Review: What Farce Is This? The Artistic Home Lands a Slam Dunk with Malapert Love
I do not amuse easily and when something is touted as farcical, I expect it to be on point. The…
Review: In After the Blast, a Play About Environmental Disaster, a Robot Named Arthur Steals the Show
Zoe Kazan’s play After the Blast is set a few generations in the future—underground. An environmental disaster has made “upstairs” unlivable and…
Review: Broken Nose Theatre Asks If the Cure Can Be Worse Than the Illness in This is Only a Test
I have not heard the air raid sirens in years. In the ’50s through the ’80s an air raid siren…
Review: Artistic Home’s Eurydice Captures Playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Quirky Charm
Orpheus and Eurydice are on the beach—two adorable young lovers. He’s lost in his music and in describing his love…
Review: The Suffrage Plays Celebrate Centennial of Women’s Voting Rights
Tennessee became the 38th state to ratify the 19th amendment on August 18, 1920, the last of the required 36…
Review: Artemisia’s Sweet Texas Reckoning Resolves a Culture Clash a Bit Too Slickly
Sweet Texas Reckoning is a family story set up as a kitchen culture clash. It’s the story of a biracial, same-sex…
Horror is Healing: A Conversation with Hilary Williams of WildClaw Theatre’s Second Skin
Hilary Williams loves horror. In the dim light of the bar at the Den Theatre (where she is performing in…
In Refrigerator at First Floor Theater, We’re Depositing Our Consciousness … Somewhere
Refrigerator is a play about the future. A dystopian future, of course. Playwright Lucas Baisch speculates that some day we will…
Theater Oobleck’s Reality Is an Activity: 90 Delectable Minutes of Poetry and Word Play
Reality Is an Activity is not a typical theatrical production. It’s short on plot and character development. But it’s a symphony…
Haven Theatre’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich: Brecht’s Ghost Warns Us About Fascist Dictatorship
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich can be described as Bertolt Brecht’s ghost arriving to warn us about the…
Firebrand Theatre’s Lizzie Is Delicious Rock-and-Roll Catharsis
Sitting in the audience at the thoroughly impeccable Chicago premiere of Lizzie, it is easy to forget that this production…
The Hypocrites’ Adding Machine Anything But Mediocre
Amidst a cloud of haze and the repeated plunking of a piano key, a nondescript man hunches over his desk, writing…
