2,444 stories from chicagoreader.com
In Cat McKay's queer comedy Plaid as Hell, Cass (Reagan James) hopes that a weekend away in the Wisconsin woods will be a fitting opportunity for her best friend Emilie […]
The post Cabin …
Sarah Sapperstein's Maggie the Cat commands your attention with her act one monologues in MadKap Productions's mounting of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Skokie Theatre, direc…
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…
Drawing from a well that's 500 years old and who knows how deep takes nerve. Yet that's what Laughing Stock attempts with this contemporary take on commedia dell'arte. You could […]
The po…
Their premise is not half bad: a "still relatively new" (as they describe themselves) theater company uses a fictional 125th-anniversary "jubilee" to bring together a collection of short ske…
The surrealist, sometimes anarchic style of British playwright Caryl Churchill's prose invites a lot of directorial interpretation and creativity from the theater artists who've been drawn t…
In Boeing-Boeing, the 1960 French sex comedy by Marc Camoletti (translated by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans) that's now being mounted by Saint Sebastian Players, protagonist Bernard (Garre…
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…
American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown and directed by Tim Rhoze, now playing at the Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston, opens with a quote from Ta-Neh…
Every superhero saga needs a villain, and Mark Pracht's new play The Mark of Kane"an origin story for the comic-book character Batman"provides one in the figure of Bob Kane. In […]
The pos…
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…
Teenagers tend to be reckless, sure, but few would gather in a spooky tree house to summon the spirit of Colombian drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar. But then, most aren't […]
The post Miam…
It's hard to write a play whose hero is the American Medical Association (AMA), even as embodied by crusading Dr. Morris Fishbein (the appealing Andrew Bosworth) and his equally earnest [……
Nearly a decade after it debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in 2013, Rachel De-lahay's Routes has landed at Theater Wit for its American premiere. Presented by Remy Bumppo, Routes […]
The …
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…
The game Clue taught me what "confidential" means, that a conservatory is just a fancy greenhouse, and that Miss Scarlett is always the right choice. Any armchair detective that could […]
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Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a rural Illinois family beset by delusion and dysfunction is brilliantly brought to life by AstonRep Theatre Company.  Alcoholic patri…
Invictus Theatre Company delivers a solid, sometimes stirring, and strikingly relevant rendition of William Shakespeare's 1599 tragedy. It's the story of Marcus Brutus (played by Invictus ar…
Siena Marilyn Ledger's brand-new two-person play, being produced here with 16th Street Theater and Dragonfly Theatre as part of the National New Play Network rolling world premiere program, …
Refuge, the wrenching portrait of a Central American woman's effort to reach the U.S. receiving its midwest premiere at Theo Ubique, is less a play than a ritual with music […]
The post Di…
Music Theater Works (MTW) ambitiously takes on some of the problems with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's formless and dated book, keeping our focus on Arthur (Michael Metcalf), Gueneve…
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 […]
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