Sydney Charles Archives - Chicago Reader

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.

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 […]

Four Black women dance in a kitchen. The woman on the left is in gray pants and sweater with a light blouse. The young woman to her right is in a bathrobe and slippers, her hair wrapped in a cloth. An older woman in a long housecoat with a cane stands behind the table. The only one not dancing is seated with a book at the kitchen table on the right, looking skeptically at the others.

Theater Review

Lead in the water

by Kerry Reid June 23, 2022June 23, 2022

I hardly ever start reviews this way, but trust me: stop reading this and hop online to get tickets for Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s cullud wattah, now in its local premiere at Victory Gardens under Lili-Anne Brown’s direction. It’s a profound, poetic, scabrous (and beautifully acted) piece of theater that hits at so many levels that I […]

Three Black men and two Black woman stand in a line. The man on the left holds a large staff in front of the young man in the center while an older Black woman speaks to the younger man.

Theater Review

Gem of the Ocean opens the world of August Wilson

by Kerry Reid February 2, 2022February 9, 2022

August Wilson’s Century Cycle (also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, though Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is set in Chicago) remains one of the monumental achievements in American drama. Chuck Smith’s current Goodman revival of Gem of the Ocean, chronologically the first in Wilson’s decade-by-decade exploration of Black American history in the 20th century, takes us […]

Jane Byrne behind a podium with her staff behind her and Cabrini-Green residents seated in folding chairs in front of her. A sign reading "Welcome Mayor" is behind her

Theater Review

The resurrection of Her Honor Jane Byrne

by Kerry Reid November 16, 2021November 20, 2021

Right before the stay-at-home order hit Chicago in March of 2020, Lookingglass Theatre opened Her Honor Jane Byrne, written and directed by ensemble member J. Nicole Brooks. I called that production “a rich, riotous, and soul-searching world premiere,” and mourned its truncated run. Well, you can’t keep a good show down. After winning the prestigious […]