If you think Chicago Shakespeare's upstairs theater is snug, wait till you see the headquarters of Strawdog Theatre Company, an L-shaped black box in a dingy storefront walk-up. Yet that company, which is celebrating its 20th season, has a reputation that lured me to its production of "Aristocrats," Brian Friel's great 1979 play about a family of Irish Catholics who have sunk from upper-middle-class comfort into desperately shabby gentility. Rarely have my expectations been more satisfyingly surpassed. Strawdog's "Aristocrats" is one of those revivals so excellent as to leave a critic with nothing much to do but order you to drop everything and go see it at once -- and its excellence, like that of "Passion," is deeply rooted in its clarifying smallness of scale. I saw it from the front row of the theater, sitting within arm's length of a cast whose acting was so direct and unmannered that I felt as though I were dining with them.

Mr. Friel's love of Chekhov has never been made more explicit than in "Aristocrats," in which the smiling Slavic melancholy of "The Cherry Orchard" is transplanted to a setting as Irish as a fifth of Jameson's. Not coincidentally, a bottle of that well-known whiskey figures prominently in this snapshot of a day in the life of the O'Donnells, who are paralyzed by nostalgia for a glorious past that wasn't quite so glorious as they (mostly) like to pretend. Their plight is a metaphor for Ireland itself, a tribal land entangled in the choking vines of the increasingly distant but never-forgotten past. Yet Mr. Friel is careful never to overemphasize this larger meaning: "Aristocrats" can just as easily be interpreted as a purely domestic drama about a family whose distorted memories of "the life of the 'quality'" stand in the way of their coming to grips with the harsh reality of their present-day existence.

Complex Performances
John Henry Roberts has the flashiest role as Casimir, the eccentric fabulist who treasures his implausibly vivid memories of famous visitors to Ballybeg Hall -- Yeats, Chesterton, Cardinal Newman -- whom he may or may not have actually met. The most interesting part is that of Eamon (Michael Dailey), a lower-class boy who married an O'Donnell and now regards his in-laws with an explosive mixture of love and bitterness: "Carriages, balls, receptions, weddings, christenings, feasts, deaths, trips to Rome, musical evenings, tennis -- that's the mythology I was nurtured on all my life, day after day, year after year. . . . A strange and marvellous education for a wee country boy, wasn't it? No, not an education -- a permanent pigmentation." But every actor in the ensemble gives a complex, fully rounded performance worthy of close study, and Rick Snyder's lovingly naturalistic staging and B. Emil Bulous' simple yet subtle set show them all off to perfect advantage.

I've seen plenty of first-rate shows in Chicago, but to take in two revivals as good as these in a single day is more than worth the vexation of flying in and out of O'Hare Airport. As for those local playgoers who haven't gotten around to seeing "Aristocrats" or "Passion," don't delay -- time is short.