Alex Huntsberger

Time Out Chicago • 31st August 2018

A Shayna Maidel

A Holocaust survivor reunites with her sister in this insightful but overly careful drama. A Shayna Maidel begins with with birth of a child during a pogrom in 19th-century Poland. Someone observes that the baby, named Mordechai, already knows not to cry—a survival instinct that the rest of the play interrogates. Barbara Lebow’s 1984 drama, which deals with transgenerational conflict in the aftermath of the Holocaust, is keenly aware of how survival instincts beget survivors’ guilt, sometimes w

Time Out Chicago • 29th August 2018

12 Chicago theater shows to see in September

Summer is fading, which can mean only one thing: Theater is back, baby! Clybourne Park author and satirist Bruce Norris debuts a new play about registered sex offenders at Steppenwolf. Feminist musical theatre company Firebrand Theatre revives Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Civil Rights-era musical Caroline, or Change. Celebrating the novel’s 200th anniversary, the first of several local Frankenstein adaptations jolts to life at Lifeline Theatre. Plus, the city’s latest Broadway tryout swoops

Time Out Chicago • 24th August 2018

Vietgone

It’s tempting to describe Writers Theatre’s production of Vietgone as a master stroke of timing. Inspired by the story of the playwright’s parents, who met and fell in love in 1975 in an Arkansas camp for Vietnamese refugees, Qui Nguyen’s 2015 show is making its Chicago debut at a time when America’s treatment of immigrants is at the forefront of the news cycle. But such a framing would do a disservice to Nguyen’s deeply personal script. After all, the play ends with Nguyen’s father, Quang (the

Time Out Chicago • 20th August 2018

Nightmares and Nightcaps: The Stories of John Collier

John Collier was a mordant midcentury wit known for his screenplays and for numerous short stories published in The New Yorker. A British expatriate, he wrote fantasy tales rich in twists and dramatic irony, delivered with a skeptical, upturned eyebrow. In other words, he’s the sort of writer who has fallen almost entirely out of style—a fate he would probably appreciate, but which Nightmares and Nightcaps: The Stories of John Collier nonetheless seeks to correct. If the play is a bit of a museu

Time Out Chicago • 2nd August 2018

The Harvest

Samuel Hunter’s smart, subtle plays are best viewed up close—a perfect fit for this Chicago stage. By the time Samuel Hunter introduces us to the dingy church basement in which his play The Harvest is set, the big news has already dropped: Four young missionaries from an evangelical congregation in Idaho Falls are heading to the Middle East, but only three of them will return. Josh (Raphael Diaz) plans to stay in the never-specified country they’re visiting to dedicate the rest of his life to m

Time Out Chicago • 20th July 2018

Everybody

A clever modern morality play brings a touch of randomness to the stage by assigning five roles via lottery each night. Morality plays have long existed to try and counter the fact that humankind is innately kind of awful. With obvious metaphors and sweeping gestures, they try to temper our worst aspects—at least according to what any given society at any given time considers to be “the worst.” One famous such morality play is Everyman, a medieval English drama based on a medieval Dutch drama b

Time Out Chicago • 18th July 2018

Victims of Duty

Michael Shannon is a detective who doesn’t solve mysteries—he only creates more of them. Let us consider, for a moment, the elusive Michael Shannon in his natural habitat: the cramped storefront stage of a A Red Orchid Theatre, the company that he helped found and to which he frequently returns. Shannon has made a thriving career in Hollywood as a thinking man’s villain, with his looming frame and bug-eyed intensity injecting eldritch weirdness into many a stock character. But to see him floppi

Time Out Chicago • 5th July 2018

Waitress

If this joyous tearjerker proves anything, it’s that we need more musicals from Sara Bareilles, pronto. The Cadillac Palace Theatre is turning into Chicago’s premier destination for musicals that once featured local actress-turned-Broadway superstar Jessie Mueller. Last December, the venue hosted a national tour of Beautiful—The Carole King Musical, and it’s currently showing Waitress, an adaptation of the late Adrienne Shelly’s beloved 2007 indie film. Mueller headlined both musicals on Broadw

