Columbia College Chicago Theatre alum Keith Surney ’13, a graduate of the Theatre Program’s BA Program in Acting, is making his debut as a stage director with an acclaimed revival of Amiri Baraka‘s controversial 1964 drama Dutchman. The production, in which Surney also plays the leading male role, runs through October 25 at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, Chicago. For tickets, click here.

The Chicago Reader, Chicago’s premier alternative weekly, gave the show a Recommended rating. “Dutchman is a deliberately discomfiting blend of absurdism and political allegory,” writes the Reader‘s theatre editor, Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department alum Kerry Reid ’87, in her review. “Set on a subway train in New York and unfolding in real time, the story involves a young Black man named Clay (representative of his seemingly malleable nature and identity) and a white temptress named Lula, who makes her entrance munching on an apple like Eve. She teases and seduces while tormenting and insulting (a suitable embodiment of how the American dream has long been dangled just out of reach for non-white people). . . . Dutchman . . . is raw, confrontational, poetic, and sometimes maddening, but its pull for audiences and other playwrights . . . remains palpable” in “Surney’s spare but sharp staging.” To read the full review, click here.

“Surney does a skillful job in his directorial debut; he and the other actors keep the pace of this short, thrilling drama,” says Third Coast Review. And Buzz Center Stage’s “Highly Recommended” review declares: “Dutchman remains one of the most incisive allegories in American drama—a modern tale in which seduction, power, and racial history collide in the confined space of a subway car. Trap Door Theatre’s production, directed with precision and calculated risk by Keith Surney, resurrects the play’s mythic and political undercurrents, deepening its resonance as both ritual and warning. . . . Surney’s directorial debut [is] a bold and fearless entry that takes genuine risks—some raw, some revelatory— announcing a director unafraid to challenge both text and audience. If Dutchman is a voyage into the heart of America’s contradictions, Surney steers it with both daring and intellect.” To read the full review, click here.