The Great Leap is an homage to basketball and to playwright Lauren Yee’s father—and also connects to Chinese history and politics and the country’s competitiveness with the West. Yee’s latest play is now […]
Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater is a book you can enjoy in two ways. You can read it from beginning to end, as you would any narrative of fiction or […]
The play that launched Chicago’s lauded ensemble returns to the substantially larger stage for the first time since 1982. Sam Shepard’s True West propelled the Highland Park High School and Illinois State […]
Chicago had a candidate in the ring during the 1992 presidential election. Ms. Joan Jett Blakk ran for the Democratic nomination that year. What? You don’t remember her? She won zero votes […]
There are no children in Lucy Kirkwood’s play, The Children. The play’s storyline is built on “the disaster,” which we don’t learn the nature of immediately. The disaster was an explosion at a […]
To fully understand this witty and nuanced play, one must know that it is a sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s original A Doll’s House, which was written and set at the end of […]
This isn’t a “best theater of 2018” list. We didn’t see everything. Most of our writers are freelancers, all with other gigs, and it’s hard for us to cover the hundreds of […]
Pink crosses spread across the front of the stage. Many of them are marked “Desconocida” (unknown). Unmarked graves of young women who wanted to better their lives by working in the new […]
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 […]
What makes one a victim? And what moral superiority does a victim have over their aggressor? When is one’s humanity lost, and what qualifications, if any, are there to getting it back? […]
Search the Chicago theater listings far and wide this summer and you will find very few productions with two 50-something women at the center of the production, if any (and no, Cher […]
Amy Morton, the legendary Steppenwolf Ensemble member known for her work as both actor and director, brings her staging of Rajiv Joseph’s off-Broadway smash hit to Chicago, complete with original cast members […]
