British playwright Simon Stephens has been produced here so often, he’s practically an honorary Chicagoan. So it’s perhaps puzzling that his adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won the 2015 Tony Award for best play, has only been seen locally in a 2016 touring production with Broadway in Chicago and with Steppenwolf for Young Adults in 2018. 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Through 4/21: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Wed 4/17 1:30 PM; Skokie Theatre, 7924 Lincoln, Skokie, 847-677-7761, skokietheatre.org, $42 ($38 seniors and students)

Part of why may be that the original production, directed by Tony-winner Marianne Elliott, used a daunting array of technical elements to illustrate the sensory overload experienced by protagonist Christopher Boone—a teenage boy with autism whose investigation into a neighbor’s dog’s death leads him on a hero’s journey of sorts from his small town to the heart of London, where navigating the tube is just one of the hurdles he faces.

This revival by MadKap Productions, directed by Steve Scott and starring Senn High School student Leo Spiegel as Christopher, is generally sturdy enough to hold one’s attention without the technical bells and whistles. While the Broadway production used complex light-up screens to illustrate Christopher’s journey (among other things inside his head), this production uses green lines and dots on moveable black backdrops (set by Brian Wasserman). Brian Bedoya’s sound design and Pat Henderson’s lights do most of the work of evoking the confusion and overload for Christopher at the most traumatic moments.

Stephens’s script turns Haddon’s story into a play within a play, so Christopher’s teacher Siobhan (the sympathetic Danielle Kerr) serves as the mediator for his story. It’s not wholly effective, and nor is the line of “voices” at the back of the stage who awkwardly pop up as various neighbors, commuters, and other teachers from time to time. But the central relationship between Christopher and his beleaguered father, Ed (Michael Wollner), who has been hiding a major secret, is strong enough to generally carry us through some of the more wincing moments.