Review: "Ugly Lies the Bone," a play about pain by Shattered Globe

As its daring title might suggest, “Ugly Lies the Bone” is a tough watch. The current production from Shattered Globe Theatre at Theater Wit, which opened Thursday night, is about a severely wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan and her attempts at rehabilitation and to return to, for want of a better word, normalcy.

To a large extent, Lindsey Ferrentino’s play, now directed in Chicago by Jonathan Berry, is about the definition and management of pain. This topic is, of course, not something one typically thinks about until it arrives in one’s own consciousness. We can’t really know someone else’s level of agony, which is why the medical profession has come up with pain scales, the 1-10 range that acknowledges that human tolerance varies and that no single person really knows how anoth