Drama Archives - Chicago Reader

A dozen actors (nine Black, three white) stand in a line onstage n front of a huge American flag, hung facing downward. The set is a wooden barracks, and the cots are also draped in the American flag. The three men in front are in officers' dress khakis. The men in the rear are in regular army green fatigues.

Army tragedy

by Kerry Reid April 6, 2023April 6, 2023

Though it premiered in 1981 with the Negro Ensemble Company, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and was subsequently turned into the well-received 1984 film A Soldier’s Story, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play didn’t get a Broadway production until nearly 40 years after it first appeared. Fuller, who died in October 2022 at 83, […]

We see what appears to be an apartment setting, with four people. There is a man on the far left, bald with a dark beard, who is wearing an athletic shirt and blue jeans. He is looking down at a bottle of what looks like whiskey. Next to him is another man with long dark hair, wearing a T-shirt and some kind of cardigan. In the foreground are two women. At the far right is a woman seated on a couch. She has reddish hair pulled into a ponytail and wears a white T-shirt and jeans. Standing on the left of the couch is another woman, who also has light-colored hair pulled into a ponytail. She wears a short-sleeved blue knit sweater, a blue denim miniskirt, and pattered tights. She is looking out and holds a multicolored backpack in one hand.

Theater Review

Too soon?

by Marissa Oberlander April 5, 2023April 5, 2023

It feels early to stage a play set during, and concerning the effects of, the early days of COVID-19 on its characters. We can still feel those days intimately, given the short passing of time, and the degree of veracity required to make this a world we want to and can meaningfully revisit is high. […]

A couple standing looking at each other warmly. The setting appears to be a hallway in an apartment building. There is a mirror behind them and a door with an "EXIT" sign to the left. The man is wearing a dark leather coat and a dark woolen hat with a red-and-black plaid scarf. The woman has her dark hair pulled into a ponytail and is wearing a tan tank top and a brown cardigan.

Theater Review

Cultural storms

by Boutayna Chokrane April 5, 2023April 6, 2023

A production with a promising premise is especially disappointing when it falls short. Unfortunately, that’s the case with Uprising Theater’s Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play. Amidst the chaos of a category three hurricane and the COVID-19 pandemic, exes Waleed (Kal Naga) and Sarah (Maren Rosenberg) find themselves isolated in an Airbnb. Sarah, a white woman, […]

At left is a figure in a white costume representing a stork. The mask looks a little like one worn by a "plague doctor." At right is a Black woman in a blue top, patterned yoga pants, and a long gray cardigan. She is holding a glass and looking at the stork creature with a mix of fear and confusion.

Theater Review

A perfect nightmare

by Amanda Finn March 30, 2023March 30, 2023

Like the people in the allegorical Tower of Babel, the citizens of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s futuristic Babel are seeking oneness. The kind of oneness that mankind has never reasonably come close to, because each person is born with a set of characteristics, skills, and behaviors—unless we engage in eugenics. In an eerily not-so-distant-seeming future, Goldfinger’s world […]

Two Black men stand facing each other in what looks like a wooden cabin set with rough wooden plank walls. The man on the left is bald, wearing dark trousers, a light shirt, and a dark vest. The man on the right is wearing overalls and a plaid shirt. Both are bearded. They look as if they are caught mid-laugh. The man on the left is holding what looks like a diploma or some sort of certificate. Behind them we also see light green curtains and a set of shelves with various household implements on them. A table with a lace tablecloth and a chair covered in light red patterned upholstery is visible at the lower left.

Theater Review

The pain of history

by Sheri Flanders March 23, 2023March 23, 2023

I cannot recommend this play without caveats. At least to Black people. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad play. As a matter of fact, it’s a very good play. It’s clever, well-written, timely, and it makes good use of unusual devices. The quality of the play is not the problem. The problem […]

Kayla Boye, a white woman with dark hair piled on her head, sits at a table in a black slip dress and a pearl necklace. She holds a pair of horn-rimmed glasses in one hand and what appears to be an orange toothbrush in the other. A black plastic garbage bag is on the table in front of her, and a series of lights dangle behind her.

