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 […]
Tag: Tara Mallen
Posted inTheater Review
West Virginia woes
Williamson, West Virginia, is in the heart of Hatfield-McCoy history, but the conflict driving apart a family in Madison Fiedler’s Spay, now in a world premiere at Rivendell under Georgette Verdin’s direction, is rooted in opioids, not moonshine. Kindergarten teacher Harper (Krystel McNeil) has just brought home her half-sister Noah (Rae Gray) from the hospital, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Laura and the Sea examines our working relationships
A coworker’s suicide leads to soul-searching in Kate Tarker’s darkly comic meditation.
Posted inArts & Culture
The plot is ripped from the headlines, but The Cake lets in a whiff of ambiguity
Bekah Brunstetter’s play takes its characters to exquisitely complicated places.
Posted inArts & Culture
Parachute Men, You on the Moors Now, and eight more new theater reviews
This week’s stage highlights include three losers who (hopefully) make good and four 19th-century fictional heroines battling their would-be betrotheds.
Posted inArts & Culture
Laura Jacqmin’s new play is a requiem for a teenage jerk
Laura Jacqmin’s new play Look, We Are Breathing brings to life the aftermath of a death by drunk driving.