Posted inTheater Review

The state of our rights

To say that Heidi Schreck’s 2017 Pulitzer-and-Tony-nominated play What the Constitution Means to Me hits differently in a post-Roe v. Wade world is a huge understatement. TimeLine’s current production (the first by a local company—Schreck’s piece, which she originally performed, has been seen here twice on tour, pre- and post-COVID shutdown), moves the show from […]

Posted inTheater Review

#OscarsSoWhite

This past fall, TimeLine offered a blistering revival of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, in which a Black actress in a 1950s Broadway play about lynching (penned and directed by white men, naturally) takes a stand against the insulting stereotypes in the script and the microaggressions in the rehearsal room. They’ve followed that up with […]

Posted inTheater Review

Screwball smear tactics

Politics has always been a “smelly kitchen,” to borrow a phrase from Jean Anouilh’s version of Antigone. But in 1933, two new cooks entered that kitchen. And the recipes they came up with continue to befoul the air of American elections. Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker (a widow and a married man who eventually became […]

Posted inTheater Review

The price of exposure

In Viola Spolin’s seminal work Improvisation for the Theater, the very first exercise listed is named “exposure.” During this exercise, a group of actors are divided into halves and instructed to simply look at others and allow others to look at them. This deceptively difficult task often challenges new performers greatly; not only do they […]

Posted inTheater Review

History is Relentless

The year 1919 is having a theatrical moment this season in Chicago, even with Steppenwolf postponing the world premiere of Eve L. Ewing’s 1919 (which was originally slated to open this week as part of the Steppenwolf for Young Adults series) until fall of 2022. That watershed year in American history comes to complicated and […]