Steep Theatre Archives - Chicago Reader

A woman stands onstage next to a couch. There is a looming shadow behind her on a purple screen

Enraging and engaging

by Catey Sullivan August 18, 2023August 25, 2023

Sometimes more didactic than dramatically sound, Ella Hickson’s The Writer remains enraging and engaging as it offers a graphic crash course in the perils of playwriting while female. And, for that matter, existing while female. Directed by Georgette Verdin, Steep Theatre’s staging offers a motherlode of stark truths about the intractable, insidious reach of the most […]

A triptych of headshots. On the left is Dusty Brown, a nonbinary white person. They have short dark hair, light-brown facial hair, and are wearing brown rimmed glasses, a light patterned shirt, and a dark blue plaid jacket. In the center is Michael Dias, a white man with dark gray hair and a gray beard and mustache. He is wearing a light blue v-neck T-shirt. At right is Eileen Dixon, a white woman with short red hair. She is wearing a black knit top with a v-neck.

Ghost Light

Redtwist names new artistic director

by Kerry Reid December 2, 2022December 6, 2022

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, […]

Four girls of various ethnicity and race, dressed in school uniforms, sit cross-legged around a Ouija board.

Theater Review

Miami death trip

by Emily McClanathan November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

Teenagers tend to be reckless, sure, but few would gather in a spooky tree house to summon the spirit of Colombian drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar. But then, most aren’t as hardcore—or foolhardy—as the members of the Dead Leaders Club, a group of private school girls in Miami who dabble with supernatural forces in Our […]

Marissa Lynn Ford, a Black woman, is photographed outside in front of a wall of greenery. She is wearing a patterned blouse with orange, black, and light green colors.

Ghost Light

Marissa Lynn Ford takes the wheel at the League of Chicago Theatres

by Kerry Reid September 23, 2022September 23, 2022

Amid the tidal wave of turnovers at theaters large and small in Chicago the last two years, we also learned this past February that Deb Clapp, the longtime executive director for the League of Chicago Theatres, was stepping away from her job in June. Last week, the League announced her successor: Marissa Lynn Ford, recently […]

Nine actors of various ages and races stand on a series of platforms onstage. Above their heads we see suspended curling pieces of sheet music. Chairs and lamps are scattered onstage.

Theater Review

Dimming of the day

by Irene Hsiao July 13, 2022July 13, 2022

“When people die, they move from the first person to the third person. They also move from the present tense to the past tense.” These words are spoken by Christine (Kendra Thulin), who opens Simon Stephens’s Light Falls, directed by Robin Witt, by narrating her own death—sudden, solitary, and mundane in a liquor store in […]

Four people in the break room of a warehouse. A young Black woman sits left, with an older white woman behind her. A middle-aged white woman sits center, and a middle-aged white man in a police uniform stands right.

Theater Review

Big-box blues

by Kerry Reid June 24, 2022June 24, 2022

On the wall of the big-box retail warehouse that forms the setting for Eboni Booth’s Paris, now in a midwest premiere at Steep Theatre under Jonathan Berry’s direction, there’s a sign reading: NOBODY CARES. WORK HARDER. It’s a stark enunciation of the realities of late-stage capitalism and consumerism. Paris Through 7/23: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun […]

Image of brick building with realtor sign on fence

Ghost Light

Steep plans a big move—just down the street

by Kerry Reid February 9, 2022February 11, 2022

In summer of 2020, Steep Theatre announced that they were losing their longtime Berwyn Avenue home (just next to the Red Line stop). The landlord was selling the building, which contained both the flexible-seating 60-seat black box theater and the adjoining Boxcar bar and performance lounge that Steep opened in 2018. At the time, Steep […]