Mike Tutaj Archives - Chicago Reader

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.

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 […]

Rob Lindley, an actor playing Andy Warhol, sits on a sofa on the left. He wears a silvery white wig, a blue blazer, blue jeans, a white shirt, and a red-and-white striped tie. Several cameras are on the coffee table in front of him. On a chair in front of a desk to the right sits Hamid Dehghani, who plays Farhad, an Iranian revolutionary. He is in a white shirt and dark trousers, and he is looking quizzically at Lindley's Warhol as the latter makes a point, motioning with his hands.

Theater Review

Tehran tête-à-tête

by Kerry Reid February 1, 2023February 2, 2023

Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, out of anger that he wouldn’t produce her play/manifesto Up Your Ass. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, out of anger at the senator and presidential candidate’s support of military aid for Israel. In Jean Stein’s 1982 oral history of Warhol’s Factory […]

Three men sit in a row at a bar turned into a car. On the right, Phil Conners is driving. Beer bottles sit before them.

Theater Review

Déjà vu all over again

by Kerry Reid February 9, 2022February 9, 2022

What musical could possibly capture our collective pandemic ennui? Perhaps a story about reliving the same gray day without surcease, surrounded by the same irritating people, with all your best intentions of self-improvement adding up to naught? BING! Welcome to Groundhog Day: The Musical. Based on the 1993 Harold Ramis film, this 2017 show (book […]

Arts & Culture

A fact-based drama at the Goodman explores the psychic and moral costs of survival

by Tony Adler May 17, 2017August 18, 2021

In Objects in the Mirror, a refugee’s troubles aren’t over when he reaches safety.

Dean Evans, Jay Torrence, Leah Urzendowski Courser, Ryan Walters, and Anthony Courser

Arts & Culture

The transcendent horror of Burning Bluebeard

by Tony Adler November 27, 2013August 19, 2021

The Ruffians revive Burning Bluebeard, a sweet tale of catastrophe.