Theater Review

Beckettian summit

by Jack Helbig March 23, 2023March 23, 2023

Dame Peggy Ashcroft considered the role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s notoriously difficult Happy Days a “summit part,” one of those roles, like Hamlet or King Lear, that tests an actor’s mettle and proves her alpha status in the pack. (Ashcroft played Winnie in a 1975 production at the Old Vic Theatre in London.) Chicago […]

Theater Review

Woven tales

by Amanda Finn March 23, 2023March 23, 2023

Hajja Souad’s story, eight decades of life lived, is woven into a narrative of resilience, hope, and the changing tides in Palestine during her long lifetime. Brought to life in the U.S. premiere of The Shroud Maker at Chicago Dramatists by International Voices Project in collaboration with Intercultural Music, Ahmed Masoud’s play about a burial […]

The setting is a family kitchen. Five people are gathered around it, toasting each other with tea glasses. The table is oval, covered with an orange tablecloth. The chairs are yellow. Three younger people are seated. At left is a bearded man with blue jeans and a pink shirt. Next to him is a clean-shaven young man in a black T-shirt and black shirt with vertical pinstripes. On the right is a young person who identifies as nonbinary in the show. They are wearing brown trousers and a teal patterned short-sleeved shirt with green animal slippers on their feet. Standing behind the table on the right is a bald bespectacled older man in a black turtleneck. To his left is a woman also older than those at the table in a short-sleeved white sweater. The feeling is one of joy and celebration.

Theater Review

Loss and joy

by Kerry Reid March 17, 2023March 17, 2023

“The shit we deal with in Baghdad, it doesn’t exist in America,” declares Sahir early in Martin Yousif Zebari’s Layalina, now in a world premiere at the Goodman under Sivan Battat’s direction. The newly minted Assyrian bridegroom is both right and wrong. The devastation of “shock and awe” bombing by American forces (followed by a […]

At left stands Glenn Davis, a bald Black man in a dark gray suit with an insignia pinned to the lape. He is playing Vova, and stands slightly in front and to the side of a very long open file drawer. On the right on the other side of the drawer is Yasen Peyankov as Nikolai. He is an older white man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses, and he wears tan trousers, a white shirt, and a brown cardigan wth the same insignia pinned to it.

Theater Review

The lies of others

by Kerry Reid March 15, 2023August 31, 2023

I’m just going to get the obvious adjective out of the way right now: Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night, now in its local premiere at Steppenwolf under Austin Pendleton’s direction, is definitely Stoppardian. As in much of Tom Stoppard’s work, the story spans decades—1920-2010, to be precise. And also as in Stoppard, an object (in […]

Film

Listen to Women Talking

by Becca James December 23, 2022December 21, 2022

Women Talking asks if you’ll listen. There is, of course, an argument to be made that Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’s critically acclaimed novel is meant to be more seen than heard. After all, the material has been taken from the page and repurposed for the screen. And while it’s understood that any great […]

a woman with short blond hair and a textured purple dress dances at a party

Film

Babylon

by Adam Mullins-Khatib December 22, 2022December 20, 2022

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a classic Hollywood reflection on itself at a pivotal point in its history, chronicling the rise and subsequent fall of a series of characters at different points in the journeys to stardom.

a detective in a blue button-down shirt stands in front of three others

Film

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

by Maxwell Rabb December 22, 2022December 20, 2022

Glass Onion introduces us to the eclectic cast of characters with a puzzling invitation. And I mean that literally.

Four women in white dresses stand together in a group embrace. One of them wears a wreath of flowers in her hair.

Theater Review

A big-hearted Little Women

by Kerry Reid December 21, 2022December 21, 2022

First Folio Theatre planned to produce the world premiere of Heather Chrisler’s adaptation of Little Women back in spring of 2020, but COVID took that production out just as surely as scarlet fever ended Beth March. (Calm down: the book is over 150 years old, so spoiler alerts don’t apply.) Though of course one never […]