Arts & Culture Archives - Page 5 of 2079

Four people in folding chairs onstage enacting the Tea Party. The first two are men in suits with hats, then Alice in a white dress and black-and-white striped stockings, with a man in a pink and white pinafore at the far right. The men all have their hands raised in the air, while Alice looks on with delight.

Chess, circus, and the game of life

by Kimzyn Campbell May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Here is a riddle for you: What do a game of chess and life have in common?* Inside the tidy, rule-driven universe of a chess board, seven-year-old Alice stumbles upon the inexplicable and absurd rules of a new world. Every fledgling chess player will empathize as Alice is met with surprise after surprise in this […]

The cast of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Invictus Theatre, shot slightly from above. Honey is in a green sweater, dancing with a smile on her face, at left. George is standing behind the sofa, arms crossed, wearing a yellow cardigan. Nick is seated on the sofa in a gray suit, looking glum, while Martha, in a low-cut red blouse, sits next to him laughing

Theater Review

Living room absurdism

by Albert Williams May 17, 2022May 17, 2022

It may be difficult to comprehend today just how shocking Edward Albee’s drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was when it premiered in October 1962, the same week that the Cuban missile crisis began. While the atomic fireworks the world feared never happened, Albee’s three-act, three-hour-plus masterpiece detonated an explosion that rocked American culture to […]

Photos of Michael Weber (left), who is a middle-aged white man, and Donterrio (left) who is a younger Black man.

Arts & Culture

Porchlight puts Passing Strange in the spotlight

by Matt Simonette May 16, 2022May 17, 2022

For Chicago-based director Donterrio, the late-00s musical Passing Strange represents a road map for how an artist—no matter the medium in which they create—can live their life. The show’s story of a Black musician’s coming-of-age depicts “what happens once you have this crazy dream as a teenager to be an artist, and this is how […]

Arts & Culture

Loving, repeating, collaborating, and intimacy

by Coco Picard May 16, 2022May 16, 2022

In a new exhibition, longtime collaborators Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger created an immersive multimedia installation that explores intimacy, distance, and the fluctuations between. The above comic captures their reflections on making together and materials in play. Text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability. Our collaboration developed organically. We were both ceramic […]

the front cover of the book "True Biz" by Sara Novic. the words True Biz are on the top of the cover in multicolored bright letters and a drawing of a hand signing is layered on top (in similar colors)

Arts & Culture

True biz? There’s a lot to learn in Sara Nović’s new book.

by Taryn Allen May 16, 2022May 16, 2022

“Eyeth—get it? In the Deaf storytelling tradition, utopia is called Eyeth because it’s a society that centers the eye, not the ear, like here on Earth.” That’s the opener to “Ear vs. Eye: Deaf Mythology,” one of the many brief lessons sprinkled between the chapters of Sara Nović’s realistic fiction novel True Biz, released March […]

curator Ciera McKissick seated in the Arts Incubator gallery on Garfield Boulevard in Chicago

Arts & Culture

Deeper research and a politics of care

by Kerry Cardoza May 13, 2022May 12, 2022

In the summer of 2020, the people of Chicago rose up in support of Black life, with thousands taking part in dozens of actions across the city. That season of uprisings had curator and cultural producer Ciera Alyse McKissick thinking about Black people moving through space: about how Black migration and travel has been a […]

Feature

The Sound Issue

by Chicago Reader May 12, 2022May 25, 2022

An audiologist’s study of over-the-counter hearing aids, a guide to radiator noises, an investigation of ShotSpotter, and much more

Painting of Susan Nussbaum, wearing a red shirt and blue pants, with a colorful shawl over her left shoulder. She is sitting on a balcony with a park and the lake behind her. Various objects float in the sky nearby, including a red pump shoe, a compact with her smiling face reflected, a pencil, a piece of paper, and a burning steering wheel.

