“'Star Witness': A small-town girl, pedaling away for her own good” -   Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 3/28/11.  "There is something about the basement of the Chopin Theatre — the point of origin of David Cromer’s now famous production of “Our Town” — that seems to spark a director’s creativity. And thus at the start of “Star Witness,” the new show created for the House Theatre of Chicago, you at first think that the entire show is being staged in the anteroom, or lobby, that sits just beyond the main playing area.

But that is merely an illusion. Before long, those heavy doors are thrown open to reveal designer Lee Keenan’s telescopic vista of a young woman, pedaling down the roads of a small town, as if her very life depended on her escape. The space occupied by the show expands exponentially from there.

That effect is an eye-popping theatrical moment in a very interesting and provocatively staged new show, directed by Sean Graney, that has yet to unpack the drama of its central human story. Penned by the Chicago-based Joe Meno (primarily a fiction writer who also created “The Boy Detective Fails” for House), “Star Witness” is centered on Shelley, a 19-year-old waitress in small-town Somerset, Ill. Shelley lives with her foster grandmother Hazel, a woman who likes to listen to the police scanner for entertainment.

As the pair sit in their living room — Shelley tired from a day serving the eccentrics of the diner — the scanner splutters with the information that a little girl has disappeared from her neighborhood. And Shelley decides to get involved.

Small-town tragedy — and the notions of shared grief, responsibilities and possibilities for collective redemptions—are powerful motifs to which the House has returned, very effectively, many times over its decade-long history. And Meno’s quirky style — he is a savvy writer very much in tune with the power of mystery in ordinary locales — has always been a good match for the company.

But while “Star Witness” is consistently intriguing, and intermittently resonant, the broader potential of this story proves elusive.

That’s partly because the show, at this juncture, tends to get caught between two potential protagonists — the disappeared little girl, whom we never meet, and the waitress, whom we do, but who tends to get stuck reacting to things (and to strange people) rather more than doing things herself, peddling her bike notwithstanding. That does not a satisfying protagonist make.

Because we’re not connected to the lost child — who is only sketchily drawn — we struggle to become involved in her fate in any kind of personal way or understand her import in the town. And yet the concerns of Shelley, despite a very engaging and honest performance from Briana DeGuilio, also do not seem to fully pop out of the narrative as they should, given the emotional ambitions of the drama.

It’s mostly a matter of fixing the problems with the meandering storytelling and allowing the central character to better take her place at the heart of her story. Some overwrought acting — many temptations await those who play rural folks — contributes to these problems. Throughout the show, you feel like the key to this piece is somewhere here in the basement — just not out where it needs to be.

There is a glimpse of a potent future direction in the best scene, which comes late in the play: We start to sense how Shelley has intimate, daily relationships with people she does not even know and the dangers that presents any kid in any diner in any small town. Make that feeling really come alive and we’d all be right with her, pedaling off on that bike”

Star Witness – Kris Vire, TimeOut Chicago 3/30/11 – “According to the House’s press notes, Meno considers his new play “a riff on The Wizard of Oz.” But it’s not a riff in the manner of the House’s classic The Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz, a refracted retelling of the actual story. No, you have to look much harder at Star Witness  for tips that would merit calling in the Baum squad: a sung snippet of “Over the Rainbow” here, a pair of red cowboy boots there.

Meno’s tale is set in a small town in downstate Illinois, where we learn a JonBenet-like young pageant girl has just gone missing. We hear most of this develop over the police scanner that’s obsessively monitored by retired kindergarten teacher and armchair detective Hazel (Redmon). Hazel’s housemate is 19-year-old diner waitress Shelley (De Giulio), who’s lived with Hazel since her mom split a decade earlier, and who’s desperately in search of some confirmation of good in the world.

I’ll cop to not having read Chicago favorite Meno’s fiction, but this is the third of his plays that I’ve seen, and I wonder if the Columbia College faculty member’s much-praised formal experiments in prose simply don’t translate well to stage. Like The Boy Detective Fails and Office Girl before it, Witness feels aimless and unfocused, its dialogue imprecise and its tone remarkably unbalanced.

The first act, which takes place in Hazel’s kitchen, is packed with clumsy exposition; Redmon’s cartoonishly fiery portrayal takes up enough oxygen to make it unclear which of the women is our protagonist. That’s cleared up (sort of) when Shelley, our quasi-Dorothy, sets out on her bike in the much shorter second act, in search of the missing girl or her ghost or something; she encounters three characters who bear striking resemblances to others we saw in Act I.

The imbalance (imagine if the black-and-white Kansas scenes of the MGM film were twice as long as the Technicolor Oz sequence) feels as if it’s thrown off even Graney and his appealing cast. Consciously or not, the director seems to have suppressed his normal affinity for the outré in the first act; I was a bit relieved to see Graney coming through in the second. (His use of the space, staging Act I in the Chopin’s basement lounge and Act II in the theater proper, is quite clever.) De Giulio and the cast’s men make an admirable effort, but Meno’s wrap-up feels so glib and rushed that, well, it’s as if there’s no magic behind the curtain”.

Star Witness - Zach Freeman, NewCity Chicago 3/31/11.  "A high-energy cast and innovative staging take the forefront
 in the latest offering from The House Theatre. In small-town Illinois, 19-year-old Shelley (Briana De Giulio) spends her days waiting tables  in a diner and her nights with her foster grandmother (Mary Redmon) playing board games, gossiping and listening to the police scanner.   When the police report a young girl gone missing, a series of events
finds Shelley rushing out of the house (intimately set in-the-round  in the downstairs lobby), onto her bicycle, and into an entirely new set.   The second act, which takes place in an elaborately immersive setting  that spills out into the audience with a DJ and a smoke machine,  consists of a number of disconnected vignettes, each of which is
 engaging on its own (thanks to the consistently impressive cast) but  which overall lacks a sense of linear and emotional cohesion.  At the end of playwright Joe Meno’s winding story the audience has  been through a lot, but the upshot is muddled".