Bug starts out like a Sam Shepard play. Two lost souls in a seedy Oklahoma motel room. Fools for love. Agnes (Carrie Coon) is a waitress who’s dreading her ex-husband’s […]
There is dancing in Dance Nation, now at Steppenwolf Theatre. It’s sometimes clumsy, sometimes graceful, and generally amateurish. Clare Barron’s play is about a crew of 13-year-old girls (and a […]
Chicago and Durban, South Africa, have been Sister Cities since 1997, and spiritual siblings for far longer, as explored in the joyful world premiere of Lindiwe, written by Eric Simonson, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]