In case you think brooding suggests gloom and doom, think otherwise. Trap Door Theatre’s The Old Woman Broods is chaotic, cacophonous and more than a little cuckoo. The 1969 play by Polish playwright Tadeusz […]
Familiar at Steppenwolf Theatre rings true as a familiar story in one way or another for most of us. An immigrant family struggles with education and culture in its new country, and tries […]
“This is Major Tom to Ground Control I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today For here am I sitting […]
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a 1957 play by William Inge, is set in a small town in 1920s Oklahoma. The play tells the story of the Flood family—Cora […]
The Revolutionists is feminist history laced with an argument for the value of art in revolution. Playwright Lauren Gunderson describes it as a “comedic quartet about four women at the height of the […]
“Once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely […]
Wrightwood 659 is a stunning new art gallery in Lincoln Park and its current exhibition is a great way to get acquainted with the new space if you have not been there […]
Manual Cinema is presenting a weirdly enchanting version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at Court Theatre. Nine puppeteers and musicians display the original story of Dr. Frankenstein and the Creature, combined with Mary Shelley’s […]
I admire experimentation in theater, whether it’s setting a familiar Shakespearean tale behind a vinyl screen in some post-modern setting (as Gift Theatre did with Hamlet recently) or telling the Frankenstein story […]
Earlier this week I reviewed a darkly hilarious Kurt Vonnegut satire on stage in New York. The other two plays I saw last weekend are powerful dramas about family tragedy. They aren’t comedies, […]
If you’re a Kurt Vonnegut reader, Happy Birthday, Wanda June will sound familiar. I was sure I had read it long ago when I was devouring everything he wrote. But no, I never […]
In the madness of our daily lives, we may wish that we could abandon our devices and spend a week meditating in the woods and getting high on nature. We would return […]
