feels trapped in a life she does not want. Vicki Walden who plays Mary Barnes is the engine of the narrative, with her obsessive love and encyclopedic knowledge of of Jean Luc Godard’s films and theories, and her analysis of how everything that is happening in the world of this play is somehow related to Godard’s oeuvre. When Godard himself shows up (Jayita Bhattacharya in a no holds barred performance) you almost fall for it.  Everyone always refers to Mary Barnes by her first name which gives the script a strange kind of punctuating poetry. 

It is refreshing and affirming to see an entire evening centered on the women’s relationships to each other with men as peripheral plot points or comedic interruptions. It probably added innumerable resonances to have the playwright Beau O’Reilly’s offspring Briavael O’Reilly directing.  It brings to mind those revolving lenses in an optometrists office: so many ways to look at the collaboration of the past and the present.  This show highlights what life is now: absurdist, dysfunctional, full of things you don’t expect and yet we keep going. 

Curious Theatre Branch has been producing startlingly original and profoundly human works since 1988. As Neil Young would say: Long May You Run. 

This play is an absolute gem and your life is a little less smart, a little less deep if you missed it. Talking About Godard played  May 29th through June 28th, 2026 at Facility Theatre, 1138 N California Avenue in Chicago. For more information go to https://curioustheatrebranch.com/

For  reviews go to https://www.theatreinchicago.com/