Time Out Chicago • 29th June 2018

The Cher Show

The Cher Show delivers what it promises and nothing more. The Cher Show’s blunt, unassuming title is a fair proxy. It’s a show. It’s a show about Cher. It’s The Cher Show. Covering the singer/actress/icon’s early years in its first act and the next 48 years in a shorter second act, The Cher Show is too convoluted to be anything artful but has learned enough razzle-dazzle from its subject to be generally entertaining. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it is, but it ain’t got nothin

Time Out Chicago • 28th June 2018

9 Chicago theater shows to see in July

Last year, actor Stacy Keach suffered a heart attack onstage during the opening night of his one-man performance as Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona at the Goodman Theatre. Though the entire run was canceled, Keach wasn’t down for long. Pamplona is back this summer along with a robust crop of seasonal shows in venues of all sizes. From major musicals like Waitress and Heartbreak Hotel to wild experiments like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody plus Michael Shannon doing French absurdism in a storefr

Time Out Chicago • 25th May 2018

Waiting for Godot

Druid Theatre’s touring production of Beckett’s classic comedy/drama/whatever is very good and very Irish. Audiences in need of a bracing, existentialist thwack across the face would do well to make it down to Navy Pier to see Druid Theatre’s touring production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, now visiting Chicago Shakes. Director Garry Hynes has carved out a sharp, angular rendition of the text that leans into the play’s vaudeville roots, while still leaving plenty of gaps for the wailin

Time Out Chicago • 21st May 2018

Refrigerator

Lucas Baisch’s prickly technodystopia is like Philip K. Dick, emphasis on the dick. It’s the future, and 82 percent of the world’s population has uploaded its minds into a digital paradise. One of the companies that performs this procedure is IceBox, whose employees live and work in a state of semi-chaos, earning “points” that can be used in an employee lottery to gain ascension themselves. Welcome to playwright Lucas Baisch’s Refrigerator, a piercingly surreal—and surprisingly thirsty—trip dow

Time Out Chicago • 19th May 2018

The Light Fantastic

Ike Holter’s new play is smart, saucy, touching—and will scare you silly. Let me be clear here: Ike Holter’s The Light Fantastic will most definitely frighten you. Set “deep in the dark heart of motherfucking Indiana” the show is a horror story with a LeBron-like diversity of skill sets. Directed by Gus Menary, The Light Fantastic knows how to scare you out of nowhere and how to ratchet up the tension till you burst. It understands creeping dread as well as it gets how to make you jump out of y

Time Out Chicago • 1st May 2018

The Madres

‘Jane the Virgin’ star Ivonne Coll shines in this story of mothers against fascism. Until the day that history delivers us an oppressive dictatorship perpetrated entirely by women, studies in fascism will innately double as studies in misogyny. In her new play The Madres, playwright Stephanie Alison Walker makes this link explicit. The play is set in Argentina in the late 1970s during the Guerra Sucia, or “Dirty War,” in which a military junta seized power and proceeded to “disappear” tens of

Time Out Chicago • 18th April 2018

33 to Nothing

Is there anything quite so sad as being a rock musician in 2018? When do you know it’s time to give up your youthful dreams? Is it when you want to settle down and start a family? Is it when your day job turns into, like, an actual job? Is it when you don’t have fun making music or acting in plays or painting pictures anymore? Or is it that moment when you finally take a long, hard look at your life and realize: I gave this my best shot, and I still failed? For the members of the unnamed rock

Time Out Chicago • 18th April 2018

Lettie

Instead of just lecturing, this touching drama lets real-world issues inform its story. The problem with “issue” plays is that, well, they’re almost always about issues, not people. And while a certain amount of theatrical problem-solving might be able to turn that minus into a plus, it’s something that rarely happens—possibly because bold theatricality is considered to be the same thing as “risk,” and there’s nothing that terrifies artistic administrators more than actual risk. Writing a real

Time Out Chicago • 4th April 2018

The Gentleman Caller

Tennessee Williams and William Inge make a tragic duo for the ages. The Glass Menagerie, the 1944 play that launched Tennessee Williams to stardom, originally had a different title: The Gentleman Caller. And it’s that name that Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins has repurposed for this original story (based on true events) of Williams’s relationship with fellow playwright, gay man, and alcoholic William Inge. It’s a beautiful play, equal parts Williams, Inge, and Dawkins himself—a stiff, intoxic

