Steppenwolf Archives - Chicago Reader

A young woman stands left, looking at a young man standing right. Another young man is in the background between them. There is a sofa and a small dining table with chairs.

Sanctuary City explores the plight of DREAMers

by Kerry Reid September 29, 2023September 29, 2023

Before Martyna Majok won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her drama Cost of Living (which was planned for this season at Victory Gardens before the board decided to close up shop at the Tony Award-winning theater), her plays got airings with small companies around Chicago. (She graduated from University of Chicago in 2007.) Red […]

Jeff Perry and Mark Ulrich, two older white men, sit in leather armchairs. A wooden side table is between them.

Theater Review

No country for old men

by Kerry Reid July 26, 2023July 27, 2023

Harold Pinter’s 1974 play No Man’s Land occupies the territory between his earlier “comedies of menace,” such as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, and the more overtly political work he’d create in the 1980s (Mountain Language, One for the Road). But it’s primarily a comedy of language, at least in Steppenwolf’s current intriguing staging […]

A man in jeans and gray jacket stands left. To the right and rear is a woman sitting on the arm of a sofa.

Theater Review

Another Marriage marks a promising playwriting debut

by Kerry Reid June 29, 2023July 12, 2023

During the years that I’ve seen Kate Arrington onstage at Steppenwolf, “chameleonic” is the adjective that most often comes to mind. From show to show, she never seems to play the same type, slipping into the skin of characters so seamlessly that I have at times had trouble recognizing her initially. Which, paradoxically, makes her […]

A young Black girl sits on a couch holding a stuffed toy. A Black woman sits next to her. She looks like she's telling a story to the child.

Theater Review

The broken double helix of pain

by Kelly Kleiman April 21, 2023April 21, 2023

Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s play is about the limits of love—both in what it can accomplish, even when it feels infinite, and in what it can tolerate before it disappears. Monique (the protean Ayanna Bria Bakari) shows up at her sister’s house with her 11-year-old daughter in tow and an undisclosed agenda. (Daughter Sam is played […]

At left stands Glenn Davis, a bald Black man in a dark gray suit with an insignia pinned to the lape. He is playing Vova, and stands slightly in front and to the side of a very long open file drawer. On the right on the other side of the drawer is Yasen Peyankov as Nikolai. He is an older white man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses, and he wears tan trousers, a white shirt, and a brown cardigan wth the same insignia pinned to it.

Theater Review

The lies of others

by Kerry Reid March 15, 2023August 31, 2023

I’m just going to get the obvious adjective out of the way right now: Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night, now in its local premiere at Steppenwolf under Austin Pendleton’s direction, is definitely Stoppardian. As in much of Tom Stoppard’s work, the story spans decades—1920-2010, to be precise. And also as in Stoppard, an object (in […]

Frank Galati, an older balding white man with a full beard and glasses, is seated and photographed at a rehearsal. He is wearing a black shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, and his arms are crossed over his chest. There is a big smile on his face.

Arts & Culture

In the room with Frank Galati

by Mark Larson January 17, 2023January 19, 2023

Actor, director, playwright, screenwriter, and professor Dr. Frank Galati died on January 2, 2023, but his impact on those he worked with and loved (they were one and the same) and his legacy are imperishable. He won two Tony Awards in 1990 for adapting and directing The Grapes of Wrath, and was a nominee in […]

Two Asian women are seated on a green couch. The woman on the left wears a sleeveless top and ripped jeans. Her head is closely shaved, and she is baring her teeth in a grimace-grin. The woman on the left is in jeans and a tan cardigan. Her head is wraped in a gray scarf.

Theater Review

Mourning and celebrating in the same breath

by Irene Hsiao December 15, 2022December 28, 2022

Him (Jennifer Lim) coughs on the smoke of the incense she lights as she bows to a temporary altar in her kitchen in Carrollton, Texas. Ma (Wai Ching Ho) is propped up on a hospital bed, where she is unceremoniously dying. Sophea (Francesca Fernandez McKenzie) isn’t around, but is it her fate or her fault? […]

A group of six Black actors (three women, three men) crouch in a circle, their arms stretched out and supporting each other.

