I found Steppenwolf’s “Fool for Love” overly styled and tentative, but that’s far from the case with director Azar Kazemi’s Raven production, filled with compelling young actors such as Ian Maryfield, Arash Fakhrabadi, John Drea and Gloria Imseih Petrelli going for broke in Raven’s intimate theater.

Muscular, gritty, blistering — they’ve all been used often to define Chicago theater. And while they might be cliche, Raven Theatre’s incendiary production of Sam Shepard’s violently intense “A Lie of the Mind” is definitely all three.

Sam Shepard's drama about the aftermath of a horrific incident of domestic violence gets a stirring revival at Raven.

With “Fool for Love” playing at the Steppenwolf Theatre and now “A Lie of the Mind” at the thriving Raven Theatre, Chicago is having something of a Sam Shepard revival. The late ...