1,044 stories by "Kerry Reid"
Like theater, baseball has no set time clock by which the action must unfold. It takes as long as it takes to finish the nine innings. That can lead to longueurs, or it can raise the stakes.…
Every time I hear someone describe Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as a "romance," I die a little inside. It's a portrait of dysfunction, abuse, codependency, and revenge. Which, sure, I…
Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, out of anger that he wouldn't produce her play/manifesto Up Your Ass. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, out of anger at …
Christina Anderson's luminous and wise the ripple, the wave that carried me home (now at the Goodman in a coproduction with Berkeley Rep, where it played in fall 2022) unfolds in mesmerizing…
First Folio Theatre planned to produce the world premiere of Heather Chrisler's adaptation of Little Women back in spring of 2020, but COVID took that production out just as surely as scarle…
Shakespeare was queering the narrative before that term even existed. So it makes sense that Midsommer Flight's seventh annual production of Twelfth Night at the Lincoln Park Conservatory go…
At a preshow reception introducing the Goodman's new artistic director, Susan V. Booth, executive director Roche Schulfer talked about how the theater's production of A Christmas Carol, whic…
Theatre Above the Law's sampler platter of four one-acts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (most of them seldom produced) offers mixed results. The opening piece, A Dollar […]
Th…
Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind made its off-Broadway debut in 1955, but it never made the leap to the Great White Way (emphasis most definitely on "White"). The white producers […]
The …
Lifeline Theatre's acclaimed KidSeries has had good luck with the silly bucolic tales of Doreen Cronin (illustrated by Betsy Lewin), from 2003's production of Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type…
Hansol Jung's 2016 play, Among the Dead, now in an intriguing, surprisingly funny, and sometimes quite moving production with Jackalope Theatre, occupies a bit of the same surreal territory …
Fourteen years ago, First Folio Theatre presented Jeeves Intervenes, the first in what would prove to be a reliably crowd-pleasing series of adaptations by Margaret Raether of P.G. Wodehouse…
If you're an adult of a certain age, hearing the name "Peabody" in conjunction with science may make you think of a polymath anthropomorphic cartoon dog, companion to young lad […]
The pos…
When it comes to bold and audacious stagings of Measure for Measure (for my money, the most unpleasant of Shakespeare's "problem plays"), it's hard to top Robert Falls's dark take-no-prisone…
Black Ensemble Theater's latest follows the company's tried-and-true formula with an otherworldly twist. In Blue Heaven, written and directed by Daryl D. Brooks (BET's producing managing dir…
This show at the Broadway Playhouse in Chicago is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs.
Though it's called The Cleanup, Hallie Palladino's new play, now in a world premiere with Prop Thtr under Jen Poulin's direction, is all about messiness in the aftermath of the […]
The pos…
Women love true-crime stories"so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite "Murder Show." Fans […]
The…
Six weeks after my mother died of colon cancer in 2008 (which was almost eight years after my dad died of lung cancer), my sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, […]
The post Seeing the…
Shepsu Aakhu, a founding member of MPAACT (Ma'at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre) has crafted many of the company's shows over the past 32 years. But I'm not sure […]
Th…
Last fall for the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, Aguijón Theater (the oldest Latinx company in the city) unveiled the world premiere of Rey Andújar's La Gran …
J. Nicole Brooks's adaptation of 1919, Eve L. Ewing's collection of poems published a century after the "Red Summer" race riot in Chicago sparked by the murder of Eugene Williams, […]
The …
Theatre Above the Law returns to the fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, as adapted again by Michael Dalberg. (Dalberg's adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll […]
The …
Covering theater in Chicago is sometimes about writing valedictions for companies that have decided it's time to fold up the tent. In the past couple of weeks, two such announcements […]
T…
Welcome to Florence, circa 1485, where the Medicis rule by fear and favors"and where their favorite bad-boy artist, Sandro Botticelli, is about to fuck around (literally) and find out. Canad…
