Sometimes the topic of a play is so big and important, a brief description falls short. Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, now onstage at TimeLine Theatre, lands squarely in […]
Maybe one of the essential hallmarks of truly great art is the way it inspires others to produce creative efforts of their own. And that is nowhere more true than […]
In Quietness at A Red Orchid Theatre asks a lot of its audience, especially an urban liberal (most likely) audience. The play pits feminism against fundamentalist religion. It asks us to believe […]
Playwright Clifford Odets set Waiting for Lefty in 1935, but this one-act classic play about unions has echoes of life in America today. Unions’ battle against big business was illustrated […]
Lights come up on a live broadcast. On the television on the far corner of the small apartment, we witness President Barack Obama announcing that American troops would withdraw from […]
“The truth is, I needed to know I could love someone.” That’s all so many of us want—to love and to feel loved. That can look a number of different […]
Shattered Globe Theatre’s new play, Flood, is about family issues—parents who don’t understand their children, children who never call home, elderly parents who ignore the realities of today’s world. There may […]
Champion is the story of welterweight boxer Emile Griffith’s career in boxing with a life-defining fatal bout in 1962 against Benny “Kid” Paret. I believe that an opera in jazz […]
Puppets have stories to tell. And they tell them in all sorts of fanciful and humanistic ways. The 6th annual Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival has come to an end […]
The 6th Annual International Puppet Theater Festival is under way in Chicago and we have a few brief reviews to whet your appetite for your own puppetry experiences. The festival […]
Get your tickets and grab your seats. On the relatively small stage at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, Porchlight Music Theatre is putting on a big, big show: […]
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 […]