Time Out Chicago • 22nd March 2018

Through the Elevated Line

In this update of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ a gay Iranian man struggles to contend with trauma and acceptance. Assimilation is a hell of a drug. Even as many try to reckon with just how un-osmosed this country really is—at least compared to how they once idealized it—it’s also true that America has swallowed whole innumerable cultures, traditions, and peoples. The free market is great for that; no matter the color of a person’s skin, their money’s still green, same as anyone else’s. But it’s

Time Out Chicago • 22nd March 2018

An Enemy of the People

That a play written almost 150 years ago is still this relevant proves deeply unsettling. The best thing a revival of a classic play can do is remind you that this, what you’re going through right now, is neither new nor special. These thoughts, these feelings, these widespread societal problems have been here for centuries—and they will likely be here for centuries more. And while adaptor and director Robert Falls has certainly tipped the scales in his favor with his new version of Henrik Ibse

Time Out Chicago • 21st March 2018

Sweeney Todd

Theo Ubique bids farewell to the No Exit Café with a bloody good show. For its last full-length production in the No Exit Café, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre is putting its audiences within sniffing distance of Mrs. Lovett’s famous meat pies. And while Sweeney Todd is a show made for operatic houses, it fits quite snugly in this theater’s long-time Rogers Park home. As cast members move in and about the audience—a certain amount of twisting and neck-craning is involved—they drag the grime and the

Time Out Chicago • 18th December 2017

Violet

A singular lead performance makes this early musical from composer Jeanine Tesori something really special. The hardest road for any piece of musical theater to walk is that of genuine, homespun grit. When characters are constantly bursting into song and dance, it’s difficult to simultaneously make folks buy into the dirt under their nails and the dust on their boots. Many musicals solve this by steering wide of anything that even resembles grit. It’s all sequins and top hats: artifice so artif

Time Out Chicago • 18th December 2017

Altar Boyz

This boy-band musical comes from a pre-social media age, and it should have stayed there. Until either a meteor or an atomic bomb hits (my money’s on the bomb), boy bands are never going to go out of style. New Kids on the Block gave way to ’N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, which gave way to One Direction, which gave way to BTS, which will inevitably give way to some new clustering of fresh-faced future youths. In that sense, the 2005 musical Altar Boyz, with music and lyrics by Gary Adler and

Time Out Chicago • 18th December 2017

Red Velvet

This story of an actor who refused to pander to racist audiences does some very effective pandering itself. The playing space that Gary Griffin and designer Scott M. Davis have created for his production ofLolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet is a hybrid stage and prison cell. With a large wreath of red curtain hanging overhead that’s drawn down to cover scene changes—as though watching actors and crew move furniture around was somehow indecent—the space is incredibly isolating. And intentionally so

Time Out Chicago • 12th December 2017

Beautiful—The Carole King Musical

Chicago actor Sarah Bockel is fantastic as Carole King in an uneven show that’s got perfect timing. When Beautiful—The Carole King Musical first opened on Broadway in late 2013, the buzz was all about former Chicago actor Jessie Mueller’s lead performance; when the first national tour arrived in Chicago two years later, it was Jessie’s sister, Abby Mueller, in the title role. So an audience member might be forgiven for wondering whether the touring production’s return would be worth checking ou

Time Out Chicago • 12th December 2017

Wicked

An undeniably “Popular” Broadway hit, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Oz prequel returns to the Oriental Theatre. Have you heard of this musical called Wicked? It’s very good. I’ve been reviewing plays semi-professionally (meaning I get paid to do it, I just don’t get paid that much) for going on six years now, so it might come as a surprise that I’d never seen Wicked, one of the most popular musicals of the new millennium, until now. I was familiar with the show’s premise, and I could h

Time Out Chicago • 11th December 2017

Puff: Believe It Or Not

This fun, period farce refuses to be anything more, no matter how hard it tries. It’s a tricky proposition, putting on a classical play that you hope will speak directly to the present moment. Rare is the story or work from ages past that translates perfectly to a modern setting. Social mores change. They change a lot. Often the best you can hope for is a story that hits the general themes plaguing modern audiences, even if its actual take on the issues isn’t quite up to date. Such is the case

