Drama Archives - Page 3 of 406

Four women in pajamas sit in a circle on the floor of a cabin. There is a piece of cardboard and a box of chalk on the floor between them. A lot of beer cans are visible on the coffee table behind them.

Cabin in the woods

by Katie Powers November 9, 2022November 9, 2022

In Cat McKay’s queer comedy Plaid as Hell, Cass (Reagan James) hopes that a weekend away in the Wisconsin woods will be a fitting opportunity for her best friend Emilie (Cayla Jones) to bond with her new girlfriend Jessica (Ashley Yates)—who Emilie hasn’t been so keen on getting to know, thanks to an unrequited crush […]

A white woman in a sundress stands holding a drink behind a white man wearing a green short-sleeved shirt over a white T-shirt. A crutch leans against him.

Theater Review

Southern secrets and lies

by Matt Simonette November 9, 2022November 9, 2022

Sarah Sapperstein’s Maggie the Cat commands your attention with her act one monologues in MadKap Productions’s mounting of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Skokie Theatre, directed by Steve Scott. Sapperstein’s costars take her energy and roll with it for the entirety of this show, in which a southern family unravels (and […]

An onstage four-piece band. The lead signer is a woman with long hair, dressed in punk/riot grrrl attire.

Theater Review

Riot grrrl witch hunt

by Dan Jakes November 3, 2022November 3, 2022

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 […]

A young Latinx woman in white robe and blue shawl covering her head kneels center stage. On her right, slightly in the shadows, is an older white man in a monk's robe.

Theater Review

You say you want a revolution?

by Kerry Reid November 3, 2022November 4, 2022

When it comes to bold and audacious stagings of Measure for Measure (for my money, the most unpleasant of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”), it’s hard to top Robert Falls’s dark take-no-prisoners 2013 production at the Goodman, which reimagined Vienna as Times Square, circa the late 1970s. (Think David Simon’s The Deuce on HBO.) But Henry Godinez’s […]

A middle-aged white man in a blue suit, bald with a beard, stands left facing right. A middle-aged Black woman in a white shirt and blue jeans is center. She is talking to a young white man in a police uniform, gesturing to the man behind her. There are gray chairs and a side table behind them.

Theater Review

Forced dialogues

by Josh Flanders November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown and directed by Tim Rhoze, now playing at the Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston, opens with a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates that “race is the child of racism, not the father.” The quote carries a powerful truth that encourages the audience to dwell on deeper […]

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 […]

Four girls of various ethnicity and race, dressed in school uniforms, sit cross-legged around a Ouija board.

Theater Review

Miami death trip

by Emily McClanathan November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

Teenagers tend to be reckless, sure, but few would gather in a spooky tree house to summon the spirit of Colombian drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar. But then, most aren’t as hardcore—or foolhardy—as the members of the Dead Leaders Club, a group of private school girls in Miami who dabble with supernatural forces in Our […]

A white man sits on a stool left. His hair is slicked back and he wears a stethoscope around his neck. An older white man is seated on an exam table, wearing a striped shirt, dark trousers, and suspenders

Theater Review

Medicine show

by Kelly Kleiman November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

It’s hard to write a play whose hero is the American Medical Association (AMA), even as embodied by crusading Dr. Morris Fishbein (the appealing Andrew Bosworth) and his equally earnest sidekick (Shawn Smith, without enough to do). The AMA’s erstwhile role as the scourge of quack medicine has been eclipsed by its more recent history […]

Two young Black men sit at a table in a posture of arm wrestling. They appear to be in some sort of conference room or holding area with a large glass window behind them.

Theater Review

Seeking sanctuary in Routes

by Kaylen Ralph October 28, 2022October 28, 2022

Nearly a decade after it debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in 2013, Rachel De-lahay’s Routes has landed at Theater Wit for its American premiere. Presented by Remy Bumppo, Routes is a story of progressively intertwined, mirrored vignettes of two characters and the handful of people who will determine their respective fates. Olufemi (Yao Dogbe) […]

The setting is a nursery school classroom. A white woman in jeans and a long cardigan kneels left, cleaning furniture from a dollhouse. Crouched on the right is a white man with a beard in a flannel shirt. They both wear green rubber gloves.

Theater Review

Adulting and its discontents

by Kerry Reid October 28, 2022October 28, 2022

Though it’s called The Cleanup, Hallie Palladino’s new play, now in a world premiere with Prop Thtr under Jen Poulin’s direction, is all about messiness in the aftermath of the COVID-19 shutdown. Set at a nursery school co-op established by dedicated community mom Julie (Lynnette Li), the play traces the fallout when two of the […]

Two people in a living room. An older woman in a dark dress and pearls stands behind the couch, leaning over an older man in jeans, a flannel shirt, and a baseball cap who is sitting on the couch. We can see a cornfield right behind them.

Theater Review

Unearthing raw passions

by Matt Simonette October 28, 2022October 28, 2022

Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a rural Illinois family beset by delusion and dysfunction is brilliantly brought to life by AstonRep Theatre Company. Alcoholic patriarch Dodge (Jim Morley, who brought to mind Richard Widmark in a stellar performance) is permanently ensconced on the living room couch yelling to his wife, Halie (Liz Cloud). Few […]

Theater Review

Democracy under siege

by Albert Williams October 27, 2022October 27, 2022

Invictus Theatre Company delivers a solid, sometimes stirring, and strikingly relevant rendition of William Shakespeare’s 1599 tragedy. It’s the story of Marcus Brutus (played by Invictus artistic director Charles Askenaizer, who also directed), a well-intentioned aristocrat in the waning days of the ancient Roman Republic, who joins a plot by his fellow senators to assassinate […]

Theater Review

Luminous storytelling

by Jack Helbig October 27, 2022October 27, 2022

Siena Marilyn Ledger’s brand-new two-person play, being produced here with 16th Street Theater and Dragonfly Theatre as part of the National New Play Network rolling world premiere program, is based on a deceptively simple premise. Luna, a quirky and precocious tween whose mother is undergoing cancer treatment, befriends Aaron, another cancer patient, also in the […]

The ensemble of Refuge. In the front from left we see a young Latinx man. IN the center, crouched down, is a young Latinx woman. An older white man stands on the right.

Theater Review

Displacement and determination

by Kelly Kleiman October 27, 2022October 27, 2022

Refuge, the wrenching portrait of a Central American woman’s effort to reach the U.S. receiving its midwest premiere at Theo Ubique, is less a play than a ritual with music enacting displacement, loss, and fear—but also love and the determination to go on. So my not understanding the two-thirds of the dialogue delivered in Spanish […]

The setting is a police station. A young Black woman sits left at a table. She is wearing a plaid shirt and dark trousers. Next to her stands a white woman in all-black clothing. We can see a badge underneath her jacket. A Black woman in a police uniform sits across the table from the younger Black woman. They are all looking toward the right, where a younger white male police officer is standing.

Theater Review

Murder, she wrote

by Kerry Reid October 26, 2022October 26, 2022

Women love true-crime stories—so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite “Murder Show.” Fans of the podcast My Favorite Murder (aka “Murderinos”) are overwhelmingly female. When you’re raised from an early age to think that rape and murder are […]