After reading the play The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview, about an artist driven to despair due to censorship, by the early 20th century Polish avant-garde writer Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, […]
Green Corridors focuses on the stories of four Ukrainian women and other citizens trying to escape the brutality of Russian attacks on Ukraine in the war that Russia started in […]
It’s a Swiss town full of writers, where everyone is obsessed with getting published and winning a new literary prize. A Publisher arrives, eager to find new works to be […]
Amiri Baraka was still LeRoi Jones when he wrote Dutchman in 1964. The play, now being staged by Trap Door Theatre, is an early dialogue on race, class and power. […]
The new production of The Mannequins’ Ball at Trap Door Theatre is a whole lot of 1930s agitprop choreographed with music, singing and dancing. Nicole Weisner and Miguel Long direct 90 minutes […]
The production is a visual spectacle. Ten actors in colorful, period costumes and stylized makeup perform on the tiny stage, which is tricked out with a more elaborate set design […]
Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, is the greatest anti-war play of all time. Anti-war, anti-government and anti-capitalism, as we learn in the opening scene of this stirring […]
Two old friends, their bonds apparently fractured by despair at a collapsing world or something else entirely, meet again. One is artistic and the other is a practical man, a […]
Bowie in Warsaw isn’t really a play for David Bowie fans but it is an example of Trap Door Theatre’s ability to stage the work of Eastern European playwrights with Chicago […]
Joan and the Fire, Trap Door Theatre’s latest production, by Romanian playwright Matei Vișniec, takes us back to the Middle Ages to argue about history. The story is told by an […]
Princess Ivona inspires Trap Door Theatre to show us what it does best: Take a clever script and turn it into a carnival with exaggerated style and physical performance, while […]
I always get to shows early. I consider that to be a virtue and also very helpful in getting the vibe of a place. My early arrival habit paid off […]