Oak Park Festival Theatre Archives

A young woman in a red dress stands at a microphone on the left while a young man standing right holding a guitar looks on. The walls behind them are covered with wooden crates and records.

Rocking With Chekhov

by Jack Helbig October 19, 2023October 21, 2023

There is something about Anton Chekhov’s first successful full-length play, The Seagull, that attracts playwrights to try their hand at creating their own adaptations—faithful or otherwise. Maybe it’s the fact that the characters at the center of this nearly 130-year-old play—the narcissistic mother, her emotionally damaged son, his talented but blindly ambitious girlfriend—feel so contemporary […]

An actor wearing large donkey ears sits center while two other actors look on.

Theater Review

A Midsummer with some twists

by Jack Helbig July 19, 2023July 19, 2023

Is there a Shakespeare comedy better suited for an outdoor production in a park in July than A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Much of the play itself takes place outdoors in the summer, in the woods on the outskirts of a very English-seeming Athens. And the stories that unfold there are just twisty enough to keep […]

Melissa Lorraine, a white woman in a strapless black dress and black boots, with long blonde hair, stands in a light on the left, holding a microphone and reading from a notebook. A group of eight performers of different races, ethnicities, genders, and ages are moving offstage on the right. The setting is a concrete raw space with an orange ladder visible in the right rear corner and a chandelier visible overhead

Ghost Light

Home at last

by Kerry Reid March 3, 2023March 6, 2023

Theatre Y started searching for a permanent home in North Lawndale three years ago. As founding artistic director Melissa Lorraine puts it, “It’s been a little bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The first place they considered, near the Pulaski Pink Line stop, was a little too small. The second, the Central Park Theater […]

Eleven actors of varying ages and ethnicities stand in a line on the set of The Winter's Tale, which looks like gray-and-rust industrial steel. A Black actor in a brightly colored robe stands above them center.

Theater Review

Winter in July

by Jack Helbig July 20, 2022July 20, 2022

This is a great play for the summer—despite its title—because The Winter’s Tale is as much about the coming of spring as it is the dreary desolation of December. At least that is what director Kevin Theis emphasizes in this high-spirited, lighthearted production. All that is positive, sweet, and redemptive in the play—the openhearted expressions […]

A diverse group of people dancing together outdoors

Arts & Culture

Taking the drama and dance outdoors

by Kerry Reid June 23, 2022July 8, 2022

I spent most of the 90s in the Bay Area, where outdoor theater in the summer is a given, and the weather generally cooperates (if you’re not facing the threat of forest fires, that is). But in Chicago, extreme heat and thunderstorms go with the territory. Despite Mother Nature and other logistical challenges, outdoor theater […]

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 […]

Christian Gray as Edgar Allan Poe in foreground, two shadowy figures of women in the background

Theater Review

Poe finds a Pleasant Home in Oak Park

by Jack Helbig October 21, 2021October 21, 2021

Given the choice of presenting an evening of Edgar Allan Poe’s better known stories and poetry (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven”) and writing a play about the tormented alcoholic author and his obsessive pre- and post-mortem love for his first cousin/child bride Virginia, David Rice did both, weaving together dramatic readings of Poe’s […]