Time Out Chicago • 30th November 2017

Wild Boar

This smart Hong Kong detective story plays it loose, but a stiff production keeps it from taking off. Candace Chong’s Hong Kong-set play Wild Boar (adapted here by David Henry Hwang from a translation by Joanna C. Lee and Ken Smith) mixes its genres in a style not unlike the odd “one country, two systems” status of Hong Kong itself. The play is a mystery thriller, a romance, a wry comedy and a semi-dystopic parable that eerily suits the current political moment. The mixture isn’t a fluid one;

Time Out Chicago • 16th November 2017

Fade

Tanya Saracho’s new play takes on racism and sexism but is equally concerned with the dangers of selling out. This new play by Chicago playwright (and current TV-writing Angeleno) Tanya Saracho begins with Lucia (Sari Sanchez), a Mexican-born novelist-turned-TV-writer, trying to converse in Spanish with Abel (Eddie Martinez), an American janitor of Mexican descent at the TV studio where she’s just been hired. He pointedly ignores her, bristling at her presumption that Spanish would be his prefe

Time Out Chicago • 16th November 2017

Lizzie

If one were to choose the inaugural production for a brand new feminist musical theater company, one that was to debut amid a never-before-seen unearthing of male sexual predation amidst the country’s cultural and political elites, than you probably couldn’t pick a better show than Lizzie, a rock musical retelling of the tale of Lizzie Borden, America’s favorite axe murderess. And in director Victoria Bussert’s swaggering, ass-kicking production for Firebrand Theatre, news-weary audiences will

Time Out Chicago • 9th November 2017

Captain Steve’s Caring Kingdom

The Factory Theater’s bawdy take on the secret lives of ’80s kids’ show characters is too predictable to shock. The premise behind Mike Ooi’s Captain Steve’s Caring Kingdom poses a fairly simple question: What do the characters of an ’80s, H.R. Pufnstuf-esque kids’ show get up to whenever their host, Captain Steve, isn’t around? And the answer it provides is also simple: The animal denizens of the Caring Kingdom live fairly miserable, workaday lives. Their marriages falter or fail, their bosses

Time Out Chicago • 26th October 2017

1980 (Or Why I’m Voting for John Anderson)

Jackalope Theatre Company’s new play about a doomed third-party candidacy offers a bright outlook in dark political times. Third-party candidates can all too often seem like they’re the “new exercise regime” of American politics. People make lots of noise about ditching the two-party system, about finally, this time, voting for someone who isn’t a Democrat or a Republican… only to end up voting for their preferred political party when it becomes clear just how long the odds of a third-party can

Time Out Chicago • 23rd October 2017

Hard Times

Lookingglass returns to its 2001 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s allegorical tale of yearning in an Industrial Age mill town. With its stark juxtaposition between the free-living world of the circus and the hard-bitten life of a northern English milltown, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is not just a perfect fit for a Lookingglass/Actor’s Gymnasium collaboration, it’s also a perfect fit for our present times. And it’s not as though this is news to anyone. The original production, adapted and dire

Time Out Chicago • 18th October 2017

The Skin of Our Teeth

Remy Bumppo Theatre Company revives Thornton Wilder’s fanciful comedy about a nuclear family that lives through eons of human history. The most astounding thing about The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1942 behemoth, is that is still feels so radically experimental today. And unlike Wilder’s quietly radical Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth makes no effort to hide its eon-spanning, reality-shredding weirdness. It’s the play in which Wilder lets down his hair, grows ou

Time Out Chicago • 18th October 2017

Two Mile Hollow

Playwright Leah Nanako Winkler tweaks the privileged-Caucasian-family-secrets genre in this biting satire. The opening image of Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow is a sad white woman sitting on her porch swing, sadly clutching a pillow with an air of, oh what’s the word, let’s just go with “sadness.” Now, if you’re the kind of person who reads that sentence and promptly throws your phone across the room then hold on a second, because, surprisingly, Two Mile Hollow is exactly the show for yo

Time Out Chicago • 18th October 2017

Les Misérables

One tour more: The bombastic musical based on Victor Hugo’s novel of suffering and rebellion in 19th-century France is back again. Here’s the thing about Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Misérables: It might actually be the perfect piece of middlebrow entertainment. Based on the epic (i.e. long) 1862 novel by Victor Hugo, it is high-minded and literary enough to appeal to the upper-crusters while stuffed with enough romance and melodrama to satisfy the rabble (a.k.a. tourists).

