Theater Preview Archives - Chicago Reader

Five women in 1950s dresses stand behind a table filled with quiche dishes. They have looks of ecstasy on their faces.

Setting the stage for queer stories

by Matt Simonette September 20, 2023September 27, 2023

One of Chicago’s greatest treasures for its LGBTQ+ community and its allies is the city’s queer theater scene. As the 2023–24 season kicks in, there will be no shortage of queer stories playing out on Chicago’s stages. Uptown-based LGBTQ+ theater stalwart PrideArts got an early start, kicking off its fall season back in August with […]

Seven play scripts are fanned out cover up on a round table. Another book entitled Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance is positioned below the plays.

Arts & Culture

A dramatic top ten for fall

by The staff of the Understudy September 6, 2023September 25, 2023

Since opening in March 2023, Andersonville’s Understudy bookstore and cafe has stayed busy by offering a robust selection of theater-related titles, coffee, pastries, and public programming. With the fall theater season about to kick into high gear, we asked the staff what they’ve been reading lately. The UnderstudyMon-Thu 7 AM-6 PM, Fri-Sun 7 AM-7 PM, […]

Close-up of actor parodying Jessica Fletcher, with a magnifying glass held very close to one eye. An elegant high-rise apartment living room is in the background.

Arts & Culture

Murder, she sang

by Jack Helbig August 1, 2023August 1, 2023

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 […]

A group of actors stand in a group holding cardboard props. The one in the center is of a bag of money with sinister eyes.

Arts & Culture

Building hope with Free Street

by Sandra Treviño July 26, 2023July 26, 2023

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 […]

Interior kitchen set with white stove, brown wooden cabinets, and dark countertops.

Arts & Culture

Port of Entry creates a home for immigrant stories

by Kerry Reid June 28, 2023July 5, 2023

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 […]

A composite of four headshots, with two men on the left and two women on the right.

Arts & Culture

CLATA launches an incubator for new Latine voices

by Sandra Treviño May 31, 2023May 31, 2023

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 […]

A group of people seated at a table with scripts in hand. At center are Matthew C. Yee, an Asian American man, and to the right is Aurora Adachi-Winter, an Asian American woman.

Arts & Culture

In Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon, renegade lovers are on the lam

by Jack Helbig May 17, 2023May 17, 2023

Actor, writer, composer, musician, lyricist, visual artist, short film director, and stop-motion animator Matthew C. Yee is no still water. But he does run deep. Yee is currently playing the lead male in Lookingglass Theatre’s Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon, a country-and-western musical about an Asian American couple on the lam from the law. He also […]

A man on a bed covered with a white blanket reaches a hand upward to a starry sky.

Arts & Culture

Subconscious romance

by Alejandro A. Riera May 11, 2023May 11, 2023

“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 […]

A group of six women of various ages and races are seated together on the floor photographed from above.

Arts & Culture

London Road centers voices of survivors

by Emily McClanathan April 19, 2023April 19, 2023

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 […]

Three SWANA actors are seen sitting together on a couch in a living room set. At left is a man with brown hair and beard, wearing a blue patterned sweater and jeans. He is looking at the other two, his arm stretched out before him. A young woman with short dark hair, wearing khakis and a green flowered shirt, sits center. On the right is another young man with brown hair, no beard, wearing a gray hoodie. He is smiling. The young woman is looking in his direction.

Arts & Culture

Tales of our nights

by Boutayna Chokrane March 8, 2023March 8, 2023

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 […]

A group of Black people seated around a long rehearsal table. There are scripts and water bottles scattered about. Several of them are masked. In the near foreground, a woman with close-trimmed blonde hair, wearing a green sweater and gold hoop earrings, with her hand held in front of her, appears to have just been making a point.

Arts & Culture

Medical racism

by Dilpreet Raju March 8, 2023March 8, 2023

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 […]

Arts & Culture

Nobody knows the Troubles they’ve seen

by Jack Helbig February 22, 2023March 10, 2023

There are not many names more Irish than Shannon O’Neill. “I’m like the John Smith of Ireland,” O’Neill quips. So it only makes sense that the sixth-generation Irish American (whose people fled the Emerald Isle in the 1840s during the potato famine) “fell in love with being Irish at a very early age.” As a […]

Arts & Culture

Collected stories

by Kerry Reid January 10, 2023January 10, 2023

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.” […]

Three young men (Elliott Valadez, Lucas Bigos and Jonathan Soco) are seated in a wood-paneled room. Behind them is a poster for the Young Playwrights Festival. Valadez is on the left. He is wearing a black T-shirt with anime figures on it and a blue flannel long-sleeved shirt. Lucas Bigos is in the center, wearing a red T-shirt wth the image of an eagle on it. He also wears eyeglasses. Jonathan Soco is on the right, wearing a dark blue dress shirt, also with glasses.

Arts & Culture

The science of playwriting

by Jack Helbig January 4, 2023January 4, 2023

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 […]

Three actors who are all transgender or gender nonconforming are photographed in front of a brick wall. On the left is Luke Halpern, wearing a red leather skirt and a black turtleneck. They have curly lightish brown hair and facial hair. Center and slightly forward is Alec Phan in a paisley patterned shirt, with a white undershirt visible beneath. They also wear blue-framed glasses and a beaded necklace and are clean shaven. At right is Crystal Claros, wearing black-and-white plaid trousers, a white T-shirt, and a denim jacket. They have short black hair

Arts & Culture

‘Queer joy and success as revolution’

by Karen Topham January 3, 2023January 3, 2023

Jonathan Larson is well-known as the playwright of the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent, but that powerful musical about struggling artists affected by the out-of-control AIDS epidemic in New York’s Alphabet City was not his only contribution to the genre. The playwright, who never even saw one of his own plays produced—he died […]