Victory Gardens Theater Archives

A street scene featuring the exterior and marquee of the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater

Will Victory Gardens ever bloom again?

by Kerry Reid December 21, 2022December 22, 2022

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected since it was first published to reflect that Erica Daniels never served as executive artistic director for Victory Gardens. Chay Yew’s tenure was slated for the end of June 2020, and Daniels resigned before assuming the planned new role. The biggest story of the year in Chicago theater […]

The exterior and marquee of the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, shot from across Lincoln Avenue and looking north.

Arts & Culture

Victory Gardens dismisses remainder of staff

by Kerry Reid September 8, 2022September 8, 2022

The tangled recent history of Victory Gardens Theater became even more complicated this week with the mass dismissal of the remaining staff members in the wake of an attempt to unionize. It’s the latest development in a series of moves that has thrown the survival of the venerable Tony Award-winning regional theater—long a beacon for […]

Two photos. On the left a young white man in a gray sweater sits on the floor. A white woman in a burgundy dress kneels behind him, embracing him. The photo on the left is of playwright James Sherman, an older white man in a blue suit, shirt, and tie. He has graying darker hair.

Arts & Culture

Chagall’s Camelot

by Jack Helbig August 31, 2022August 31, 2022

James Sherman began his career as an actor; he joined the Second City in the 70s, while he was still a student at Illinois State, appearing in the shows Once More With Fooling and East of Edens with the likes of George Wendt, Tim Kazurinsky, and Miriam Flynn. But starting with his 1982 backstage play, […]

City Life

House music, Midsummer parties, and Queer Pride

by Salem Collo-Julin, Micco Caporale and Kerry Reid June 24, 2022June 24, 2022

Here’s some events and activities to close out the month of June and start the summer right.

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 […]

A young Chinese woman stands in the foreground. Behind her are four white people around a dining room table--an older man and woman, a middle-aged woman, and another young woman.

Theater Review

The big meal

by Kerry Reid April 13, 2022April 13, 2022

In a recent New Yorker profile of Natasha Lyonne, star and creator of the trippy Netflix series Russian Doll, Lyonne reflects on her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and how that trauma creates ripple effects through the generations. “I joke that there’s a straight line from Hitler to heroin,” she says. The Levi-Katz […]

Two Black men face off in a playful duel with sticks in a campsite.

Theater Review

Father and child reunion

by Dan Jakes February 9, 2022February 17, 2022

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 […]

travis tate in orange shirt and baseball cap on left, Donja R. Love in white turtleneck on right

Performing Arts Feature

Exploring the intersections of Blackness and queerness onstage

by Kerry Reid January 28, 2022February 9, 2022

In a recent New Yorker essay on Charles J. Shields’s new biography Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the Sun’, Blair McClendon notes that the editors of The Ladder, the first national lesbian publication, tried to persuade the playwright to publicly come out after the success of her Broadway play. “Hansberry said that, […]

Music

Michael P. Smith deserves to be as widely remembered as his songs

by Steve Krakow December 1, 2021December 1, 2021

The past 20 months have been such a whirlwind of sickness, grief, political madness, and worldwide protests for causes either righteous and necessary or selfish and deranged—it hasn’t been easy for music fans to do justice to the lives and memories of all the amazing artists who’ve passed away during this chaotic period. Famous folk […]