First Folio Theatre Archives

The set is a living room and dining room combination. Faded wallpaper on the walls, a wooden arch in the rear, and a staircase on the left. Three men are at a small table in the living room, a bottle of whiskey and glasses in front of them. Two younger men are seated on either side, with an older man standing and talking to them in the middle. At the dining room table, two women are seated. On the right is an older woman with long gray hair wearing a nightgown. A younger woman in a light green dress sits left. Another younger woman in a dark dress stands behind the table between them. All the women are laughing, apparently at the men.

Celtic conflicts

by Kelly Kleiman February 2, 2023February 2, 2023

Ann Noble’s play about an Irish family decompensating after the mother’s death had its premiere in Chicago nearly 30 years ago, and it’s showing its age. There are plots and subplots and Irish-lit tropes like a storytelling session apropos of nothing, but none of these achieves warp, or even tarantella, speed. As the dutiful daughter […]

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 […]

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.

Theater Review

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 […]

A man in a trenchcoat and fedora stands in a doorway, right behind a woman in a purple coat and hat who is also peering around the door.

Theater Review

Secret, but saggy

by Jack Helbig February 2, 2022February 2, 2022

Note to would-be play adapters: Agatha Christie’s second published detective novel, The Secret Adversary (1922), is in public domain. That means you can pretty much do whatever you want with this text, and still call it an “adaptation.” This is pretty much what First Folio executive artistic director David Rice does here. Extremely loosely based […]

White woman, Asian woman, and Black woman from left to right

Ghost Light

Fire in Oak Park and changes in Oak Brook and Jefferson Park

by Kerry Reid December 3, 2021December 3, 2021

Oak Park Festival Theatre was one of the first companies back to live performance this year after the COVID-19 shutdown with their production of The Tempest, staged in their longtime outdoor home at Austin Gardens. They weathered that storm, only to suffer a fire on November 23 at their offices in downtown Oak Park, located […]

Woman on left consulting notebook while woman on right stands behind a man in a chair, holding him in a headlock.

Theater Review

Putting the pieces together in First Folio’s The Jigsaw Bride

by Catey Sullivan October 21, 2021October 22, 2021

Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier has a history of taking largely forgotten, sometimes nameless characters and putting them in the dead center of the iconic tales they support. It’s a potentially grim business, digging up backstories (and futures) for (no)bodies the world only knows as incidental to someone else’s story. But anyone passingly familiar with the commercial/critical […]

Photo of playwright Joseph Zettelmaier on pink background, wearing red shirt with glasses

Theater Preview

October ushers in bride of Frankenstein story at First Folio

by Bridgette M. Redman October 14, 2021October 19, 2021

Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier is a maker of monsters, a horror artist who retells classic tales with an emphasis on what makes these constructs human. First Folio Theatre, which has produced five of Zettelmaier’s plays in the past (including horror tales The Man-Beast, The Gravedigger, and Dr. Seward’s Dracula, along with two non-horror pieces, Salvage and […]