Close quarters, minuscule budgets, and structural limitations can work wonders when it comes to creating intimacy and forcing invention.
Author Archives: Zac Thompson
Posted inArts & Culture
In Long Day’s Journey Into Night there’s darkness at the end of the tunnel
Eugene O’Neill’s family tragedy Long Day’s Journey Into Night gets a true-to-life staging at Court Theatre.
Posted inArts & Culture
How Chicago theater artists are diversifying the city’s stages
Efforts are underway to make Chicago’s theater less uniformly white, thin, able-bodied, and gender-conforming.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Goodman’s 2666: Epic, eerie, and ultimately unfathomable
Roberto Bolaño’s sprawling novel becomes a phantasmagoric five-and-a-half-hour ride.
Posted inArts & Culture
Steppenwolf’s Domesticated is a battle tooth and claw
Bruce Norris’s dark comedy looks at the aftermath of a political sex scandal.
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Victory Gardens’ Sucker Punch is a KO
Dexter Bullard directs British playwright Roy Williams’s drama about two black London boxers.
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The Chicago Fringe Festival: Satire! Burlesque! Nonsense!
A critical guide to the 2015 Chicago Fringe Festival
Posted inArts & Culture
Post-PJ Paparelli, ATC goes bold with Fulfillment, provocateur playwright Thomas Bradshaw’s latest
American Theater Company suffered a major loss in May, when artistic director PJ Paparelli died at age 40 after a car accident in Scotland, just weeks after the opening of The Project(s), his acclaimed documentary-theater piece about public housing in Chicago. ATC is dedicating its 2015—’16 season to the writer-director’s legacy, but don’t expect a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Making art out of Hurricane Katrina’s suffering
Ten years after the disaster in New Orleans, true stories of survival fill a pair of Chicago productions.
Posted inArts & Culture
The multimedia Assassination Theater argues that a Chicago crook killed JFK
Former investigative reporter Hillel Levin makes a case for the return of the grassy knoll.
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best test of the structural soundness of audience members’ backsides
All Our Tragic The day before I saw the Hypocrites’ loose adaptation of all 32 surviving Greek tragedies, I flew back to Chicago from a vacation in Austria. The flight lasted nine hours, the show 12. But although it took significantly more time to get through than it takes to cross the Atlantic, All Our […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lookingglass Theatre moves Moby-Dick from sea to sky
Lookingglass Theatre’s dazzling new staging of Moby-Dick uses aerial acrobatics to buoy Melville’s masterpiece.
Posted inArts & Culture
Second City E.T.C. brings us the happiest measles outbreak on earth
The Second E.T.C. revue Soul Brother, Where Art Thou? has plenty of poignance and pointed commentary to go with the yuks.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Hammer Trinity is a nine-hour fantasy epic that feels surprisingly short
The House Theatre of Chicago’s fantasy epic The Hammer Trinity is thrilling and thought-provoking—even if you don’t like fantasy.
Posted inArts & Culture
In the Hypocrites’ Endgame, the cosmic void crashes a kid’s birthday party
The cosmic void crashes a kid’s birthday party in the Hypocrites’ incongruously cutesified staging of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.