Midway through Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive," a man gives fishing lessons to an unseen child. He describes the pompano as "a very shy, mercurial fish," and advises that catching one…
The grungy motel in the middle of nowhere is as much a trope for American psychological thrillers as the gloomy country manse in English murder mysteries. From "Psycho" to "Bug," it's where …
Joseph Zettelmaier has become something of a playwright in residence for suburban First Folio. In addition to a trilogy of plays that skillfully reimagined classic horror stories about Frank…
The cure for the wintertime blues is apparently "Million Dollar Quartet." Two theaters in the Chicago area " Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire and Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind. " are…
Long before "Scream" sent up the teen slasher genre, there was the "Evil Dead" trilogy. Director Sam Raimi's low-budget homage/spoof series blended H.P. Lovecraft's mythos about the Necronom…
On the heels of a wave of diverse younger women joining the ranks of the 116th Congress, Pegasus Theatre Chicago's 32nd Young Playwrights Festival feels right at home with the zeitgeist. The…
Issues of identity and immigration, borders and belonging, took on harsh and frightening dimensions in the headlines this year. So in looking over the shows that made the biggest impression …
I've seen more than 30 shows at Trap Door Theatre over the past 16 years. Yet their current offering, Tadeusz Rozewicz's "The Old Woman Broods," may be the Trap Dooriest of them all in its d…
The opening moments of Strawdog Theatre's "The Revolutionists" feel like they might be perfectly at home at Trap Door. Four women, garbed in deconstructed variants of 18th century garb, stan…
In January 1951, a 30-year-old black woman with five children was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. After enduring a horrific series of radiation treatments for month…
It seems every year that events conspire to make the Goodman's production of "A Christmas Carol" an exercise in both cheery holiday escapism and timely consciousness raising. So it is with t…
The fraught election season of blue and red is (sort of) in the rearview mirror as bright holiday colors deck the halls and malls. Before you're overloaded with shopping and socializing, tak…
Yes, hostelry jokes abound in staging "Holiday Inn" at a Marriott. Get them out of your system. I'll wait. This show, now in its regional premiere at Marriott Lincolnshire, is not "White Chr…
"Soon it's gonna rain, I can see it. Soon it's gonna rain, I can tell." All right, fine. Those lyrics are from "The Fantasticks" and not "110 in the Shade," the musical version of N. Richard…
In January 2018, Pew Research Center released the results of a study on women working in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs that revealed 50 percent said they had experien…
Belarus Free Theatre is best known locally for stunning deconstructions of classics, such as their mind-blowing production of "King Lear" at Chicago Shakespeare in 2016. But the company, whi…
Theater Unspeakable takes a cue from the Reduced Shakespeare Company by condensing the history of the American Revolution to 50 minutes. Then it further "reduces" the story by confining the …
If you stitched together a butoh performance and a zombie film, you'd come close to capturing the look and feel of the opening minutes of Remy Bumppo's "Frankenstein." Greg Matthew Anderson,…
What's more dangerous than a heretic? A pagan. At least, that's the view propounded by Jan, the young Czech sorta-dissident in Tom Stoppard's 2006 "Rock 'N' Roll." First seen locally in 2009…
Lynn Nottage may be one of the most humane playwrights in our contemporary canon. Her plays give breathing space for her characters to find their voices, no matter how constricted their own …
In June 2017, an article by Mark Gokavi in the Dayton Daily News mentioned that one man in the Ohio city had been revived via Narcan by police 20 times after overdosing on opioids. An office…
The late Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company provided the blueprint for David Cerda's Hell in a Handbag Productions, purveyors of quality camp since 2002. So it's perhaps od…
Omigod you guys! Sisterhood is awesome! If you want a show that celebrates female friendship with flying colors (mostly on the pink end of the spectrum), then have no fear " Elle Woods is he…
The Modern Prometheus is getting quite a workout on Chicago stages this year, with three adaptations of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" opening this fall and a fourth in the spring. The obviou…
Years before she put herself in the world of "Straight White Men" (the play that gave her the distinction of being the first Asian-American playwright to get a Broadway production), Young Je…