Sunday, July 10, 2016
A working man joins his comrades in the woods to rehearse a "most lamentable comedy." But someone's made an ass of him — literally. "Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee," cries out one of his f…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:51PMWednesday, July 6, 2016
Aristophanes' urtext for the battle of the sexes has inspired so many reimaginings and adaptations (including Spike Lee's recent contemporary Chicago take, "Chi-Raq") that putting them all u…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMSaturday, June 25, 2016
They have known each other as allies for decades. There's comfort in that familiarity. But then — things change. They begin wanting different things from each other. Perhaps they are simul…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:20PMTuesday, June 21, 2016
Two years ago at the Goodman, Amanda Drinkall left a mark in "Venus in Fur," playing a seemingly innocent actress who teaches an older male director a few things about submission and control…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:07PMFriday, June 17, 2016
One evening with Ben Hecht can't begin to cover everything in his prolific career. But James Sherman gives it a good shot in his self-performed solo, "The Ben Hecht Show," now in a world pre…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:23PMThursday, June 9, 2016
Christopher Chen enjoys exploring the art of artifice and political manipulation. In "The Hundred Flowers Project" (produced in 2014 at Silk Road Rising), Chen used a collaborative theater p…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:07PMWednesday, June 8, 2016
The big map of North America on the wall of the vice principal's office isn't all that it appears to be in Rajiv Joseph's "The North Pool." Dr. Danielson, the vice principal, believes that K…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:37PMFriday, June 3, 2016
His very name suggests "malevolence." But Malvolio, the nearest thing Shakespeare provided to an antagonist in "Twelfth Night," gets a chance to air his numerous grievances against the world…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:36PMSaturday, May 28, 2016
If, as Eugene O'Neill once wrote, there is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again, then is it ever possible to make amends for past crimes and move on? That's one …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:26PMThursday, May 26, 2016
Anton Chekhov's first major play always strikes me as a bit more claustrophobic than his later work. Unlike "The Cherry Orchard," with its prescient echoes of the decline of the Russian bour…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:26PMTo put yourself in the right frame of mind for Dorota Maslowska's "No Matter How Hard We Try" at Trap Door Theatre, it helps if you stroll the 606 beforehand and run into a man in a wheelcha…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:18PMSunday, May 15, 2016
How many stories do we find in popular culture about working-class American women in small towns? Subtract "Roseanne" from the equation and the answer is "not many." Fortunately, Dana Lynn F…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:27PMIn her collection of essays on storytelling, "The Faraway Nearby," Rebecca Solnit notes: "The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story. It's a …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:22PMThursday, April 28, 2016
In a year when the fate of refugees in Europe has dominated headlines, a play about European Jews struggling to make their way in America after the Holocaust should hit home hard. But Alan L…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:01PMIt's pretty much impossible to avoid culinary metaphors in reviewing Benjamin Brand's "Taste." But before you think, "Great, an onstage cooking show," Google "Armin Meiwes." I'll wait. All r…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:56PMThe smell of chlorine hits the nostrils the second you walk into the small lobby at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble for Ruby Rae Spiegel's "Dry Land." Appropriate, since Spiegel's piece, now in a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:46PMThursday, April 21, 2016
Samuel D. Hunter could easily lay claim to being the Raymond Carver of contemporary American theater. Like the late short-story writer and poet, Hunter's world portrays the backwaters of the…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:55PMStephen Adly Guirgis' Pulitzer Prize-winning "Between Riverside and Crazy" gets its local debut at Steppenwolf in June. But before that, you can dip into his earlier work with Eclipse Theatr…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:53AMMonday, April 18, 2016
Dionne Warwick's voice — resonant, cool, but with a persistent undertone of wistful loss — provides a soundtrack that crosses generations and genres. It's a tough one to imitate. Thankfu…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:45PMThursday, March 31, 2016
Factory Theater loves a good caper story, and in Ernie Deak's "The Last Big Mistake," it has one that also functions as a love letter to Chicago grit — the kind of grit that exists not far…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:17PMWhat if Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," had been born female and a half-century later? Adam Rapp makes a compelling, if occasionally elliptical, argum…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:35PMFactory Theater loves a good caper story, and in Ernie Deak's "The Last Big Mistake," it has one that also functions as a love letter to Chicago grit — the kind of grit that exists not far…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:59AMWednesday, March 30, 2016
"And yet it moves." Those four words, allegedly uttered under his breath by Galileo Galilei right after recanting his views on heliocentrism under threat by the Roman Inquisition, generally …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:36PMWednesday, March 23, 2016
For fans of classic cinema, Queen Christina of Sweden means Greta Garbo, who played the fascinating and troubled 17th century monarch in 1933's (highly fictionalized) "Queen Christina." Garb…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:48PMSunday, March 20, 2016
For those of us of a certain age, seeing John Leguizamo's early solo work such as 1992's "Spic-O-Rama" (which played at the old Goodman Studio) was a revelatory, if unsettling, experience. L…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:51PM For those of us of a certain age, seeing John Leguizamo’s early solo work such as 1992’s “Spic-O-Rama” (which played at the old Goodman Studio) was a revelatory, if unsettling, exp…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:50AMTuesday, March 15, 2016
Craig Wright's play is about the 9/11 attacks only in the sense that, say, "Glengarry Glen Ross" is about real estate. His 2003 dramedy is set comfortably far away in distance (it takes plac…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:16PMImagine the sturdy films about workplace mundanity and absurdity, "Clerks" and "Office Space" filtered through George Orwell's "1984," and you might have a glancing idea of what David Jacobi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:15PMThursday, March 3, 2016
It's the oldest American story in the book. Lighting out for the territory. Getting on the road or the train or the plane and going somewhere, anywhere — as long as it isn't here. In "Fugi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:09PMWednesday, March 2, 2016
Set in 1933, William Inge's "A Loss of Roses" takes an unflinching snapshot of people in a small town suffering from "a depression of the heart, a drought of the soul," as the voice of an of…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:20PMThursday, February 25, 2016
"Accidents of fate are just the probabilities playing out," says Liz — half of the two-lives-in-one protagonist, Elizabeth, in "If/Then," the heart-on-sleeve musical about roads taken and …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:42PM 