Time Out Chicago • 13th October 2017

Evening at the Talk House

A Red Orchid Theatre mounts the Chicago premiere of Wallace Shawn’s dystopian cocktail-party comedy. (This is comedy, right?) Wallace Shawn seems to have a particular interest in how intellectuals and artists respond to totalitarianism. And if his new play Evening at the Talk House were to be lined up alongside his older works Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Designated Mourner, you wouldn’t come away with a heart swollen full of hope. Now receiving its Chicago premiere at A Red Orchid Theatre under

Time Out Chicago • 13th October 2017

The Invisible Hand

The capture of an American banker by Pakistani extremists turns into an explainer on the link between global markets and ideology in Ayad Akhtar’s 2014 work. There’s a moment in Ayad Akhtar’s 2014 play The Invisible Hand when you can see the play you think it’s becoming. It’s when Citibank financier Nick Bright (Joel Reitsma) and his captor, the British-Pakistani Bashir (Owais Ahmed), use inside info about a suicide bombing to short some local water futures. (Having this kind of information is

Time Out Chicago • 7th October 2017

Ghosts & Zombies

Contemporary Swedish playwright Gustav Tegby adds a little something to Ibsen’s drama in this brainy (and brain-hungry) mashup. Those unfamiliar with Henrik Ibsen might think this play will be a straightforward evening of spooks and night bumps. And while the play certainly contains those, it’s also something a bit more (or less, depending on your opinion of literary mashups). Ghosts & Zombies might be more accurately titled Ghosts, a play by Henrik Ibsen, featuring some zombies added by playwr

Time Out Chicago • 7th October 2017

Foxfinder

Dawn King’s dystopian tale of a near-future England wracked by blight and hunger is rendered in remarkable detail in Interrobang’s excellent Midwest premiere. Fans of fantasy and science fiction often talk about the importance of world-building, that accumulation of detail that makes any setting, no matter how fantastical, feel like a real place. Foxfinder, by British playwright Dawn King, is one of the best examples of world-building I’ve seen onstage in quite some time. It introduces the audi

Time Out Chicago • 29th September 2017

Building the Wall

Robert Schenkkan’s rapid response to last year’s presidential election proves wearying to scale. With the recent Broadway and HBO success of All The Way, his play about Lyndon Johnson, playwright Robert Schenkkan might seem like an ideal candidate to write a future-tense play about the Trump administration. And Schenkkan’s new play, written in under a week soon after last November’s election, is anti-Trump both in style and in content, but it’s done in by its utter, plodding dullness. While it’

Time Out Chicago • 19th December 2016

Honky Tonk Angels

The storytelling’s left to the songwriters in this unembellished but well-cast country-music revue. Country music makes a fine companion for musical theater, due in no small part to the lyrical straightforwardness of songs like “Harper Valley PTA” and “Ode to Billie Joe”, both of which are featured in Honky Tonk Angels, a jukebox musical from Ted Swindley (Always…Patsy Cline). Directed in Theo Ubique’s Chicago premiere by Courtney Crouse, the show features a whole array of country music classic

Time Out Chicago • 12th December 2016

Pygmalion

Professor Higgins is a jerk in Remy Bumppo’s memory-play take on Shaw’s class comedy. Henry Higgins is a dick. If there’s one thing that director Shawn Douglass makes perfectly clear in his  clean, clear-eyed new production of this George Bernard Shaw classic, it’s that. And after watching the wonderful Nick Sandys in a performance that practically flays the character alive, it’s hard not to agree. The way Sandys plays him, Higgins is an ancestor to the modern manchild. He’s still brilliant, o

Time Out Chicago • 12th December 2016

King Charles III

Mike Bartlett’s imagined ascendance of Prince Charles feels like it’s already evolving with our real-life game of thrones. The events of November 8, 2016, changed a lot of things, and the way people will view this play is one of them. What before might have seemed like an amusing, though probing, meditation on celebrity and power in the digital age now reads as a harrowing look into the precariousness of political norms and institutions. There are several moments in King Charles III that might

