No wings close the expanse of earth that widens the Court Theatre stage to a landscape in Caryl Churchill’s Fen, directed by Vanessa Stalling, with scenic design by Collette Pollard. The terraced land, hemmed in scalloped edges by shining metal borders, looks like the ocean, diminished and immobilized in its crash against the massive concrete […]
Tag: Caryl Churchill
Posted inTheater Review
When a chair is a springboard
Appropriation, wordplay, riffs on news headlines, improv skits, and a grab bag of absurdist tropes get thrown in a hat to very uneven ends in Curious Theatre Branch’s set of four half-hour plays responding to Caryl Churchill’s This Is a Chair. This Is Not a ChurchillThrough 2/25: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, […]
Posted inGhost Light
Caryl Churchill gets some love from Chicago theaters
British playwright Caryl Churchill is having a bit of a moment this month in Chicago. Court Theatre opens her rarely produced 1983 play, Fen, under the direction of Vanessa Stalling on February 10. And Curious Theatre Branch opens This Is Not a Churchill—four plays inspired by her work—this weekend at the Facility Theatre in Humboldt […]
Posted inTheater Review
Riot grrrl witch hunt
The surrealist, sometimes anarchic style of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s prose invites a lot of directorial interpretation and creativity from the theater artists who’ve been drawn to her mesmerizing work for the better half of a century. And yet, I don’t think I’ve witnessed a more seamless marriage of her words and a thematic overlay […]
Posted inGhost Light
Farewell to Eclipse and Underscore
Covering theater in Chicago is sometimes about writing valedictions for companies that have decided it’s time to fold up the tent. In the past couple of weeks, two such announcements came through. Underscore Theatre announced in late September that they were closing permanently. (During the pandemic, the company gave up their storefront rental space at […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Love and Information takes us through the digital looking glass
Trap Door’s production captures the narrative of no narrative in the Internet age.
Posted inArts & Culture
Writers Theatre strips down A Number to its absorbing essentials
Robin Witt’s production takes a somber tone, downplaying the comic turns.
Posted inBlogs
This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic Marilyn Ferdinand about Chocolat and White Material
The first in a series of conversations about the noted French filmmaker, the subject of a monthlong retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center
Posted inArts & Culture
One to watch this fall: Eric Hoff works the corner of justice and art
One to watch this fall: Eric Hoff stages The Skriker at Red Tape Theatre
Posted inArts & Culture
Cloud 9 is so 20th century
Caryl Churchill’s 1979 satire shows its age in a Gift Theatre production
Posted inArts & Culture
A Number
Spare in language and rich in ideas, Caryl Churchill’s 2002 one-act marks her continuing evolution from sprawling examinations of sexual and class politics like Top Girls and Cloud Nine to less overtly political but absolutely chilling portraits of the tangled impulses underlying relationships. Human cloning is the engine driving the play’s plot, but Churchill’s double- […]