Young Jean Lee looks me in the eye and smiles her most sympathetic smile. "I feel sorry for you," she says. "You don't get to have one of the big categories of oppression. You are expected t…
Border walls are crumbling at theaters all over town these days, the Trump-mandated edifice being the metaphor du jour for a political revolution sourced in protectionism and thus anathema t…
"Faceless," the lively new drama at Northlight Theatre that deals with the recruitment " over Twitter and Facebook " of a young American woman to join the jihad, is the work of 22-year-old p…
Some Jewish people saw the Holocaust coming with total clarity " they understood almost immediately the pull of fascism and the weakness of the opposition. They decoded the fake news. Others…
The new revue at the Mercury Theater, "I Left My Heart: A Salute to the Music of Tony Bennett" delivers exactly what it promises " a simple, irony-free, enjoyable, predictable exploration of…
To: Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States From: Chris Jones, Tribune critic Re: The National Endowment for the Arts A modest proposal, Mr. President: Don't kill the National E…
"What are you doing here?" asked an acquaintance during intermission at the Oriental Theatre on Wednesday night. "It's my job," I replied. "More interestingly, what are you doing here?" "Ham…
Over the past week, I've reviewed plays about cancer, climate change and sex offenders. Doesn't that make you want to rush out to the theater? Well, there was also "Saturday Night Fever," al…
It is now impossible to watch George Washington make his exit from public life in "Hamilton" without the face of Barack Obama staring back at you from the stage. It's not just that the first…
There's a legitimate school of rehabilitative thought that says many sex offenders can't change their impulses " they only can learn to self-regulate their behavior and understand how conseq…
Margaret Edson's "Wit," which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999, is the best play ever written about cancer. In fact, I'd say it's the best play ever written about hospitals, too, and…
There is much to worry about at present. Attending Mike Bartlett's sprawling, three-hour drama "Earthquakes in London" at the Steep Theatre, and you should, for it is a wild, trippy fusion o…
Amnesia " willful or otherwise " about what transpired in the late 1970s is hardly uncommon. Perhaps that explains why so many people think "Saturday Night Fever," the Robert Stigwood epic a…
Writers Theatre in Glencoe will stage the world premiere of "Trevor: The Musical" in a pre-Broadway tryout this fall, the Tribune has learned. This will be the first pre-Broadway show for th…
In 2004, iconic American playwright August Wilson was awarded the Tribune's Literary Prize at a fall ceremony, part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Halfway through the lunch that followe…
The brilliant playwright Richard Nelson recently said a couple of very smart things in Australia. One was that a great writer can look at families and, if that writer really digs deep, find …
"The Project(s),"Â the emotional, political and critically acclaimed theater piece created by the late PJ Paparelli that detailed the history of public housing in Chicago, is to have a fut…
One frequent problem with plays about sports is that you rarely see the game at the heart of the story. Lots of these dramas get stuck in locker rooms, offices or classrooms. It's very hard …
In the lobby of a theater the other day, an acquaintance of mine observed that the only good thing about the rise to power of Donald J. Trump was the post-facto unification of, well, let's c…
Alastair Reynolds, a British astrophysicist who turned his hand to penning fiction, writes what is known as "hard sci-fi," or, yet more intensely, "dark, hard sci-fi." The term " which you a…
The Stonewall riots of June 1969, wherein the patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village decided to fight back against police raids that had become routine, is justly seen …
The actor Wayne Brady, who plays Aaron Burr in the Chicago production of "Hamilton," sustained a minor leg injury Saturday during a matinee performance of the show in downtown Chicago …
There is one consistent quality in the work of director Ron OJ Parson, the man behind the Court Theatre revival of Pearl Cleage's "Blues for an Alabama Sky," to value above all else right no…
Most puppets have big personalities. It's an art with roots on the streets " you have to talk up a storm to draw a crowd to pass the hat. But the puppets that drew a packed, rapt house at th…
As President-elect Donald J. Trump morphed into the 45th president of the United States on Friday, arts organizations, especially the big ones, were tying themselves in knots trying to figur…