Arts & Culture

Susan Nussbaum, 1953-2022

by Mike Ervin May 12, 2022May 12, 2022

Editor’s note: Chicago playwright, novelist, actor, director, and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaum died April 28 of pneumonia at 68. Playwright Mike Ervin, who collaborated with Nussbaum as cowriter on the comedy revue The Plucky and Spunky Show and whose 1999 play, The History of Bowling, was directed by Nussbaum, remembers his friend and mentor. […]

A woman in a sundress stands left, her hands coering her ears. To her right, a man holding a guitar is jumping in the air. They are in front of a wall made of wooden slats, with an open trunk set behind them on the right.

Theater Review

Reunion and regret

by Josh Flanders May 12, 2022May 12, 2022

Like several post-pandemic shows in Chicago, the Artistic Home’s production of The Pavilion, written by Craig Wright and directed by Julian Hester, is about an intimate relationship between two people over time. It is also about the creation of the universe, being tethered to the past, and literally burning down sentimentality. High school sweethearts Peter […]

A kitchen set. A young Black woman in contemporary clothes stands left, with a white woman in 19th-century dress next to her. In the foreground, another white woman in contemporary dress looks offstage.

Theater Review

The bones of grief

by Kerry Reid May 12, 2022May 11, 2022

Laura Schellhardt’s Digging Up Dessa was commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center as part of its Theater for Young Audiences program in 2018. But this play, now in its Chicago premiere with Theatre Above the Law, is like a lot of great YA fiction—relevant to many audiences. Digging Up Dessa Through 5/22: Fri-Sat 8 […]

A Black man in a blue shirt and tan trousers sits on a bar stool. A white woman in ripped black jeans, a black top, and with a yellow-and-plaid flannel shirt wrapped around her waist, sits next to him. They are both looking at a penny the man is holding up. The lighting is blueish, as if in a dimly lit bar.

Theater Review

People who need people

by Kelly Kleiman May 12, 2022May 18, 2022

When everyone on the stage is excellent, it shows a director fully in command of the material. That’s the case with Cody Estle’s production of The Luckiest by Melissa Ross, receiving its Chicago premiere at the Raven Theatre. Plays about a young woman’s disability and impending death always risk straying into Love Story-style bathos, while […]

Three men in formalwear stand in a line carrying a wooden box wrapped with rope. On the right, a woman in a white dress is visible behind a sheet of plastic.

Theater Review

War cries

by Dmitry Samarov May 12, 2022June 5, 2022

A wooden rowboat and plastic sheets lining two back walls are the only decorations for Sarah Tolan-Mee’s English-language adaptation of Heiner Müller’s 1982 cry-of-anguish riff on war, betrayal, and the messiness of identity. Using the Greek legends of Medea and Jason as a jumping-off point, this is a raging, poetic rant against tyranny and fate […]

A group of six is seated around a round table on the left. The floor is inlaid wood. On the right, an older man is lying on a chaise lounge, while a younger man stands next to him, looking concerned.

Theater Review

Steppenwolf’s Seagull opens a lovely new space

by Kerry Reid May 11, 2022May 11, 2022

“Here is a theater. No curtain, no wings, no scenery. Just an empty space.” Konstantin Treplev, the young and hungry artist manqué in Anton Chekhov’s Seagull, intones these words before the disastrous and abortive premiere of his play-within-the-play for his family. But at the Saturday opening of ensemble member Yasen Peyankov’s production at Steppenwolf, it […]

Dance

Light drives the story in TAKE

by Irene Hsiao May 11, 2022May 12, 2022

On an industrial strip of Rockwell just off Elston, beyond a white door with numbers painted in red, past a makeshift bar, through a dark curtain lies a white brick room filled with smoke. Through the haze, folding chairs line each wall, leaving bare an expanse of concrete, above which soar long sheets of white […]

An Asian man in a green jacket, blue trousers, and a black baseball cap sits left next to an Asian woman in black trousers and top with a pink blouse. Her hair is in a ponytail. They are looking at each other quizzically.

Arts & Culture

‘Afong Moy was a real person’

by Irene Hsiao May 11, 2022May 11, 2022

The year was 1834. Indigenous communities were being displaced from their ancestral homelands on the forced march known as the Trail of Tears. Over two million people of African descent were enslaved. And America’s first model minority, Afong Moy, was imported to New York: a 14-year-old girl with bound feet, made to perform for the […]