The warmer temperatures, blossoming flowers, and budding trees aren’t the only harbingers of spring. It’s also the season of the season announcements, with the major Chicago companies letting us know what to expect in 2023-24 on their stages. The Goodman presents the first season selected by Susan V. Booth, who took over as artistic director […]
Tag: Steppenwolf Theatre
Posted inTheater Review
Teenage traumas
Ask any middle-aged person about their first romantic breakup, and there’s a good chance they’ll laugh. Ask about their first friend breakup, on the other hand: no laughter. Director Ericka Ratcliff’s Steppenwolf for Young Adults stage adaptation of Mahogany L. Browne’s 2021 novel-in-verse Chlorine Sky uses the dissolution of a relationship between two high school […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Defying gravity
Suddenly the audience was enveloped in darkness. We awaited the commencement. Two screens turn on, showing poetic verses scrolling up. Then, the music started flowing through the space, conducted by Asante Owusu-Brafi, Angel Bat Dawid, and Ishmael Ali as they sat under a somber blue light. Ethereal sounds and light piano keys echoed. I see […]
Posted inCity Life
’Well done, Gloria Allen’
Black trans icon Mama Gloria is remembered for living an extraordinary and full life.
Posted inAgenda, City Life
Performance art on film, 1919, and more
Steppenwolf for Young Adults brings its acclaimed production of 1919, J. Nicole Brooks’s stage adaptation of Eve L. Ewing’s poems about the “Red Summer” race riots and white supremacy in America, from their Halsted Street venue to a short tour this week with Chicago Park District’s “Night Out in the Parks” program, starting tonight at […]
Posted inTheater Review
Stranger things
What if the person you love—the one you want to spend the rest of your life with—were to confess a secret so bizarre, so disturbing, that it makes you question whether you know them at all? How do you truly accept every part of a person when you can’t begin to understand one of their […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Maybe we’re crazy
Have you ever been playfully called “crazy” and laughed, only to cry silently in the basement bathroom for two hours? No? Just me? Well, if you’ve ever stared into the abyss and questioned your own sanity for more than a hot second, Kellye Howard’s latest one-woman show, Crazy or Nah?!, running this weekend as part […]
Posted inTheater Review
A school full of song
The four years that young adults spend in high school are widely recognized as some of the most formative (and cringeworthy) years of their lives. It’s a space where they come face to face with their insecurities on a daily basis. For many, this space is a common site for first-time struggles related to academics, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Irregular Girl is leading the fight for trans utopia
If it’s the first Friday of the month, you’re going to see a line snaking out of Berlin that extends past the entrance to the Belmont CTA station and sometimes around the block. It’s populated by people in leather miniskirts and mesh crop tops, disco bambis and alien centaurs, club mystics with lashes so long […]
Posted inTheater Review
Steppenwolf’s Seagull opens a lovely new space
“Here is a theater. No curtain, no wings, no scenery. Just an empty space.” Konstantin Treplev, the young and hungry artist manqué in Anton Chekhov’s Seagull, intones these words before the disastrous and abortive premiere of his play-within-the-play for his family. But at the Saturday opening of ensemble member Yasen Peyankov’s production at Steppenwolf, it […]
Posted inTheater Review
Reflecting pools
I saw a lot of old friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in quite some time last weekend. And as sometimes happens for people of a certain age, shades of sorrow and remembrance for those no longer here crept into the conversation. No matter how much we try to play whack-a-mole with the Reaper, he’s […]
Posted inTheater Review
King James explores basketball and male bonding
I’ve always been ambivalent about the use of land acknowledgements in the arts sector, but as I am not of Indigenous descent, I can’t speak for Indigenous opinions on the matter. At the world premiere of King James at Steppenwolf, the audience was treated to not only a land acknowledgement, but also to what I […]
Posted inMusic
Michael P. Smith deserves to be as widely remembered as his songs
The past 20 months have been such a whirlwind of sickness, grief, political madness, and worldwide protests for causes either righteous and necessary or selfish and deranged—it hasn’t been easy for music fans to do justice to the lives and memories of all the amazing artists who’ve passed away during this chaotic period. Famous folk […]
Posted inTheater Review
Bug captures our current malaise
There was only one weekend left in Steppenwolf’s original production run of Bug when the theater announced it would be closing its doors to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on March 12, 2020. Twenty months later, the company has launched its “comeback” season with a second, complete revival run (once again directed by David Cromer) […]
Posted inGhost Light
Steppenwolf sets up Loft-y ambitions in new building
Steppenwolf finally cut the ribbon on their new theater and education center on Tuesday after two and a half years of construction, and everybody from Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot (whose wife, Amy Eshleman, is on the theater’s board of trustees) to many current members of the ensemble showed up to mark the occasion, which […]