David Catlin Archives - Chicago Reader

A woman in a short white dress and head covering hangs airborne, one hand clutching a silk rope. To her right and holding her other hand is a man in a dark tunic. His back is to the camera

Quixote goes airborne

by Kimzyn Campbell February 23, 2023February 23, 2023

Circus Quixotic, the winter circus production at The Actors Gymnasium, flips the story of Don Quixote into a modern retelling. Through metaphor and audience asides from the actors, director and adapter duo David and Kerry Catlin condense Miguel de Cervantes’s 1,072-page tome of misadventures into a family-friendly chunk of mayhem featuring the title character and […]

Four people in folding chairs onstage enacting the Tea Party. The first two are men in suits with hats, then Alice in a white dress and black-and-white striped stockings, with a man in a pink and white pinafore at the far right. The men all have their hands raised in the air, while Alice looks on with delight.

Theater Review

Chess, circus, and the game of life

by Kimzyn Campbell May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Here is a riddle for you: What do a game of chess and life have in common?* Inside the tidy, rule-driven universe of a chess board, seven-year-old Alice stumbles upon the inexplicable and absurd rules of a new world. Every fledgling chess player will empathize as Alice is met with surprise after surprise in this […]

A group of six actors in Victorian costume stand in front of a shop model and workbenches, tossing paper snow in the air.

Theater Review

Mr. Dickens’ Hat offers a different spin on a Victorian Christmas

by Kerry Reid December 8, 2021December 8, 2021

In 1865, Charles Dickens, his mistress Ellen Ternan, and her mother were all on a train that derailed in Kent, England. Dickens used his hat to carry water to the survivors (and some that didn’t make it). That grim footnote in history forms the basis for Michael Hollinger’s Mr. Dickens’ Hat, a play with music […]