Kelly Kleiman, author at Chicago Reader

A middle-aged woman sits left at a kitchen table, across from a middle-aged man on the right. She is wearing a full apron. He has his hands on either side of what appears to be an unwrapped birthday present of a fishbowl.

Lighting up the years

by Kelly Kleiman September 21, 2023September 20, 2023

Noah Haidle’s play got absolutely savaged in New York, with the critics’ main objection being that the story of a family over time had already been told in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner. Apparently they’d never heard that there are only seven plots in the world. In any case, I could […]

A bald middle-aged man kneels on the left, holding the hand of a young woman who is crouching on the right.

Theater Review

A superb View

by Kelly Kleiman September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

When it’s directed wrong, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge comes off as a dated melodrama about the unthinkability of incest. Fortunately, director Louis Contey at Shattered Globe understands it’s actually a piece about self-deception leading to self-destruction and thus is as much of a punch in the gut as it was when it […]

Nine performers of various races and genders stand in a line. They are wearing rehearsal clothing.

Theater Review

The love language of dance

by Kelly Kleiman September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

It’s incredibly ambitious for a Chicago company to choose A Chorus Line, because although the city has a strong dance community, it’s not one with a tradition of crossing over into theatrical dance. So director Wayne Mell and choreographer Susan Pritzker have done a creditable job in staging a show that’s all about theatrical dancing. […]

Two women in white dresses stand at a distance from each other at the shore of a lake.

Theater Review

Theatre L’Acadie’s Today Tonight Soon wears out its welcome

by Kelly Kleiman August 22, 2023August 22, 2023

It looks so simple: two people occupy a stage, waiting for something and talking about nothing. But Waiting for Godot works because Samuel Beckett was a genius, and because waiting itself was his subject. Few imitators can make the same claims, and neither holds true for Melanie Coffey’s world premiere with Theatre L’Acadie, Today Tonight Soon. […]

Two people wearing boxing gloves fight in front of a banner for Standard Oil.

Theater Review

Amped-up oligarchy

by Kelly Kleiman August 1, 2023August 1, 2023

It’s not clear that there’s anything funny about the life story or legacy of John D. Rockefeller, which raises the question of Corn Productions’ attraction to the material and goal in presenting it. Unfortunately, although clever bits appear throughout this satirical history lesson, Ryan Stevens’s production of his own play relies on the actors’ shouting […]

Three people onstage. One is playing a guitar while sitting on a bench. The other two are on the right, reclining on the floor and listening.

Theater Review

Elegy for the Age of Aquarius

by Kelly Kleiman June 29, 2023July 19, 2023

Hair is such an icon—profanity and naked people on Broadway, oh my!—that it can be hard to remember it’s an actual play with a plot (Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote the book and lyrics for Galt MacDermot’s score), and even a subplot. Kudos to director Derek Van Barham for focusing on the story of […]

Maria, a Latine woman and Tony, a white man, stand embracing on a fire escape.

Theater Review

A ‘miraculous’ West Side Story

by Kelly Kleiman June 8, 2023June 8, 2023

In most productions of West Side Story (and I’ve seen half a dozen or more), Tony is the weakest link: the character just isn’t as cool as Riff or as sexy as Bernardo. He’s kind of a dork, in fact. But in the Lyric’s remounting of its own 2019 revival of the show, Tony is […]

Five actors stand in front of a walls of cardboard boxes. Four of them are wearing light-blue work shirts and vests, as in a retail store. On the front right is a woman in a light tan cardigan, holding a clipboard and confronting a man who is facing her.

Theater Review

Big-box problems

by Kelly Kleiman May 4, 2023May 4, 2023

If verisimilitude and timeliness were all it took to create a great play, Ken Green’s world premiere comedy-drama about working in big-box retail would be a home run. Its dialogue captures every cliche and bit of doublespeak in the corporate human resources dictionary, not to mention every grouse and plaint ever uttered in a workplace—and […]

A young Black girl sits on a couch holding a stuffed toy. A Black woman sits next to her. She looks like she's telling a story to the child.

