Goodman Theatre Archives - Chicago Reader

A group of four Black women stand in the foreground of an elegant living room set, while a fifth sits in a chair. Behind them we see a library with a portrait on the wall and two younger Black women and a young Black man.

Debutantes and debacles

by Kerry Reid September 28, 2023September 28, 2023

Pearl Cleage isn’t from Chicago, but she’s been produced enough here that she feels like an adopted playwright at least. Now-defunct Eclipse Theatre Company (dedicated to the one playwright, one season model) offered a season of Cleage plays back in 2007, and that same year, Court Theatre did a stunning revival of her 1992 frontier […]

Four Black women in gardening clothes and hats stand together outside. They are smiling and holding Easter eggs and metal cooking pots.

Theater Review

Goodman grows a delightful family show

by Amanda Finn August 10, 2023August 10, 2023

Settled in the grass at Moore Park in the Austin neighborhood, a baby clad in a vegetable-patterned onesie coos to the music, while a toddler wriggles, wiggly worms in hand, to the aptly named “I Like Worms” song—only to begrudgingly give the rubbery creepy crawler back to the cast members. All the while, a chorus […]

A woman and man sit on a couch on the left. Tommy as a young man looks into a mirror on the right, in which two younger versions of himself are visible.

Theater Review

See him, feel him

by Kerry Reid June 29, 2023June 29, 2023

Pete Townshend wasn’t able to make it to Chicago for Monday night’s opening of The Who’s Tommy at the Goodman. But there was plenty of star power onstage already, particularly in Ali Louis Bourzgui’s hypnotic turn as the adult Tommy Walker. This reimagined reboot of the stage musical that first played Broadway 30 years ago […]

Tommy, wearing a white turtleneck and dark pants, stands singing on a table left, while a group of actors cluster in front of him, their heads thrown back in fervor.

Ghost Light

Tommy takes flight

by Kerry Reid June 23, 2023June 26, 2023

Goodman’s season closer, The Who’s Tommy, promises to be a blockbuster (it’s already extended through early August). But the story of the pinball wizard—first introduced in the Who’s 1969 double album, then seen in a 1975 film, and finally as a Broadway musical in 1993—isn’t just about the familiar anthemic songs. Dance and movement play […]

Antonio Edwards Suarez is shown seated onstage, his back to a platform. Behind him, drenched in blue lighting, are overlapping projections of him seated onstage.

Theater Review

Fathers and sons

by Kerry Reid May 11, 2023May 11, 2023

Back in 2012, playwright and solo artist Dael Orlandersmith performed Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre. In a series of monologues drawn from interviews with several subjects, Orlandersmith anatomized cycles of abuse and toxic masculinity through the voices of a variety of people (a preteen sex worker, a social worker) from […]

Audrey Francis, a white woman in blue jeans and a black jacket, is standing left, and Glenn Davis, a Black man in dark trousers and shirt, is standing right in front of the empty new theater at Steppenwolf.

Ghost Light

It’s season-announcement season

by Kerry Reid April 13, 2023April 14, 2023

The warmer temperatures, blossoming flowers, and budding trees aren’t the only harbingers of spring. It’s also the season of the season announcements, with the major Chicago companies letting us know what to expect in 2023-24 on their stages. The Goodman presents the first season selected by Susan V. Booth, who took over as artistic director […]

Theater Review

Dancing on the edge of disaster

by Kerry Reid April 13, 2023April 24, 2023

The last great production of The Cherry Orchard I saw was at Steppenwolf, nearly 20 years ago. Tina Landau turned the company’s upstairs theater into a near-immersive experience, with Riccardo Hernández’s set design incorporating swathes of lacy white cloth all around us—perfect for Anton Chekhov’s characters, who spend so much time hiding from visible truths […]

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 […]

Three SWANA actors are seen sitting together on a couch in a living room set. At left is a man with brown hair and beard, wearing a blue patterned sweater and jeans. He is looking at the other two, his arm stretched out before him. A young woman with short dark hair, wearing khakis and a green flowered shirt, sits center. On the right is another young man with brown hair, no beard, wearing a gray hoodie. He is smiling. The young woman is looking in his direction.

Arts & Culture

Tales of our nights

by Boutayna Chokrane March 8, 2023March 8, 2023

There’s a tranquil moment of healing in act two, when a teary-eyed Marwa turns to their older brother Yousif and pleads, “I don’t want 17 years to pass.” That instant captures the heartbeat of Layalina (lay-ali-na), a new play at the Goodman that aims to remind us what family can truly mean at best. Layalina […]

A Black woman wearing an old-fashioned baseball uniform stand center stage. Her right arm is raised straight above her head, holding a baseball. The set around her suggests an old ball field, with a scoreboard suspended in the back and faded advertisements for Pepsi and other products on the low walls flanking the playing area.

Theater Review

A league of her own

by Kerry Reid February 10, 2023February 10, 2023

Like theater, baseball has no set time clock by which the action must unfold. It takes as long as it takes to finish the nine innings. That can lead to longueurs, or it can raise the stakes. It all depends on the quality of the play and the players. Fortunately, Lydia Diamond’s 2019 play Toni […]

Three Black women in bathing suits stand in shallow water (up to their ankles) in a pool, their arms outstretched as if they are dancing.

Theater Review

Waves of memory

by Kerry Reid January 27, 2023January 27, 2023

Christina Anderson’s luminous and wise the ripple, the wave that carried me home (now at the Goodman in a coproduction with Berkeley Rep, where it played in fall 2022) unfolds in mesmerizing capillary waves of memory, selective and otherwise. (“This country is built on selective memory,” one character observes while watching the Rodney King trial […]

A middle-aged white blonde woman stands behind a kitchen table, leaning in toward a young white man with darker hair who is sitting at the table.

Theater Review

A swing and a miss

by Catey Sullivan October 19, 2022October 19, 2022

As the single most-produced contemporary playwright in the Goodman Theater’s history, Rebecca Gilman has provided audiences with some truly perceptive, unflinching depictions of life’s varied brutalities. 1999’s Spinning Into Butter took on racism at a small, supposedly progressive liberal arts college. Fourteen years before #MeToo, Boy Gets Girl stunned with its take on the nightmarish […]

Performing Arts Feature

Ghosts of gentrification

by Annie Howard October 12, 2022October 14, 2022

As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the […]

Marissa Lynn Ford, a Black woman, is photographed outside in front of a wall of greenery. She is wearing a patterned blouse with orange, black, and light green colors.

Ghost Light

Marissa Lynn Ford takes the wheel at the League of Chicago Theatres

by Kerry Reid September 23, 2022September 23, 2022

Amid the tidal wave of turnovers at theaters large and small in Chicago the last two years, we also learned this past February that Deb Clapp, the longtime executive director for the League of Chicago Theatres, was stepping away from her job in June. Last week, the League announced her successor: Marissa Lynn Ford, recently […]

A line of four people in a restaurant kitchen. From left, we see a Latinx man in a red T-shirt and wearing a bandana on his head; a Black woman with long pink braids; a Black man in a yellow dashiki and head covering, and a white man in a black T-shirt and backwards baseball cap who is covered in tattoos.

Theater Review

Clyde’s shows off the sunnier side of Sweat

by Kerry Reid September 22, 2022September 29, 2022

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: any similarities between Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s, now in its local premiere at the Goodman, and the Hulu series The Bear are purely coincidental. (Honestly? Though I’ve read several essays about it, I haven’t watched the latter yet. I know!) Yes, they are both set in the kitchen […]