This has been a year of tremendous changes at the top for Chicago theaters, with Susan V. Booth taking over at the Goodman after Bob Falls’s 35 years as artistic director and Braden Abraham, formerly the artistic director for Seattle Rep, poised to take over as AD at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre in February. Cody Estle, […]
Tag: Jenn Freeman
Posted inTheater Review
Southern spells
A good play, suggests Tony Kushner in his 1995 anthology Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue, “should be overstuffed.” Memorably comparing well-constructed theater to lasagna, he writes that a work of theater “should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been” and, at its best, “has a bursting […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘We need to be imagining other possibilities for ourselves’
The United States incarcerates more people and incarcerates them at a higher rate than any other country in the world, with 2.3 million people presently in custody—over half a million more than the country with the next highest population of imprisoned people. A report released in 2021 by the Sentencing Project found that Black people […]
Posted inDance
The collective quest of Chicago dance
Two events occurred toward the close of 2020 that suggested that life and art as we knew it (for better or for worse) might have a fighting chance of existing in 2021: the election in November and the emergency use authorization of COVID-19 vaccines in December. But more briefly than the duration of most resolutions, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Torchy Brown lights way for Litany
Jenn Freeman (aka Po’Chop) probes femininity, gender, rage, and history in a five-part dance film.
Posted inBlogs
Jamila Woods’s video for ‘Holy’ embodies black self-care
With her video for “Holy,” soul singer Jamila Woods demonstrates how to show love for your community as well as for yourself.