City Lit Theater Archives - Chicago Reader

The set is a 1950s kitchen, with a yellow linoleum table and red-and-white checked floor tiles. A woman in a yellow dress is in the foreground with a blindfold on. It appears to be a game of blind man's bluff. Another woman in a black-and-white checked dress stands right behind her. A man in a white shirt and blue-green tie is on the right, pointing to the blindfolded woman. Another man stands in the left corner. In the center rear behind the table is a man in a brown bathrobe. Visible above his head is a banner hanging from a door way reading "Happy Birthday."

Don’t miss this Birthday Party

by Kelly Kleiman January 27, 2023January 27, 2023

If you were concerned that Chicago’s storefront theaters lost their mojo during the pandemic, get thee to Terry McCabe’s gripping production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. It’s a meta-accomplishment: not a false note in this version of a play that’s entirely about false notes. Pinter’s breakthrough piece (albeit a flop at the time), […]

Theater Review

Villainy and vindication

by Albert Williams November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

Every superhero saga needs a villain, and Mark Pracht’s new play The Mark of Kane—an origin story for the comic-book character Batman—provides one in the figure of Bob Kane. In Pracht’s account, Kane was an ambitious freelance illustrator who, in 1939, came up with the concept of a crime-fighting vigilante who could fly with the […]

Close-up of Mark Pracht. He is a white man with short dark hair and blue eyes. He is wearing a black leather jacket and has a silver hoop earring in one ear.

Arts & Culture

Blame it on Kane

by Josh Flanders October 27, 2022October 31, 2022

I first met Batman battling villains from the Hall of Justice with the other Super Friends, part of the Saturday morning cartoon lineup of the 1970s, and soon afterward I caught the campy reruns of the 1960s live-action TV show. This led me to scour my brother Aaron’s Bronze Age collection of DC Comics, the […]

Four actors in dressing gowns and pajamas are in the foreground (one woman standing on the left, two men on either side of a sofa, with a woman between them). Behind them are four other people (two women, two men) in casual clothing of the 1920s.

Theater Review

Cool Kids vs. Normies

by Kelly Kleiman September 8, 2022September 8, 2022

If you didn’t know that Noël Coward was an actor as well as a playwright, you’d figure it out within minutes of seeing any of his plays: how else to account for the nearly limitless opportunities they provide for chewing the scenery? Entering fully into the Cowardly spirit, director Terry McCabe frees his Hay Fever […]

A pub setting. On the left, a young blonde white woman wearing a yellow apron sits holding a pewter tankard. Behind the bar stand two more young white women. A young dark-haired man in a white shit stands looking upward, his hand extended, as if he's in the middle of telling an exciting story.

Theater Review

A ‘fully flavoured’ Playboy

by Albert Williams July 13, 2022July 13, 2022

“In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple,” wrote Irish playwright John Millington Synge in the preface to his 1907 comedy The Playboy of the Western World. By that standard, Playboy is a very good play—indeed, one of the greatest and most entertaining works in 20th-century English-language […]

A man in blue nurse's scrubs is left. A woman seated, holding a baby wrapped in blankets, sits center. A woman in nurse's scrubs looks over her shoulder on the right.

Theater Review

Special needs

by Kerry Reid April 28, 2022April 27, 2022

Kristine Thatcher’s drama about a couple adopting (or not adopting, as it turns out) a child born with profound disabilities kickstarted Thatcher’s profile as a playwright in its 1996 Victory Gardens premiere. It’s back at City Lit, once again under Terry McCabe’s direction. And while some parts don’t hold up well, the production builds to […]

A puppet horse on the left, with a cowboy standing right

Theater Review

City Lit stages the OG of Westerns

by Albert Williams January 19, 2022January 19, 2022

City Lit’s original stage adaptation of Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian focuses on the experience of two easterners adjusting to the rough-and-ready way of life in pre-statehood Wyoming in the 1880s. One is “The Virginian” (he has no other name), the foreman on a ranch owned by a wealthy cattle baron. The other is […]

Conference table surrounded by women in men's suits

Theater Review

Thirteen Days that shook the world

by Max Maller September 24, 2021September 24, 2021

There are different schools of thought on how the world avoided its own destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The case put forward in Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s memoir Thirteen Days (published posthumously in 1969), the basis for this original adaptation for the stage by Brian Pastor, is unambiguous. After an […]