1,044 stories by "Kerry Reid"
Aristophanes' urtext for the battle of the sexes has inspired so many reimaginings and adaptations (including Spike Lee's recent contemporary Chicago take, "Chi-Raq") that putting them all u…
They have known each other as allies for decades. There's comfort in that familiarity. But then " things change. They begin wanting different things from each other. Perhaps they are simulta…
Two years ago at the Goodman, Amanda Drinkall left a mark in "Venus in Fur," playing a seemingly innocent actress who teaches an older male director a few things about submission and control…
One evening with Ben Hecht can't begin to cover everything in his prolific career. But James Sherman gives it a good shot in his self-performed solo, "The Ben Hecht Show," now in a world pre…
Christopher Chen enjoys exploring the art of artifice and political manipulation. In "The Hundred Flowers Project" (produced in 2014 at Silk Road Rising), Chen used a collaborative theater p…
The big map of North America on the wall of the vice principal's office isn't all that it appears to be in Rajiv Joseph's "The North Pool." Dr. Danielson, the vice principal, believes that K…
His very name suggests "malevolence." But Malvolio, the nearest thing Shakespeare provided to an antagonist in "Twelfth Night," gets a chance to air his numerous grievances against the world…
If, as Eugene O'Neill once wrote, there is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again, then is it ever possible to make amends for past crimes and move on? That's one …
Anton Chekhov's first major play always strikes me as a bit more claustrophobic than his later work. Unlike "The Cherry Orchard," with its prescient echoes of the decline of the Russian bour…
To put yourself in the right frame of mind for Dorota Maslowska's "No Matter How Hard We Try" at Trap Door Theatre, it helps if you stroll the 606 beforehand and run into a man in a wheelcha…
How many stories do we find in popular culture about working-class American women in small towns? Subtract "Roseanne" from the equation and the answer is "not many." Fortunately, Dana Lynn F…
In her collection of essays on storytelling, "The Faraway Nearby," Rebecca Solnit notes: "The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story. It's a …
In a year when the fate of refugees in Europe has dominated headlines, a play about European Jews struggling to make their way in America after the Holocaust should hit home hard. But Alan L…
It's pretty much impossible to avoid culinary metaphors in reviewing Benjamin Brand's "Taste." But before you think, "Great, an onstage cooking show," Google "Armin Meiwes." I'll wait. All r…
The smell of chlorine hits the nostrils the second you walk into the small lobby at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble for Ruby Rae Spiegel's "Dry Land." Appropriate, since Spiegel's piece, now in a…
Samuel D. Hunter could easily lay claim to being the Raymond Carver of contemporary American theater. Like the late short-story writer and poet, Hunter's world portrays the backwaters of the…
Stephen Adly Guirgis' Pulitzer Prize-winning "Between Riverside and Crazy" gets its local debut at Steppenwolf in June. But before that, you can dip into his earlier work with Eclipse Theatr…
Dionne Warwick's voice " resonant, cool, but with a persistent undertone of wistful loss " provides a soundtrack that crosses generations and genres. It's a tough one to imitate. Thankfully,…
Factory Theater loves a good caper story, and in Ernie Deak's "The Last Big Mistake," it has one that also functions as a love letter to Chicago grit " the kind of grit that exists not far f…
What if Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," had been born female and a half-century later? Adam Rapp makes a compelling, if occasionally elliptical, argum…
Factory Theater loves a good caper story, and in Ernie Deak's "The Last Big Mistake," it has one that also functions as a love letter to Chicago grit " the kind of grit that exists not far f…
"And yet it moves." Those four words, allegedly uttered under his breath by Galileo Galilei right after recanting his views on heliocentrism under threat by the Roman Inquisition, generally …
For fans of classic cinema, Queen Christina of Sweden means Greta Garbo, who played the fascinating and troubled 17th century monarch in 1933's (highly fictionalized) "Queen Christina." Garb…
For those of us of a certain age, seeing John Leguizamo's early solo work such as 1992's "Spic-O-Rama" (which played at the old Goodman Studio) was a revelatory, if unsettling, experience. L…
 For those of us of a certain age, seeing John Leguizamo's early solo work such as 1992's "Spic-O-Rama" (which played at the old Goodman Studio) was a revelatory, if unsettling, experienc…
