Productions & Events featuring Austin Pettinger

Acclaimed as a “rip-roaring, grit-your-teeth production” (Chicago Sun-Times), “a refreshingly political piece” (Chicago Tribune) and an “urgent, cinematic, and breathlessly intense … dose of thinking theater” (Stage and Cinema), this show is a political conspiracy thriller (based on true events) in the vein of House of Cards, Kill the Messenger and All the President’s Men.

Based on the best-selling novel and set in post-war Brooklyn, MY NAME IS ASHER LEV follows the journey of a young Jewish painter torn between his Hasidic upbringing and his desperate need to fulfill his artistic promise. When his genius threatens to destroy his relationship with his parents, young Asher realizes he must make difficult choices between his passion and his faith. This stirring adaptation of a modern classic presents a heartbreaking and triumphant vision of what it means to be an artist at any cost—against the will of family, community and tradition.

MY NAME IS ASHER LEV received its world premiere in January 2009 at the
Arden Theatre in Philadelphia and recently closed a heralded 10-month run Off- Broadway in New York City, receiving the Outer Circle Critics Award for Best New Off-Broadway play. TimeLine’s production is the play’s Chicago premiere.

Originally on Broadway in 1959, this timeless musical has never been seen in Chicago, until now!

During the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, the fearless matriarch of a destitute household holds her family together in the face of her husband’s carousing. With fortunes about to turn, the family strives to rise above the political and social unrest around them. This epic, humorous and heartbreaking tale of survival is told through honest and powerful anthems such as “I Wish It So,” “We’re Alive” and “On a Day Like This.”

Originally premiered Off-Broadway in 1985, TimeLine’s production is the first Chicago staging of this landmark play that “blasts you like an open, overstoked furnace” (The New York Times) since its Tony-Award winning Broadway production in 2011. Set at the height of the public and private indifference to the AIDS plague in the early 1980s, this searing drama will feature acclaimed actor/director David Cromer in his return to the Chicago stage as a passionate activist leading the fight to awaken the world to the crisis. Along the way he, and the community he leads into the battle, must face the deeply held fears that led so many to remain silent for too long.

This sexy, multi-faceted puzzle of a play travels from East to West and across time, exploring provocative themes in both epic scope and human scale. In the 1880s, a Victorian woman visiting Japan is fascinated by a new invention — the camera — that allows people to own images of distant lands they never dreamed they would be able to see. In modern-day Tokyo, a collector navigates shifting relationships in search of physical memories of the past. Along the way we gaze as if through a lens at the mysterious intersection of art and authenticity, where very little is what it appears to be.