Theater Review

The broken double helix of pain

by Kelly Kleiman April 21, 2023April 21, 2023

Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s play is about the limits of love—both in what it can accomplish, even when it feels infinite, and in what it can tolerate before it disappears. Monique (the protean Ayanna Bria Bakari) shows up at her sister’s house with her 11-year-old daughter in tow and an undisclosed agenda. (Daughter Sam is played […]

Five women are seen in a kitchen set. Two are seated at a table, with a younger woman with long brown hair on the left and an older woman with shorter brown hair on the right. The older woman is looking at a cell phone. Two other older women are standing behind her, bending over to look at the phone. The one bending over on the left has long dark hair, the one on the right long blonde hair. At the rear, in front of a stainless steel refrigerator, holding up a glass of white wine and looking skeptical

Theater Review

A mother of a play

by Kelly Kleiman April 14, 2023May 10, 2023

Motherhouse begins with a recently bereaved daughter struggling to write her mother’s eulogy. Her mother’s four sisters arrive to help with the task but instead reenact every unresolved family trauma. (Suffice it to say that the best-adjusted of the sisters is the one estranged from the others by her membership in a cult.) Under the […]

Two lines of performers (three per line) stand onstage. They are dressed in vaguely 19th-century garb, holding up metal drinking mugs Their left legs are all raised akimbo and they are leaning to the right of the photo. They are surrounded by cabaret tables and chairs.

Theater Review

Bed to crime to bed

by Kelly Kleiman March 23, 2023March 23, 2023

Directors have two jobs: to help the audience understand what the play is about and to stage it so the audience can see it. Director Fred Anzevino has failed at both here. The Threepenny Opera is, like most Bertolt Brecht works, a critique of respectability: its antihero Macheath is a charming criminal, while its villains […]

A cast of 17 women and nonbinary performers, dressed in colorful Revolutionry War-era costumes, stands together in front of a red curtain. Some of them are gesticulating, others hold books as if declaiming from them.

Theater Review

Hold the fireworks

by Kelly Kleiman March 2, 2023March 2, 2023

One can imagine what inspired directors Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page to rework this 1960s musical about the Continental Congress. There’s the attraction of doing a piece about the nation’s unification during a period of division, not to mention the appeal of presenting the virtually all-male show with an all-female and nonbinary cast of […]

Two Black men sit on a dark stage. The one on the left is to the rear, wearing a long shirt with vertical green stripes. The man on the right is more forward. He is bald, and wears what looks like a Native American blanket around his shoulders.

Theater Review

Ezekiel’s Wheel is an absorbing fable

by Kelly Kleiman February 15, 2023February 15, 2023

Like most speculative fiction (and every original Star Trek episode), Ezekiel’s Wheel is a fable: a story whose moral applies to circumstances other than those being described. Determining whether that moral is “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” or “You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything,” or even “We have met the enemy […]

The set is a living room and dining room combination. Faded wallpaper on the walls, a wooden arch in the rear, and a staircase on the left. Three men are at a small table in the living room, a bottle of whiskey and glasses in front of them. Two younger men are seated on either side, with an older man standing and talking to them in the middle. At the dining room table, two women are seated. On the right is an older woman with long gray hair wearing a nightgown. A younger woman in a light green dress sits left. Another younger woman in a dark dress stands behind the table between them. All the women are laughing, apparently at the men.

Theater Review

Celtic conflicts

by Kelly Kleiman February 2, 2023February 2, 2023

Ann Noble’s play about an Irish family decompensating after the mother’s death had its premiere in Chicago nearly 30 years ago, and it’s showing its age. There are plots and subplots and Irish-lit tropes like a storytelling session apropos of nothing, but none of these achieves warp, or even tarantella, speed. As the dutiful daughter […]

The set is a 1950s kitchen, with a yellow linoleum table and red-and-white checked floor tiles. A woman in a yellow dress is in the foreground with a blindfold on. It appears to be a game of blind man's bluff. Another woman in a black-and-white checked dress stands right behind her. A man in a white shirt and blue-green tie is on the right, pointing to the blindfolded woman. Another man stands in the left corner. In the center rear behind the table is a man in a brown bathrobe. Visible above his head is a banner hanging from a door way reading "Happy Birthday."

Theater Review

Don’t miss this Birthday Party

by Kelly Kleiman January 27, 2023January 27, 2023

If you were concerned that Chicago’s storefront theaters lost their mojo during the pandemic, get thee to Terry McCabe’s gripping production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. It’s a meta-accomplishment: not a false note in this version of a play that’s entirely about false notes. Pinter’s breakthrough piece (albeit a flop at the time), […]