Brett Neveu Archives - Chicago Reader

An older white woman clutching a beer bottle stands left in the foreground. Behind her are two younger women, also holding beer bottles. The set looks like a service alley behind a mall.

Revolution offers small revelations

by Kerry Reid September 21, 2023September 21, 2023

Chicago playwright Brett Neveu is so good at writing about the darker side of life (as in his 2002 play Eric LaRue, now a film directed by Michael Shannon, his fellow ensemble member at A Red Orchid Theatre) that it’s hard to remember how flat-out hilarious he can be. If you need proof, look no […]

Danny Goldring is pictured standing outside a locked gate in an alleyway, posed as if he's trying to unlock it. He has reddish hair and a mustache, and wears a dark suit with a light shirt and maroon tie.

Performing Arts Feature

Remembering Danny Goldring

by Kerry Reid December 12, 2022December 16, 2022

When news broke over a week ago that Danny Goldring had died at 76, there was (as is often the case these days) an immediate outpouring of tributes on social media. I learned the news from Chicago actor Gary Houston; I sometimes met Goldring and his wife, actor Diane Dorsey, over the years at parties […]

Seven actors and a puppet figure stand behind a vinyl curtain, dimly lit in blue light.

Theater Review

Seeing the crab

by Kerry Reid October 20, 2022October 21, 2022

Six weeks after my mother died of colon cancer in 2008 (which was almost eight years after my dad died of lung cancer), my sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which would take her life six and a half years later. The day my sister died, my other sister’s mother-in-law fell down the basement stairs […]

Photo of Brett Neveu, who is a middle-aged white man with short brown hair. He is shown from mid-chest up, wearing a black shirt unbuttoned at the neck.

Ghost Light

Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue will hit the big screen with some help from a friend

by Kerry Reid July 14, 2022July 15, 2022

Twenty years later, I still get chills when I think about the final line in Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue, his drama about the aftermath of a school shooting, in which the mother of a teenage boy who killed three of his classmates tries to come to grips with the monstrous deed. Apparently I’m not the […]

Ghost Light

The Fine Arts theater team makes no little plans

by Kerry Reid August 13, 2021August 18, 2021

Back in the Pleistocene era (that is, 1986), I spent a few months living downtown in the now-gone Herman Crown Center, a Roosevelt University residence hall that also sheltered students from Columbia College Chicago (where I was enrolled) and the School of the Art Institute. (The building was torn down to make room for Roosevelt’s […]

Music

Evanston’s Jason Narducy wields a lifetime of rock power on Split Single’s new Amplificado

by Leor Galil July 6, 2021August 18, 2021

Split Single front man Jason Narducy can mold a bit of guitar distortion and a sweet melody into a lifeline. On “Bitten by the Sound,” a standout on Split Single’s new third album, Amplificado (Inside Outside), Narducy’s sheer but ironclad guitar embodies the white-hot energy of rock, which has mystified him since childhood. As a […]

Carlo Lorenzo García in A Portrait of My Mother

Arts & Culture

Carlo Lorenzo García creates a solo tribute in A Portrait of My Mother

by Kerry Reid May 6, 2021August 18, 2021

The onetime Chicago theatermaker premieres his digital show for Mother’s Day; plus major awards for playwrights and designers and a tribute to Russ Tutterow