Ilesa Duncan Archives - Chicago Reader

Three Black women onstage in front of a set resembling a wooden cabin. The woman in the center is in a wheelchair and the women on either side of her appear to be dancing.

Southern stories

by Kerry Reid May 11, 2023May 11, 2023

I first saw Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s autobiographical From the Mississippi Delta over 30 years ago in the old Goodman studio theater space. Though it’s been revived many times since, I hadn’t seen it again until the current Lifeline and Pegasus Theatre Chicago coproduction at Lifeline. It’s a testament to Holland’s gift for dialogue […]

Three young men (Elliott Valadez, Lucas Bigos and Jonathan Soco) are seated in a wood-paneled room. Behind them is a poster for the Young Playwrights Festival. Valadez is on the left. He is wearing a black T-shirt with anime figures on it and a blue flannel long-sleeved shirt. Lucas Bigos is in the center, wearing a red T-shirt wth the image of an eagle on it. He also wears eyeglasses. Jonathan Soco is on the right, wearing a dark blue dress shirt, also with glasses.

Arts & Culture

The science of playwriting

by Jack Helbig January 4, 2023January 4, 2023

Lucas Bigos was not a theater kid in high school—never in drama club, never in the school play. But something clicked his senior year at Lane Tech. That’s when he took a theater class at his high school to satisfy an elective requirement. A year later, the non-theater kid, currently a first-year student in computer […]

A line of four sailors on the deck of a ship, apparently being blown by high winds, with ropes swaying as they hold on.

Theater Review

A cluttered Passage

by Kelly Kleiman April 28, 2022April 27, 2022

Though it has some of Lifeline’s patented how-do-they-do-that effects, like a completely persuasive storm at sea achieved with nothing but video, some noise, and actors purporting to be blown around, Middle Passage is too cluttered to be satisfying. Rutherford Calhoun’s misadventures on the high seas include a captain mad enough to compete with Ahab, participation […]

Three people kneeling, with man on left raising his arms in the air. A park bench is visible behind them.

Arts & Culture

Decisions, demons, and doom

by Kaylen Ralph January 5, 2022January 5, 2022

While many of us (perhaps too optimistically) planned to complete any number of creative projects over the course of pandemic isolation parts one, two, or—dare I say it—three, 300 Chicago-area high school students managed to write and submit one-act plays to Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s 35th Annual Young Playwrights Festival. And three of those students—Laylah Freeman […]