Christian Gray Archives - Chicago Reader

Two men and a woman, all dressed in elegant 1920s evening wear, are onstage. On the left, a man holds a martin glass while perched on a sofa, where a woman in a white dress and black accessories is seated. Behind the couch another man is crouched in a furtive position, as if spying on the other two.

Manservant and manchild

by Kerry Reid November 9, 2022November 9, 2022

Fourteen years ago, First Folio Theatre presented Jeeves Intervenes, the first in what would prove to be a reliably crowd-pleasing series of adaptations by Margaret Raether of P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves and Bertie” stories. (Jeeves Saves the Day was the last show the company presented before the COVID-19 shutdown.) So it makes sense that they’d kick […]

Christian Gray as Edgar Allan Poe in foreground, two shadowy figures of women in the background

Theater Review

Poe finds a Pleasant Home in Oak Park

by Jack Helbig October 21, 2021October 21, 2021

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 […]