(Chris Jones's article appeared in the Chicago Tribune, 9/23.)
If you thought Carrie Coon was all sweet and Honey, you just haven't yet seen "The Real Thing."
In Michael Halberstam's smart, stimulating and sometimes beguiling production of the 1982 Tom Stoppard play about how smart, stimulating and sometimes beguiling people can have crisis-strewn love lives, this remarkable young actress, one of the most arresting talents to suddenly appear in Chicago in years, achieves one thing above all else. Plying her theatrical trade at Writers' Theatre, where most bedrooms are set well back from the street but many of the denizens are familiar with the art of negotiation, Coon forges an aggressive, dangerously desirable, young woman — one whom a man can never be sure won't one day get up and leave.