Ghost Light

Looking back at some of the best productions and biggest stories of 2022

by Kerry Reid December 13, 2022December 28, 2022

During 2020, my running joke was that, although there weren’t any plays happening, there was always plenty of drama to report on in Chicago theater. In fall of 2021, we started seeing some theater return, though the season was cut short by last December’s COVID surge. (Not to be confused with the one we’re currently […]

An Arab American family at a kitchen table. The daughter is standing on the left. The mother is seated in front of her, looking at a laptop and talking to her son, who is seated at the right. His head is resting in his hand and he looks worried.

Theater Review

Mosque4Mosque upends stereotypes

by Boutayna Chokrane November 23, 2022November 23, 2022

Mosque4Mosque is not a monolithic representation of the Arab American Muslim experience, and perhaps that’s exactly the point. Written by Omer Abbas Salem and directed by Sophiyaa Nayar, this charming production challenges all preconceived notions of a play about an Arab American Muslim family. In this sitcom-esque dramedy, Ibrahim (played by Salem) and his family […]

City Life

’Well done, Gloria Allen’

by Aaron Gettinger November 2, 2022November 16, 2022

Black trans icon Mama Gloria is remembered for living an extraordinary and full life.

A colonial bedroom set. Five Black people in working clothes sit on and around a four-poster bed. On a chair to the right sits an older white woman in a dressing gown.

Theater Review

First Lady fantasia

by Kerry Reid September 14, 2022September 14, 2022

Right before the pandemic shutdown in 2020, TimeLine Theatre presented James Ijames’s sorrowful and powerful Kill Move Paradise, in which a group of Black men murdered by the police gather in a purgatorial afterlife, where a fax machine spits out an ever-growing list of more Black people killed by the state. At the same time […]

Woman acrobat suspended by her ponytail in the air, sitting in lotuslike position

Arts & Culture

The business of circus

by Kimzyn Campbell March 30, 2022April 4, 2022

Balancing Acts: Unleashing the Power of Creativity in Your Life and Work (HarperCollins Leadership, January 2022, $28.99) by Daniel Lamarre is a book for those who need creative inspiration. Part business memoir and part self-help/motivational, the appeal of this book will land squarely on the aspiring businessman who needs an icon. It not only celebrates […]

A Black woman in denim overalls, holding a red plastic Solo cup, stands on the left, talking to a young white man in overalls seated on her right.

Theater Review

Art and appropriation

by Josh Flanders March 22, 2022March 22, 2022

Of the two plays exploring race that Steppenwolf has on stage right now—King James and WHITE—the latter definitely stands out for being not only funnier, but more complex and satisfying in its critique of race, privilege, and power. Written by James Ijames and directed by Ericka Ratcliff, Definition Theatre’s production is a delightfully silly yet […]

Performing Arts Feature

It’s become a different world

by Mark Larson January 20, 2022January 20, 2022

We see a show and later learn that it had to close abruptly. We can empathize with the actors’ disappointment and distress because we can visualize their faces and recall their voices. But how has the pandemic impacted those we see only briefly in the lobby as we enter or don’t see at all? How […]

Audrey Francis, a white woman in blue jeans and a black jacket, is standing left, and Glenn Davis, a Black man in dark trousers and shirt, is standing right in front of the empty new theater at Steppenwolf.

Performing Arts Feature

Plays in a pandemic

by Kerry Reid December 22, 2021January 6, 2022

By the time this year ends (it is gonna end, right?), Reader critics will, by my count, have reviewed 69 live theater and dance performances. That’s far less than in most years, but a veritable cornucopia after the onstage famine that began in March 2020. But just when we think it’s safe to go back […]