The death of Myrna Salazar, cofounder and executive director of the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance (CLATA), in August, a month before the fifth annual Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival kicked off, was a huge blow to the performing arts community, including Jorge Valdivia, who worked closely with Salazar and CLATA in his role as […]
Tag: Terry Guest
Posted inTheater Review
You say you want a revolution?
On one wall of the set for Terry Guest’s Marie Antoinette and the Magical Negroes, now in a local premiere with Story Theatre under Guest’s direction, a large sign tells us “THIS IS NOT HISTORY.” True: what Guest’s skillfully rendered sardonic political comedy offers is a funhouse view (with not always so much fun, given […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Black perspective on the French Revolution
Sometimes to understand the present, we must look at the past. In 2017, playwright Terry Guest grappled with how America could elect someone so outwardly racist as Donald Trump. It shocked him into questioning what could be done about the rise of fascism in the U.S. “Do we protest? Does that work?” Guest asked himself. […]
Posted inTheater Review
Southern spells
A good play, suggests Tony Kushner in his 1995 anthology Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue, “should be overstuffed.” Memorably comparing well-constructed theater to lasagna, he writes that a work of theater “should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been” and, at its best, “has a bursting […]
Posted inTheater Review
Father and child reunion
Playwright John Guare once posited that every story can be boiled down to either Romeo and Juliet or David and Goliath. A third archetype, I would submit, is the Mom or Dad Issues Play (Goliath moms and dads notwithstanding). And yet, though playwright travis tate’s new work, Queen of the Night, is part of a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
At the Wake of a Dead Drag Queen offers a history lesson on intersectional oppression—with lip synching
Terry Guest’s two-character play for Story Theatre delivers an emotional knockout.