Posted inArts & Culture

Murder, she sang

The last episode of Murder, She Wrote aired on May 19, 1996. Yet, 27 years later, the Internet bristles with fan sites. There’s Murder, She Watched, and two rival sites that both use the name Murder, She Blogged (though one of those is actually a site about true crime, not the television series).  And on […]

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Building hope with Free Street

Free Street Theater has been making theater in Chicago, connecting communities through art, since 1969. They do itinerant touring work across the city, creating accessible, inclusive, and transformational performances that seek connections between different issues facing Chicago communities. Their newest performance, There Is a Future/Tenemos un Futuro (TIAF), is an outdoor show directed by Elizabeth […]

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Port of Entry creates a home for immigrant stories

In 2016, Albany Park Theater Project took over the closed Saint Hyacinth Basilica School in Logan Square and transformed it into the fictional Ellen Gates Starr High School for their ambitious (and hugely successful) immersive ambulatory production, Learning Curve. That show took audiences throughout the school—from classrooms to bathrooms—and deep into the experience of being […]

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CLATA launches an incubator for new Latine voices

Through theater, we can experience a variety of perspectives, while examining dialogue, monologue, and characters that allow us to reflect, learn, and connect. The Chicago Latino Theater Alliance (CLATA) is an organization that helps foment this idea by supporting Latine theater through rich storytelling locally and worldwide with theater projects like Destinos: Chicago International Latino […]

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Subconscious romance

“What is it like to be a character in a dream?,” asks the protagonist of Waking Life (2001), Richard Linklater’s first stab at rotoscope animation. The question lies at the heart of clown, mime, and musician Marvin Quijada’s The Dream King, Teatro Vista’s new production codirected by ensemble member Sandra Marquez and Physical Theater Festival […]

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London Road centers voices of survivors

British imports are common enough on Chicago’s stages. The plays of Simon Stephens regularly appear at storefront theaters; Court Theatre will revive Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead next season; and Six continues its Broadway reign following its 2019 North American premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But it’s safe to say that Chicago audiences […]

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Tales of our nights

There’s a tranquil moment of healing in act two, when a teary-eyed Marwa turns to their older brother Yousif and pleads, “I don’t want 17 years to pass.” That instant captures the heartbeat of Layalina (lay-ali-na), a new play at the Goodman that aims to remind us what family can truly mean at best.  Layalina […]

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Medical racism

In 1932, Green Adair was one of 399 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, just east of Montgomery, who tested positive for “bad blood.” He and over 600 other Black men were deceived by the U.S. Public Health Service and enlisted to participate in a study originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the […]

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Collected stories

When Sharon Evans started producing solo work at Live Bait Theater in the late 1980s, storytelling hadn’t yet become a cottage industry in Chicago. “At that time it was a very unusual thing to do,” Evans says. “I remember being told that no one would pay to see a solo performer on an extended run.”  […]

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The science of playwriting

Lucas Bigos was not a theater kid in high school—never in drama club, never in the school play. But something clicked his senior year at Lane Tech. That’s when he took a theater class at his high school to satisfy an elective requirement. A year later, the non-theater kid, currently a first-year student in computer […]