1,044 stories by "Kerry Reid"
Long before she won the Pulitzer Prize for "Ruined," her searing drama about abused young women in the Congo seeking respite from soldiers on both sides of a civil war by working in a bar/br…
We often hear that what separates animals from humans is that the former don't know that they're going to die. Of course, since we lack the interspecies communications skills of Dr. Dolittle…
Before playwright Lydia Diamond went to Broadway in 2011 with "Stick Fly," her compelling and witty story of a wealthy black family on Martha's Vineyard confronting secrets and prejudices, s…
What does it mean to record your experiences even as you're experiencing them? Are you living a life of pastiche, with the cultural influences and opinions of friends and strangers who are j…
In a way, theater is a year-round Halloween party " it's all about dressing up and pretending to be someone (or something) you're not. But in honor of the ghostly season, several companies o…
After the disastrous Great Chicago Fire Festival this month, Redmoon Theater gets back to basics in a big way. Which is to say, a small way. Well, in a way.
They say Rome wasn't built in a day, but its final collapse takes place over one histrionic 24-hour period in Gore Vidal's "Romulus," which he adapted from Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenm…
16th Street Theater has made much of the subject of neighbors in recent years. Steven Simoncic's "Broken Fences" last fall examined gentrification's impact on a West Side neighborhood. In Sh…
If two shows can constitute a trend, then the latter half of 2014 is turning into the Year of the Desperate Woman Waiting for a Bus. In Martyna Majok's "Ironbound," produced in August with S…
Creative resurrectionists can never let Mary Shelley's creature rest in peace. They pick at the bones of her story and refashion her monster into a postmodern Prometheus in their own images,…
Though the shootings of unarmed black men by police officers have understandably had an increasing profile in public discourse since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Mo., the Agency T…
Trap Door Theatre has made the works of Polish proto-absurdist Stanislaw Witkiewicz ("Witkacy" to the cognoscenti) a specialty from the very beginning " "The Madman and the Nun" is listed as…
Overt physical violence has never been a hallmark of Edward Albee's work " he's good enough at the verbal variety of bloodletting, lord knows. But there is nearly always a dark foreboding of…
As the heat rises between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, the state of Chicago public education has come under the stage lights in a trifecta of new play…
The distance between Berlin and Broadway is about 4,000 miles. The distance between the onlookers and the performers in Theo Ubique's "A Kurt Weill Cabaret" can be as close as 4 inches. Yet …
Skyline StageWorks makes its inaugural bow with Patricia Henritze and Shawna Tucker's reduced take on Shakespeare's tragedy. "Antony and Cleopatra: Undone" feels more unfinished than undone.…
Chuck O'Connor's period-piece drama has the aura of an old basement rec room, where the musty memories of family arguments cling to the walls, no matter how much psychic ammonia one applies.…
Charlotte Bronte's best-known novel, as adapted by Christina Calvit, makes its third appearance since 1991 on Lifeline's stage. But this production, directed by Dorothy Milne, marks my first…
Tony Fitzpatrick's latest show is his swan song to Chicago " the 55-year-old artist/poet/performer/provocateur is packing up and moving down to the Big Easy by the end of the year. But in "T…
A crisis on the water unfolds in Anne Walaszek's "Lamp Oil," presented by Duplicity Ensemble at the Ketchup-less Stage (aka the Gift Theatre). A sailor (Gabriel Franken), who has been left a…
The Chicago Fringe Festival turns 5 this year and is celebrating with nearly 50 performances scattered around the Jefferson Park neighborhood.
The enthusiastic homecoming for the Jackie Robinson West Little League team this past week ran through my mind as I watched Luis Caballero's hagiographic "Clemente: The Legend of 21." Is it …
The last time I saw "The Arsonists" " Max Frisch's 1953 masterwork about the dangers of ignoring the obvious " was at Trap Door in 2012. That production was heavily influenced by European cl…
A late-night show that requires its audience to huddle together on floor mats and tiny stools is already asking a lot. But Morgan Ashley Madison's "Fairytales: Not Suitable for Children," ru…
Neil Gaiman's 2002 fantasy novel about a precocious 12-year-old girl, Coraline Jones, who finds a parallel and increasingly scary world on the other side of a brick wall in her home, got two…
