704 stories by "Zach Freeman"
Regardless of what comes next, I want to say this: Under The Gun's "Camp Tree Top" is Chicago's premier onstage exhibition of short shorts. Bar none. Critics talk about "courage" onstage, bu…
There are a substantial number of reasons why I should enjoy "Patchwork Drifter," Jennifer L. Mickelson's new work that opens Babes With Blades' eighteenth season: it’s an all-female c…
As subject matter goes, national tragedies are a slippery slope. Seldom do you get to see the proverbial forest and the trees. Take for example "Katrina: Mother-in-Law of 'em All," the lates…
RECOMMENDED Green Day's "American Idiot" sounds like someone took a real work of art, hammered and sanded it into an orb of commodified meaninglessness, cooked it up under the flame of unque…
Prelude The Chicago Fringe Festival is about as "off Loop" as theater gets around these parts. Fringe's anti-establishment streak goes even deeper than its DIY spaces. It goes straight down …
RECOMMENDED More scary than conventional horror is the play that preys upon its audience with an almost plausible storyline, framed by the believable extremism that lurks in the margins …
Since it was first produced more than sixty years ago, N. Richard Nash's "The Rainmaker" has aged into a kind of blanket statement on the condition of being an American. In the twenty-first …
You know what they say: Every time a mime speaks a Dickensian orphan gets sucked into a jet turbine and blasted out the other side as just a scream. However, it is that cozy time of year whe…
You know what they say: Every time a mime speaks a Dickensian orphan gets sucked into a jet turbine and blasted out the other side as just a scream. However, it is that cozy time of year whe…
By Elle Metz On a warm, sunny Tuesday night, the founders of a new theater company have retreated into the cool, dark Jackalope Theatre in Edgewater. The large storefront windows are covered…
In the world premiere of Juan Francisco Villa's "Don Chipotle" it's difficult to distinguish between the real and the fantastical. And while that may work for Cervantes in "Don Quixote," it …
A dark and occasionally funny thriller opens the twenty-seventh season at Profiles Theatre. At first glance, Beth Henley's "The Jacksonian," a surreal Southern Gothic tale, seems like an ide…
RECOMMENDED There's a scene in Myla Goldberg's "Bee Season" where a character explores a storage locker. Instead of finding the typical packrat arrangement, he discovers a museum of trinkets…
RECOMMENDED Strawdog Theatre Company lives up to the theme of their twenty-eighth season, "The Tipping Point," by thrusting audiences into the basement kitchen of an English aristocrat just …
RECOMMENDED "This House Believes the American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro" is a lengthy title for Zachary Baker-Salmon's well condensed, seventy-minute adaption of the hist…
I'd like to offer an analogy that I think Joan Schenkar, the rare American playwright at the European-leaning Trap Door Theatre, would approve of: "The Universal Wolf" is theater as ouroboro…
RECOMMENDED Earlier this year Newcity ran a story about the opening of the Windy City Playhouse and the launch of their first season. In it, artistic director Amy Rubenstein called it "the g…
RECOMMENDED Before the performance of "In Love and Warcraft" began on Sunday night, one of the show's actors explained Halcyon Theatre's philosophy of radical hospitality: the cast, crew and…
RECOMMENDED For the most part, The Inconvenience's sixth annual "The Fly Honey Show"'s blatantly burlesque and abounding pop cultural references can make it feel specifically millennial. How…
RECOMMENDED I've never been one to keep a consistent journal, but judging by the expressive content of the readings at Under The Gun Theater's new monthly show "#TBT," my infrequent entries …
Under The Gun Theater is rife with catchy concepts. Their "Comedy Against Humanity" show was so popular that – despite an informal agreement – Cards Against Humanity objected, fo…
By Elle Metz On a bright stage in a dark room at The Annoyance Theatre in Lakeview, two men, bouncing slightly on their toes, peer into the audience. Seventeen people"mostly young and casual…
By Hugh Iglarsh At a time when pop culture often seems like the only game in town, First Floor Theater's annual literary festival is a refreshing reminder of drama's richer possibilities. Fo…
RECOMMENDED Harold Pinter’s plays famously hint at something ominous below the surface of dialogue that poetically chases itself around but ends up nowhere (“They believe in me.&…
The premise of The Public House Theatre's "Ready for Hillary: The Musical" is simple, if wacky: On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, candidates Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, an…
