It’s Rome in 1922. In his play Naked, Luigi Pirandello, the Nobel Prize-winning author, concocts a puzzling tangle of death and passion. Directed by Kay Martinovich, Naked is now on stage […]
City Lit Theater’s new production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play, Arms and the Man, takes full advantage of its broad humor. Perhaps Shaw’s most frothy script, director Brian Pastor directs […]
Critics Kimzyn Campbell and Karin McKie jointly review BigMouth, running at Chicago Shakespeare Theater through September 22. Ticket discounts are available when two or more “Big in Belgium” shows are […]
Edward Albee’s 2002 play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia, hasn’t been performed very often in Chicago. I told my plus-one, rather casually, that it’s a play about a man […]
Dostoyeksky’s Crime and Punishment is a thriller, a slow-paced intellectualized thriller. If you haven’t read the novel since college days, Chris Hannan’s 2013 adaptation—on stage at Shattered Globe Theatre—will […]
Chicago Crime and Sex Trafficking Stories Explode in Monger at Her Story Theater Mary Bonnett’s play Monger: The Awakening of J.B. Benton tells a complicated Chicago crime story with several […]
If you’re familiar with the concept of a bottle episode of a TV show, you might also know how notoriously difficult they can be for writers. Bottle episodes keep a […]
The Holocaust. Armenia. Cambodia. Darfur. Bosnia. Rwanda. South Sudan. Native Americans. Rohingya. Whether or not you had family or ancestors in those hellish genocides, you may find it hard to […]
I read a lot of short stories, of varied styles and themes. I like the stories of George Saunders, Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick and Hilary Mantel, among others. But […]
Holding the Man Dramatizes True Story of Australian Actor’s Life With HIV Holding the Man, based on Timothy Conigrave’s memoir of the same name, tells the heartbreaking life story of the Australian […]
Based on the synopsis alone—a housewife discovers she has a talent for solving jigsaw puzzles and enters a competition—you’d be forgiven for thinking that Puzzle, directed by Marc Turtletaub, is a […]
Every once in a while you get to see a work of theater that seems as if it could reinvent the form. Manual Cinema is a Chicago-based company that has […]