Deborah Eisenberg, whose short stories have been popping up in the New Yorker and in acclaimed collections since the 1980s, began writing when she stopped smoking. She stopped because her lo…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:30PMOn a clear and pleasant July evening, with just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay, First Folio Theatre's pastoral setting gives the forest of Arden a run for its money. But that ca…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:54PMIf the Reduced Shakespeare Company and Forbidden Broadway had a musical baby, it would probably look and sound a lot like "Something Rotten!" No insult intended to the appearance of this ima…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:12PMThe story of the USS Indianapolis perhaps remains best known in popular culture through "Jaws." Robert Shaw's Quint delivers an unforgettable monologue outlining his experiences in the shark…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:00PMIn 1937, Marc Blitzstein's famous pro-labor musical, "The Cradle Will Rock" (created through the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration) was shut down by federal author…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:48PMCity Lit Theater's current staging of 1841's "London Assurance" marks the first local production of Dion Boucicault's comedy in 120 years. Felicitously, it opens just a month ahead of Defini…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:27PM"If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir." In that one line, William Shakespeare lays bare the central paradox of "Macbeth" — the play and the man. Arguably …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:37PMAlfred Jarry's 1896 absurd and grotesque "Ubu Roi" should be the perfect play for our current political moment. After all, it involves an impulsive vulgarian who, while utterly unacquainted …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:00PMOne of the markers of adulthood is recognizing that your parents had lives of their own that had nothing to do with you. Often you don't see it until at least one of them has died. They live…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:48PMNature may abhor a vacuum, but holes in the timeline offer catnip to authors of historical fiction. Where facts cannot be found, imagination runs wild. In "Her Majesty's Will," David Blixt's…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:21PM"Get out of my way. I feel like making some money today." Few of us can imagine sweeping into our workplace and making that pronouncement in anything other than an ironic tone. But Liz Rico …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:54PMA couple of years ago, the feel-good channels of social networking lit up with a story about a Dutch nursing home where college students live rent-free. The idea of old and young living toge…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:41PMIn "Great Expectations," Charles Dickens crafted an indelible portrait of a young man of no means whose desires to be a "gentleman" almost come true — but with tragic consequences. At its …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMSummer in Chicago focuses on outdoor fun, whether it's at music festivals, street fairs, ballgames or beaches. But Chicago's red-hot theater scene also has plenty of option. Here are 30 show…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:44PMAs a playwright, Luis Alfaro is best known in Chicago for his contemporary updates of Greek tragedies, such as "Oedipus El Rey," which reimagines the story of Oedipus through the lens of Chi…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:12PMOn the heels of its timely and sardonic production of "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," Trap Door Theatre takes a turn toward the elliptical and symbolic with "Into the Empty Sky," based o…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:55AM"Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful," They Might Be Giants sang years ago. Young Jean Lee's "We're Gonna Die," now getting a heartfelt and high-energy production with Ha…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:16AMWe all know the litany of complaints about life near Wrigley Field. Nonexistent parking. Drunk people committing various, um, quality-of-life offenses. But for decades, the Cubs and the loca…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PMWhat's your poison? Noir? Musicals? Gender-bending camp with a twist of melodrama? Well, guys and dolls, stir your stumps upstairs to Mary's Attic, where Hell in a Handbag's "Lady X: The Mus…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:48PMBefore HBO's harrowing prison drama "Oz" and before "The Shawshank Redemption," there was Tennessee Williams' "Not About Nightingales." Well, sort of. Though written in 1938 for the Group Th…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:39PMIn 2011, a group of 18 high school girls — many of them cheerleaders — in the New York town of Le Roy began exhibiting strange vocal and physical tics. The phenomenon unleashed a storm o…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:41PMWhen someone has been stuck in the shadows of history, the light that finally shines on her accomplishments seems all the brighter — even if it bends and refracts through the lens of artis…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:32PMA businessman with a crude way of talking and an outsize — but easily bruised — ego arrives in Washington, convinced he can bully and buy his way into getting what he wants. Which is mor…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:11PMHe's petulant and greedy, surrounded by thugs who take out enemies real and perceived at the drop of a hat. He mouths populist bromides while engaging in the worst excesses of corruption and…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:57PMA vague whiff of a John Hughes movie hangs in the air over Sarah Sander's "Sycamore," in which three disaffected suburban teens attempt to figure out how to claim their identity without caus…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWhat's in a name? That which we call a rose is just as bittersweet in miniature form. And so it is with Chicago Shakespeare's "Short Shakespeare! Romeo and Juliet," now dashing through the s…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMThe ghosts of Abu Ghraib haunt the world of Paul Pasulka's "Skin for Skin," while suggesting that the recent shameful past can only be read as prologue to our present times. It's a story wor…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:05PMWhen you're basing a show around the Nicholas Brothers, who created what Fred Astaire called the greatest dance sequence ever filmed — well, brother, those are some big tap shoes to fill. …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00AMThe narrative terrain in Irish playwright Marina Carr's work bursts with ghosts. But we're far away from, say, Conor McPherson's "The Weir," where a newly arrived transplant from Dublin find…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:09PMIf one seeks a personalized metaphor for the tortured morality of being a Western superpower, look no further than conflict photographers. They run around war zones — many of those places …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00AMThe women's marches held in protest of Donald Trump's inauguration last month threw already-fraught issues of gender discrimination into high profile. Away from the pink hats, three plays on…
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