Skylar Tarnas' world premiere play They Broke Up (produced by Avalanche Theatre and performing at Rivendell Theatre) is absolutely exhausting. It's close to three hours long, the pace is relentless, the screaming is rampant, and the absurdity is cranked up to 11 before we even meet the
Watching a Samuel Beckett play often feels like experiencing an apocalypse in real time. His characters exist in desolate landscapes, practically carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, and by the play's end, we bear witness to whether they give in to that weight, or if
There's been a noticeable lack of mirth and whimsy in Chicago's theatre scene as of late. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, shows that emphatically embraced the art of play - typically by adapting myths and legends and public domain storytelling into outsized fantasy extravaganzas - were often the
For better or worse, Religion and Theater make excellent bedfellows, don't they? On an institutional level, they value (or purport to value, anyway) community, trust, and the act of suspending one's disbelief to put faith into the unimaginable. That word faith is a slippery one, though.
It's incredibly tempting to see a play that asks interesting questions and tackles thorny, complicated material and immediately equate that with the play being Good. Sadly, themes and questions can only carry you so far, and Dominique Morisseau's multigenerational Mud Row, now being staged at Theater
There's an incredibly tenuous relationship with the truth that's attempting to uphold Annika Andersson's The Trick of Threes, now playing in a bold and frustrating new production under the direction of Rebecca Rose Schilsky with Instrumental Theatre Company. A solo play with five performers
Alongside Degrassi, Nirvanna the Band the Show, and the works of Guy Maddin, one of the more notable Canadian cultural exports of the 21st century (from my vantage point, at least) would have to be Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell's eclectic-to-a-fault musical Ride the Cyclone,
"The word of the day is becoming." Bellowed to us like we're the audience of some otherworldly TV show, a chorus of contorting "creatures" writhe across the stage and consistently insert dread into an otherwise jovial atmosphere, reminding us that our time is limited,
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