Tasia A. Jones Archives - Chicago Reader

A young Black woman in yellow trousers and a sleeveless green shirt kneels, holding onto a long strip of red fabric stretched behind her. Five Black performers (two women, three men) in clothing representing various eras stand behind her. There are bottles and rocks on the floor around them.

Unraveling Chicago’s racist past (and present)

by Kerry Reid October 13, 2022October 18, 2022

J. Nicole Brooks’s adaptation of 1919, Eve L. Ewing’s collection of poems published a century after the “Red Summer” race riot in Chicago sparked by the murder of Eugene Williams, is the first live show since the pandemic for Steppenwolf for Young Adults. There are only a handful of public performances, but it should not […]

A Black woman in early 1900s lingerie strikes a pose in front of a Black woman in a white dress, who is seated in a room with a chaise lounge, work table, and a mannequin

Theater Review

The fabric of romance

by Kelly Kleiman April 27, 2022April 27, 2022

In Tasia A. Jones’s impeccable production, Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel is as beautiful as the title garments, and its characters as fragile. Set in 1905, the play follows the efforts of seamstress Esther (the perfect Mildred Marie Langford) to reconcile her desire for love and marriage with her ambition to open her own business. Whether […]

A Black woman in a white dress from the early 1900s sits center stage at a sewing machine. A sepia-toned photo of a woman at a sewing machine is projected behind her.

Ghost Light

Lynn Nottage makes it work

by Kerry Reid April 22, 2022April 22, 2022

If you’re up for journeys to the suburbs this weekend, it’s possible to see two plays by Lynn Nottage; Sweat, which earned Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize in 2017, is closing Sunday in Aurora at Paramount Theatre’s new Copley black-box space. (Reader contributor Catey Sullivan called the production, directed by Andrea J. Dymond, “gripping” and […]