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`Lower Depths' rises among the wretches

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From: Chicago Sun-Times
Date: 19901026
Author:Hedy Weiss

Nearly four decades before Eugene O'Neill convened a congress of derelicts in a Bowery bar for "The Iceman Cometh," the Russian dramatist Maxim Gorky wrote his flophouse tragicomedy and called it "The Lower Depths."

O'Neill's classic is now on the stage of the Goodman Theatre. And Gorky's work opened Thursday night in a mightily ambitious and mostly successful production presented by the Commons Theatre. While the societies these playwrights depicted were half a world apart, their characters, and the stories they tell, are remarkably similar.

"The Lower Depths," with a cast of 17, is set ...

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