Oak Park Festival Theatre was one of the first companies back to live performance this year after the COVID-19 shutdown with their production of The Tempest, staged in their longtime outdoor home at Austin Gardens. They weathered that storm, only to suffer a fire on November 23 at their offices in downtown Oak Park, located […]
Tag: Bryan Wakefield
Posted inTheater Review
Poe finds a Pleasant Home in Oak Park
Given the choice of presenting an evening of Edgar Allan Poe’s better known stories and poetry (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven”) and writing a play about the tormented alcoholic author and his obsessive pre- and post-mortem love for his first cousin/child bride Virginia, David Rice did both, weaving together dramatic readings of Poe’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Much Ado About Nothing needs something more
Beatrice and Benedick are better apart than together in Oak Park Festival’s production.
Posted inArts & Culture
Organic Theater takes a bold stab at The Memo, Václav Havel’s absurdist satire
Bureaucracy, sweet bureaucracy!
Posted inArts & Culture
The power of Walt Whitman brings two high school students together in I & You
They sound their barbaric yawp through the living room.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Revolutionists undermines its own powerful message with too much cutesiness
But Olympe de Gouges and the other women of the French Revolution are worth knowing.
Posted inArts & Culture
Pilgrims, The Water Children, and six more new stage shows to see (or avoid)
A world premiere at Gift Theatre and a play about abortion are among this week’s notable plays.