When Chicago poet, sculptor, and musician Marvin Tate was in elementary school, he had a terrible stutter. To help him, his older sister gave him a poem to practice reading aloud. The poem was “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. That’s the one that begins with “We real cool. We/Left school.” and ends with “We/Jazz […]
Category: Theater Preview
Posted inArts & Culture
A Black perspective on the French Revolution
Sometimes to understand the present, we must look at the past. In 2017, playwright Terry Guest grappled with how America could elect someone so outwardly racist as Donald Trump. It shocked him into questioning what could be done about the rise of fascism in the U.S. “Do we protest? Does that work?” Guest asked himself. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Porchlight puts Passing Strange in the spotlight
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 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘Afong Moy was a real person’
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 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A provocative ad stirs debate about abortion in Natalie Moore’s new play
In The Billboard, Moore explores the nuances of abortion through intraracial lens in the face of threats from a political gadfly.
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
Ginger Minj is who she is
For six years, Ginger Minj has been turning down offers to star in La Cage aux Folles. “Ever since the Trailblazer Awards I’ve been getting inquiries,” the three-time Drag Race contestant says of the 2016 event where she brought La Cage book writer Harvey Fierstein to tears and the house to its feet with her galvanic […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
How the hell did Lesley Nicol get to Chicago?
Most Americans know British actor Lesley Nicol as Mrs. Patmore, the plainspoken cook who presided over the kitchen at Downton Abbey through six seasons and two films. (The newest film in the series, Downton Abbey: A New Era, opens in May.) But before finding international success as the downstairs doyenne in Julian Fellowes’s portrait of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Decisions, demons, and doom
While many of us (perhaps too optimistically) planned to complete any number of creative projects over the course of pandemic isolation parts one, two, or—dare I say it—three, 300 Chicago-area high school students managed to write and submit one-act plays to Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s 35th Annual Young Playwrights Festival. And three of those students—Laylah Freeman […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The lost girl
J.M. Barrie’s most famous creation has become shorthand for all puckish men-children who refuse to grow up, entranced by a world of adventure and derring-do, where good and evil exist on an uncomplicated binary. But while Peter Pan and his fellow Lost Boys have found life in numerous adaptations since Barrie first introduced the character […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The real stories of a queer SWANA family
Tucked into the corner of an expansive artist studio that he rents in Edgewater with 13 other creative friends, Martin Yousif Zebari spent the latter half of 2020 sewing and writing. When he wasn’t designing and constructing “entire gaudy outfits” for himself or hooded scarves for his friends, he managed to write his first full-length […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Remembering Jan Karski
In this fraught time of political divisions and worldwide calamities, in the face of seemingly impossible odds, how can we find the courage and conviction to stand up for what is right? From November 3-14 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated actor David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck, Nomadland, Lincoln) […]
Posted inTheater Preview
Ghost trusters
It doesn’t matter where you are in Chicago. There are dead people somewhere in the ground below you. The millions of Indigenous peoples that flourished for millennia. The countless millions who trampled in next. And next. And next. All those bodies. All that energy. All those stories. Chicago is literally steeped in them. And in […]
Posted inTheater Preview
October ushers in bride of Frankenstein story at First Folio
Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier is a maker of monsters, a horror artist who retells classic tales with an emphasis on what makes these constructs human. First Folio Theatre, which has produced five of Zettelmaier’s plays in the past (including horror tales The Man-Beast, The Gravedigger, and Dr. Seward’s Dracula, along with two non-horror pieces, Salvage and […]
Posted inTheater Preview
Moving through the violence in Othello
A year and a half after the stage went dark, Court Theatre presents its first live performance since the world was plagued with pandemic and the country with civil unrest. The chosen play is Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, which places racial discrimination, misogyny, toxic masculinity, and all the ills not […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Destinos showcases local and international theater companies
By definition, futurology is the study of current trends, the findings of which can be used to forecast future developments. It’s also a schema that applies perfectly to this current, uncertain era of Chicago theater, and one that is the driving ethos behind Teatro Vista’s 30th season, the first to be helmed by the company’s […]