Time Out Chicago • 26th November 2016

A Hedda Gabler

In adapting Ibsen’s world-beating realist classic, Hedda Gabler, writer Nigel O’Hearn goes small. He has cut the play down and simplified the action to a lean 100-or-so minutes­—all the better for audiences to focus in on the heroine’s complex psychology. However, it would seem that a great deal of that psychology has also been simplified or lost entirely—at least that appears to be the case with director Max Truax’s production here, his first as Red Tape Theatre’s artistic director. For the no

Time Out Chicago • 26th November 2016

Finding Neverland

An origin story for Peter Pan’s creator summons minimal magic on tour. Baseball fans are probably familiar with the term “replacement level,” which basically means the bare minimum level at which a major league player can be expected to play and still have a job. Well, if any theatergoers out there might be wondering what a replacement level Broadway musical looks like, Finding Neverland is it. It does the job, but just barely. Based on the 2004 Johnny Depp movie of the same name (which was in

Time Out Chicago • 22nd November 2016

Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley

Middle sister Mary Bennet gets a Christmas wish in a charming sequel to Jane Austen. You don’t need to be a diehard Jane Austen–head to enjoy the world premiere of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley. A “sequel” to Austen’s inescapably famous novel Pride and Prejudice, the play mostly stands alone as an enjoyable period farce. And while there are some moments that will certainly resonate with fans of the original book, it might actually appeal more to casual fans than to diehards. Austen’s drie

Time Out Chicago • 22nd November 2016

Electra

Court’s Greek trilogy concludes, but the tragic cycle never ends. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That was written by William Faulkner, but it could describe the house of Atreus pretty well. Perhaps that’s why director Seret Scott chose a decaying southern estate as the setting for her production of Sophocles’ Electra. Capping off a three-year, pseudo-trilogy of new translations from Court Theatre’s founding artistic director Nicholas Rudall, the play is filled with characters wh

Time Out Chicago • 15th November 2016

dirty butterfly

A timely U.S. premiere bracingly examines our responsibility to our neighbors. In a time when many folks are wondering, “What could I have done?” and “Should I have done more?”, the U.S. premiere of Debbie Tucker Green’s 2003 play dirty butterfly arrives like a bracing slap in the face. It’s a story about domestic abuse that concerns itself more with the effects of that act than with the act itself. Directed here by Azar Kazemi with sleek, stiletto-blade focus, dirty butterfly is a tough but ve

Time Out Chicago • 10th November 2016

The Little Flower of East Orange

It took Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Little Flower of East Orange eight years to premiere in Chicago. For comparison, his plays The Motherf**ker With The Hat and Between Riverside and Crazy took only one and two years, respectively. So why did this tale of a dying, guilt-ridden Bronx woman and her junkie writer son take so long (basically the entire Obama administration) to make the leap? The answer, it would seem, is that Little Flower is kind of a mess—like if The Glass Menagerie got turduckened

Time Out Chicago • 5th November 2016

Betrayal

Harold Pinter’s classic play has too much fizzle, not enough spark in Raven’s revival. How fortunate that Raven Theater’s production of Betrayal, written by Harold Pinter when the future Nobel Prize winner was at the height of his ominous powers, comes so soon after A Red Orchid Theatre’s production of Pinter’s first play, The Room. Their runs even overlap for a few weeks; audiences who have the time and money to see both plays should so. In The Room, first produced in 1957, you see a young ar

Time Out Chicago • 27th October 2016

Octagon

When these seven slam poets battle it out, Chicago audiences are the real winners. For some time now, the vaunted “we say it to their faces” Chicago style of theatre has really been shorthand for “middle-aged white people yelling at each other.” And while that might have seemed pretty radical 30 years ago, in 2016 the “Chicago style” either has to evolve, or it has to die. Here’s the good news: That evolution is well under way. If you want proof, just head up to the Broadway Armory and sit you

