217 stories by "Irene Hsiao"
Drumbeats pierce the air with discomfiting bluntness, a beeline for the ear soothed into tranquility with music performed by Fred Jackson Jr., Evan Hill, and Chér Jey. Three masked figures …
The ocean is an obsession for 18-year-old Dontrell Jones III (Blake Dupree) of Baltimore, a high school graduate mere weeks from starting his full ride to Johns Hopkins, with the vastness of…
Antigonick, Anne Carson's 2012 translation of Sophokles's Antigone, is both heavy and light, with terse language hand-lettered in black and red caps, interleaved with illustrations by Bianca…
The overture begins with soft and almost wistful strings creating an atmosphere of tentative beauty, like a mist entering as the sun rises"a subtle, dark, and pensive beginning to an opera n…
The view is sumptuous even before the curtain rises on Mary Zimmerman's The Matchbox Magic Flute: chandeliers dripping with gems, stars on a painted firmament, a cascade of crimson velvet, m…
Illinois. Land of Lincoln. The Prairie State. The Inland Empire State. Home to Illinoisans, Illinoisians, and Illinoians. Algonquin for "tribe of superior men." State bird: the cardinal. Sta…
The 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival swept through Chicago as vigorously as the cold front that accompanied much of it, and puppets dominated venues all around Chicago for t…
July 27, 4:58 PM, in the sweltering afternoon of a hothouse week, my friend Jeff and I arrived at a kiosk between a shuttered Starbucks and a Cash4Gold stand on the pedway level of Block 37.…
When you hear "Charlie Chan," do you think of a Honolulu police detective with a penchant for fortune cookie proverbs in pidgin English, who was made into an American icon in six novels by O…
Joan of Arc: history or apocrypha, saint or schizophrenic, myth or martyr? We're all mad here, suggests Trap Door Theatre's vivacious U.S. premiere production of Matei ViÅŸniec's Joan and …
No wings close the expanse of earth that widens the Court Theatre stage to a landscape in Caryl Churchill's Fen, directed by Vanessa Stalling, with scenic design by Collette Pollard. The ter…
Jasmine Sharma's Radial Gradient, directed in its world premiere at Shattered Globe Theatre by Grace Dolezal-Ng, is the story of two students and their bid to enter a sorority at their unive…
Him (Jennifer Lim) coughs on the smoke of the incense she lights as she bows to a temporary altar in her kitchen in Carrollton, Texas. Ma (Wai Ching Ho) is propped up on a hospital bed, wher…
Uncle Joe was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. The cardboard boxes littered the floor, filled with Joe's tools, Joe's college textbooks, Joe's albums and […]
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René Magritte's 1929 painting La Trahison des images is best known for the text it contains: painted in a curlicue script beneath the curved image of a pipe are the […]
The post When is a…
Albert Chen (Christopher Thomas Pow) is sitting on a park bench eating what appears to be a burrito or a hot pocket when a hunched old man, dressed in an […]
The post Pecking themselves to…
Now celebrating its 45th anniversary, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago presents Refraction, a mixed bill of contemporary works consisting of the world premiere of Chicago choreographer Randy Dun…
On the rooftop of a high-rise, one of many in the forest of silhouettes that comprises our city's skyline, a professor (Dan Hanrahan) and an automotive engineer (Juanjo López) have […]
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It's impossible to summarize everything that's happening onstage this season. (It's also hard to tell you exactly what COVID-19 precautions are required at venues now; we suggest checking ah…
On September 24, Toolbox @ Twenty opens at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) to celebrate the Seldoms' 20th anniversary with an exhibition and performances in a large-scale experiment in […]…
"Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true," reads the supertitle projected over a stage sparsely set with stools. Enter a small conference of artists tasked with […]
The post …
The stage is dark and lightly clouded with fog"in the distance, a dense heap of jumbled objects signals the end of systems and uses. Booms Day brings us into the […]
The post Seeking a fri…
On August 27 in Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, the eight companies representing the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project"Ayodele Drum and Dance, Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center, Dee…
In March 2020, Theatre L'Acadie opened a production of Tennessee Williams's The Two Character Play the same week the city locked down for the COVID-19 pandemic: sibling actors, mad and […]…
On plantations in the 1800s, plantation owners used diversity as a means of division. "We lay great stress on the necessity of having our labor mixed. By employing different nationalities, t…
