Reader Recommended Archives

Film

Downton Abbey: A New Era

by Marah Eakin May 20, 2022May 20, 2022

Little of consequence happens in Downton Abbey: A New Era, but that’s sort of the point.

An Asian man sits left, looking at a Chinese woman. Both are in what appears to be traditional Chinese clothing of the 19th century.

Theater Review

The price of exposure

by Sheri Flanders May 20, 2022May 20, 2022

In Viola Spolin’s seminal work Improvisation for the Theater, the very first exercise listed is named “exposure.” During this exercise, a group of actors are divided into halves and instructed to simply look at others and allow others to look at them. This deceptively difficult task often challenges new performers greatly; not only do they […]

Two young women sit at a table. The woman on the left has a bandaged face and holds a coffee mug. The woman on the right is looking up and sitting in front of a large open book.

Theater Review

Take shelter

by Katie Powers May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

In the Chicago premiere of Sarah Treem’s When We Were Young and Unafraid with AstonRep, a group of multitudinous women navigate domesticity, violence, and identity in a cultural landscape that both oppresses and empowers. Set in 1972, just before the Roe v. Wade decision and 22 years before the passage of the Violence Against Women […]

Two women in white fencing clothes. The woman on the left is white, and is in a kneeling crouch. The woman on the right is Black, and is looking down at the other woman, holding her fencing sword pointed down.

Theater Review

Babes with blades

by Kerry Reid May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Whether by design or happenstance, Writers Theatre has focused on the theme of women in competition and collaboration this season. In Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman, two actors portraying Linda Loman and the “woman from Boston” in a contemporary riff on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman wonder why their characters in the play-within-the-play […]

Blback woman with white robot puppet in left foreground. White woman in mustard-colored jumpsuit kneeling slightly behind puppet on left, with look of joy on her face.

Theater Review

The play about the baby

by Kerry Reid May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Reproductive rights cuts both ways: the government deciding that you may not have a child comes from the same authoritarianism that tells you that you must continue an unwanted pregnancy. Given current grim news about the impending SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade, that thought is unavoidable when viewing Zoe Kazan’s dystopian After the Blast. […]

Four people in folding chairs onstage enacting the Tea Party. The first two are men in suits with hats, then Alice in a white dress and black-and-white striped stockings, with a man in a pink and white pinafore at the far right. The men all have their hands raised in the air, while Alice looks on with delight.

Theater Review

Chess, circus, and the game of life

by Kimzyn Campbell May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Here is a riddle for you: What do a game of chess and life have in common?* Inside the tidy, rule-driven universe of a chess board, seven-year-old Alice stumbles upon the inexplicable and absurd rules of a new world. Every fledgling chess player will empathize as Alice is met with surprise after surprise in this […]

The cast of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Invictus Theatre, shot slightly from above. Honey is in a green sweater, dancing with a smile on her face, at left. George is standing behind the sofa, arms crossed, wearing a yellow cardigan. Nick is seated on the sofa in a gray suit, looking glum, while Martha, in a low-cut red blouse, sits next to him laughing

Theater Review

Living room absurdism

by Albert Williams May 17, 2022May 17, 2022

It may be difficult to comprehend today just how shocking Edward Albee’s drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was when it premiered in October 1962, the same week that the Cuban missile crisis began. While the atomic fireworks the world feared never happened, Albee’s three-act, three-hour-plus masterpiece detonated an explosion that rocked American culture to […]

Music

London label Touch brings its 40th-anniversary celebration to the International Museum of Surgical Science

by Monica Kendrick May 16, 2022May 9, 2022

London-based Touch isn’t a record label in the traditional sense; it’s far more multifaceted. It might be more accurate to describe Touch as a collective that also extends into publishing, performance curation, and site-specific multimedia events driven by a loosely defined stable of international avant-garde electronic and sound artists, who include guitarist and producer Fennesz, […]

two white women talk with a cliffside beach in the background

Film

Anaïs in Love

by Becca James May 13, 2022May 12, 2022

Anaïs in Love is as magnetic as its protagonist.

three women smile or laugh against a dark wooded background

Film

Happening

by Kathleen Sachs May 13, 2022May 12, 2022

The no-holds-barred approach to the [abortion] procedure and its aftermath is the kind of interpretation of real life that great cinema does best.

A woman in a sundress stands left, her hands coering her ears. To her right, a man holding a guitar is jumping in the air. They are in front of a wall made of wooden slats, with an open trunk set behind them on the right.

Theater Review

Reunion and regret

by Josh Flanders May 12, 2022May 12, 2022

Like several post-pandemic shows in Chicago, the Artistic Home’s production of The Pavilion, written by Craig Wright and directed by Julian Hester, is about an intimate relationship between two people over time. It is also about the creation of the universe, being tethered to the past, and literally burning down sentimentality. High school sweethearts Peter […]

A kitchen set. A young Black woman in contemporary clothes stands left, with a white woman in 19th-century dress next to her. In the foreground, another white woman in contemporary dress looks offstage.

Theater Review

The bones of grief

by Kerry Reid May 12, 2022May 11, 2022

Laura Schellhardt’s Digging Up Dessa was commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center as part of its Theater for Young Audiences program in 2018. But this play, now in its Chicago premiere with Theatre Above the Law, is like a lot of great YA fiction—relevant to many audiences. Digging Up Dessa Through 5/22: Fri-Sat 8 […]

A Black man in a blue shirt and tan trousers sits on a bar stool. A white woman in ripped black jeans, a black top, and with a yellow-and-plaid flannel shirt wrapped around her waist, sits next to him. They are both looking at a penny the man is holding up. The lighting is blueish, as if in a dimly lit bar.

Theater Review

People who need people

by Kelly Kleiman May 12, 2022May 18, 2022

When everyone on the stage is excellent, it shows a director fully in command of the material. That’s the case with Cody Estle’s production of The Luckiest by Melissa Ross, receiving its Chicago premiere at the Raven Theatre. Plays about a young woman’s disability and impending death always risk straying into Love Story-style bathos, while […]

Three men in formalwear stand in a line carrying a wooden box wrapped with rope. On the right, a woman in a white dress is visible behind a sheet of plastic.

Theater Review

War cries

by Dmitry Samarov May 12, 2022May 11, 2022

A wooden rowboat and plastic sheets lining two back walls are the only decorations for Sarah Tolan-Mee’s English-language adaptation of Heiner Müller’s 1982 cry-of-anguish riff on war, betrayal, and the messiness of identity. Using the Greek legends of Medea and Jason as a jumping-off point, this is a raging, poetic rant against tyranny and fate […]

Film

Vortex

by Maxwell Rabb May 6, 2022May 6, 2022

This film is not for the fragile heart.