There’s a humorous (if perhaps apocryphal) line attributed to the great John Waters that I see tossed around the internet every now and then; “If you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, 'the cinematography was beautiful,' it's a bad
There's a very specific strain of British Playwriting that runs from Harold Pinter to Caryl Churchill to Sarah Kane to Mike Bartlett all the way to Alice Birch and beyond. You know it when you hear it; fragmented conversations, overlapping dialogue, an emphasis on repetition, specific circumstances hiding
If you'd come up to me right after my performance of Ryn Hardiman's The Complex Whole So Formed, their new techno-theatrical memoir playing right now at The Neo-Futurists, and asked me to sum up the show in one word, I'd likely have
For much of the 2000s and 2010s, The Gift Theatre resided in a 50-seat storefront in Jefferson Park, their ever-growing ensemble packing into taught quarters to craft sprawling dreams and visceral realities. This enigmatic troupe of Equity performers put themselves on the map with singular dissections of canonized
"No one ever really talks about how your twenties suck," a character earnestly soliloquizes partway through Madeleine Bohn's Someone Else's Nowhere, a world premiere play with SixEleven Theatre Company. I was extremely taken with this line, spoken sincerely and with great conviction by Madeline
You can call Karen Zacarias' Native Gardens a lot of things, but you'd be remiss to call it "subtle." When we're not being lectured with tired metaphors (yep, the white couple's garden unknowingly encroaching on the property of the minority couple
Bill Daniel's Two Out of Three Falls, now premiering at The Factory Theater, is - for better or worse - exactly what you want it to be, and your capacity for art to arrive as is, with little to challenge or surprise you, will likely determine how you walk away
I have an upcoming "Ben Kaye's Cultural Questionnaire" with many fun and varied questions, but I got one pair of questions that I felt deserved its own dedicated post; - name some local theaters you think are overrated, coward - top five movie theaters in Chicago (chains and
Upon immediate entry into the venue for Split Lip Theater's (no, not them) Uncle Vanya, you're going to hear snoring. That would be Vanya - or rather, Pete Laughlin as Vanya - sleeping in a chair right at the entrance. Sonya (Moriah Martel) will then check you in
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If you're someone particularly interested in stories about astronauts finding themselves isolated in space that also inexplicably feature impressive feats of puppetry, then my guess is you're having a pretty stellar 2026. Alongside the big-budget crowd-pleasing of the film PROJECT HAIL MARY, we now
First Floor Theater's latest production - reid tang's WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY, directed by Tina El Gamal, now playing at Raven Theater - is a dizzying work whose highs are intoxicating and whose lows are infuriating. If anything, it captures our modern-day hellscape almost too
The deadly allure of television sitcoms is, among much else, their enduring sense of stability. With a few narrative exceptions along the way, the TV sitcom provides comfort, familiarity, and a sense of ease, with the same characters in the same environments week after week. They may continue to get