British playwright Caryl Churchill is having a bit of a moment this month in Chicago. Court Theatre opens her rarely produced 1983 play, Fen, under the direction of Vanessa Stalling on February 10. And Curious Theatre Branch opens This Is Not a Churchill—four plays inspired by her work—this weekend at the Facility Theatre in Humboldt […]
Category: Ghost Light
Olivia Lilley prepares to move on from Prop
When Olivia Lilley took on the job of artistic director at Prop Thtr (one of the oldest off-Loop theaters in the city) in 2018, her DIY/punk aesthetic seemed like a good fit for taking the company into the next era. Even before assuming the AD role, Lilley had made a mark with site-specific, immersive productions […]
Looking back at some of the best productions and biggest stories of 2022
During 2020, my running joke was that, although there weren’t any plays happening, there was always plenty of drama to report on in Chicago theater. In fall of 2021, we started seeing some theater return, though the season was cut short by last December’s COVID surge. (Not to be confused with the one we’re currently […]
Redtwist names new artistic director
This has been a year of tremendous changes at the top for Chicago theaters, with Susan V. Booth taking over at the Goodman after Bob Falls’s 35 years as artistic director and Braden Abraham, formerly the artistic director for Seattle Rep, poised to take over as AD at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre in February. Cody Estle, […]
Jorge Valdivia takes the reins at Chicago Latino Theater Alliance
The death of Myrna Salazar, cofounder and executive director of the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance (CLATA), in August, a month before the fifth annual Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival kicked off, was a huge blow to the performing arts community, including Jorge Valdivia, who worked closely with Salazar and CLATA in his role as […]
Cody Estle flies north for his career’s Next Act
The very first Ghost Light column I wrote back in summer of 2020, I interviewed Markie Gray, the incoming managing director for Raven Theatre. Gray was hired to work alongside artistic director Cody Estle, who assumed the job in November 2017 from founders (and married couple) Michael Menendian and JoAnn Montemurro. (The board’s decision to […]
Lucky Plush helps two artists deal with their Unfinished Business
Kurt Chiang and Melinda Jean Myers (known to friends as Mindy) have wanted to collaborate for years. But it took a pandemic for the former Neo-Futurist artistic director and the Lucky Plush ensemble member to finally develop a full-length piece together. Unfinished Business, the fruit of that longed-for collaboration (much of it conducted remotely, and […]
Farewell to Eclipse and Underscore
Covering theater in Chicago is sometimes about writing valedictions for companies that have decided it’s time to fold up the tent. In the past couple of weeks, two such announcements came through. Underscore Theatre announced in late September that they were closing permanently. (During the pandemic, the company gave up their storefront rental space at […]
Marissa Lynn Ford takes the wheel at the League of Chicago Theatres
Amid the tidal wave of turnovers at theaters large and small in Chicago the last two years, we also learned this past February that Deb Clapp, the longtime executive director for the League of Chicago Theatres, was stepping away from her job in June. Last week, the League announced her successor: Marissa Lynn Ford, recently […]
Mom, meatballs, and ‘fun monsters’
Back in 2016, I climbed up the narrow stairs at the Den Theatre in Wicker Park to see a young solo performer embody the residents of a memory care center in Dallas. Based on John Michael’s own two-year stint as an activity planner at such a center, Dementia Me took the form of a birthday […]
Laugh Factory prepares to go All In with accessibility in comedy
The very phrase “stand-up comedy” is arguably ableist: even though there are many working comedians who use wheelchairs or who have other disabilities, comedy clubs (like a lot of entertainment venues) still have a ways to go to address issues of accessibility for patrons and performers alike. But Nicholas Dunnigan is hoping to change that […]
Susan V. Booth talks about coming home to the Goodman
The past two years have seen more upheavals and changes in leadership at Chicago theaters than at any time in my memory, exacerbated by the long COVID-19 shutdown. So perhaps it makes sense that Goodman Theatre went back to the future, so to speak, by announcing Susan V. Booth as their new artistic director late […]
Mudlark expands its community outreach
The last time I checked in with Evanston’s youth-oriented Mudlark Theater in April 2020, they were in the midst of pivoting to online workshops and creating digital shows. The company has returned to live classes and performances since then. And now, with the help of two grants, they’re poised to further expand their focus on […]
Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue will hit the big screen with some help from a friend
Twenty years later, I still get chills when I think about the final line in Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue, his drama about the aftermath of a school shooting, in which the mother of a teenage boy who killed three of his classmates tries to come to grips with the monstrous deed. Apparently I’m not the […]
Swinging for the Fences with Monty Cole
In 2016, Monty Cole made his directorial debut in Chicago with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at now-defunct Oracle Productions—and what a debut it was. His staging of the story of Yank, a swaggering stoker on a steamship who is ultimately destroyed by a society that sees him only as a brute, brought together a […]