Time Out Chicago • 25th October 2016

Zombie Broads

There are two types of zombie stories: Ones where zombies are utterly terrifying (Night of the Living Dead) and ones where zombies exist mostly to be killed in totally awesome ways (Zombieland). With Zombie Broads, writers Corrbette Pasko and Sara Sevigny have set out to create the latter. And with the help of director Janice L. Blixt, they have succeeded with flying colors. Well mostly, one flying color: blood red. The play’s title comes from a Zombie-themed “book group” run by doomsday preppe

Time Out Chicago • 20th October 2016

The Happiest Place on Earth

Early in his one-man show, The Happiest Place on Earth, playwright Philip Dawkins runs through a number of family photographs. Each is taken at the same spot—in the “Frontierland” section of Disneyland, near the ferry to Tom Sawyer’s Island—but they span over several decades. You see, trips to Disneyland—especially around Christmas—are something of a tradition for Dawkins’s family. And like all family traditions, there’s a story behind it. The heart of the play is the family’s first such trip.

Time Out Chicago • 16th October 2016

Life Sucks

Most Chicago audiences probably know Aaron Posner from the astounding production of The Tempest that he co-directed with Teller (of Penn and Teller) last year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But others will know him from the punk rock squall that was Sideshow Theatre’s wonderful production of Stupid F*cking Bird, Posner’s adaptation/response/reimagining of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Now Posner has done the same for Uncle Vanya with Life Sucks, now playing at Lookingglass. The play defies tradi

Time Out Chicago • 13th October 2016

Merge

The funny, fascinating history of Atari is enough; no need to keep mashing the controller. In telling the story of the video-game company Atari, local playwright Spenser Davis goes big. His play Merge, premiering with the New Colony, spans almost 30 years and uses 16 actors to portray dozens of characters. And if that seems like overkill, it’s really not. The tale of Atari earns that real estate. Probably the most important of the play’s many characters is Nolan Bushnell (Wes Needham), a bored

Time Out Chicago • 10th October 2016

The Room

Time and time again in director Dado’s powerful production of Harold Pinter’s 1957 play, it’s hard not to be reminded of the current political climate. Set in a rundown, English bedsit shared by Rose (Kirsten Fitzgerald) and her uncommunicative husband, Bert (HB Ward), The Room could be read as a lonely, fearful woman’s descent into madness. If the play, which was Pinter’s first, were set in 2016, one could easily imagine Rose as a Donald Trump supporter. Of course, this being Pinter, the play

Time Out Chicago • 10th October 2016

Apartment 3A

The cast is solidly constructed, but this script should be condemned. It’s appropriate that playwright (and world-famous actor) Jeff Daniels set his play Apartment 3A not in any specific place, but in a generic “Midwestern City.” You see, this faux-allegorical hand-waving of specific details also describes many other things in the play: for instance, the lives of its three main characters. Watching them muddle through Daniels’s weak simulacrum of “adulthood” is like watching someone teach human

Time Out Chicago • 10th October 2016

The Burials

A powerful take on school shootings doesn’t pander to its young audience. Steppenwolf’s premiere of playwright Caitlin Parrish’s The Burials, directed by her frequent collaborator, Erica Weiss, is a part of the company’s Steppenwolf for Young Adults program. And while the play, which is inspired by Antigone, is intended for younger audiences, it does almost nothing to soften the state of our country’s horrific addiction to firearms. And why should it? This is the kind of news that kids are seei

Time Out Chicago • 4th October 2016

Psmith, Journalist

There’s plenty of wit but too little life in this adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse. So there’s this play about a rich, eccentric Brit who takes over a struggling New York media company, cleans house, and starts taking on rich slum lords (with a side hustle in sports promotion). Sounds pretty relevant, right? This play must be brand spanking new! Except it’s not. This play is based P.G. Wodehouse’s comic novel Psmith, Journalist—written in 1910, over a century ago—and adapted for this production by

Time Out Chicago • 3rd October 2016

Skooby Don't

Like your uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, you’ll wish this fun drag show would stop arguing about politics. If you’re going into the latest David Cerda joint from Hell in a Handbag Productions expecting a simple drag parody of Scooby Doo, be warned that you’re getting something far more complicated—and frustrating. Skooby Don’t, directed by Derek Van Barham, begins with a familiar team of mystery solvers: Fredd (Will Kazda), Daffy (Elizabeth Lesinski), Velva (Caitlin Jackson), Scaggy (Josh Kempe