Let’s simplify and take all the phrases critics could use for Field of Flesh—surrealist, experimental, avant garde, etc.—and put them under the umbrella term “weird theater.” You know, it’s the […]
In Chicago theater, the return of a great—not to mention famous—ensemble actor to the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is an event exciting enough to register on the Richter scale. Particularly when […]
Melodrama gets a bum rap. It’s silly, the cynics say, unrealistic, it’s too much. But when melodrama is done well there’s nothing else like it. The genre appeals to the […]
Some properties exist on a Wheel of Fortune spinner of adaptations. The Producers was a movie, then a musical, then a movie. Mean Girls lived the same life. Beetlejuice has […]
Like many history books, Steven Conn’s The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America For What It Is—And Isn’t is a showcase of and argument for nuanced thinking. In his […]
Romance is difficult enough in real life, but it’s damn-near impossible on the stage. Balancing the fictive chemicals of genuine-seeming attraction is a science to challenge our best artists. Success […]
Ask a few actors about their childhoods and you start to notice patterns. “My siblings and I made costumes and put on silly plays for our parents,” is a common […]
American Psycho as originally conceived by author Bret Easton Ellis has a great elevator pitch. “A novel about an investment banker in the Reagan eighties who at night becomes a […]
In her new book Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook Sonya Huber offers a collection of effective essays mostly about her Midwest identity. A longtime essayist and Fairfield University professor, […]
Improv comedy is the performative art closest in energy to a sporting event. No one—not the audience, not the performers—knows the outcome at the beginning, and both can expect successes […]
Although Semyon, played by Daniel Shtivelberg, the main character of Moira Buffini’s play Dying For It, lives in post-revolutionary Russia, his struggles are pointedly timeless and engender a theatergoer’s sympathy. […]
Anyone who’s joined a beginners’ writers workshop knows the difficulty of reviewing prose that is nowhere near polished. It’s awkward, stressful even, trying to devise cogent thoughts about art that […]