‘Black Renaissance’ works best as show of musical defiance
Earlier this month, Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on “The Late Show,” where he seemed to rattle Stephen Colbert by refusing to say that he had hope for the United States. As...
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World premiere ‘Two Mile Hollow’ takes on the white-family plays
A troubled family gathers one last time at their ancestral home after the death of the patriarch. Over the course of the play, drinks are guzzled, grievances are aired and...
Antrobus family is a stand-in for the rest of us in ‘Skin of Our Teeth’
Global climate change, cataclysmic hurricanes, the threat of world war — with headlines like those, who wouldn't want to escape to the theater? Kidding aside, Remy Bumppo has picked a...
Fine time for a werewolf story in ‘The Man-Beast’ at First Folio
Lycanthropes, rejoice. (You know how to rejoice, don't you? Just throw your head back and howl.) There's a werewolf story prowling Mayslake Peabody Estate in a DuPage County forest preserve,...
Arguments swirl around a patient in a mental hospital in ‘Blue/Orange’
The relationship between psychiatrist and patient offers a wealth of dramatic possibilities. You've got the power dynamic between an authority figure and a person whose fate may well rest in...
What about these voices? First-time ‘Destinos’ theater fest has an answer
Last month's Emmy Awards may have represented a stride toward diversity for many artists of color. But as Patricia Garcia of Vogue (and many others) noted, "Where were the awards...
‘Muthaland’ is Minita Gandhi’s not-so-simple solo show about homelands
Elizabeth Gilbert's popular 2006 healing-heartbreak-through-travel memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love," earned backlash from those who saw it as a high-profile example of privileged Western women buying their way to peace and...
Period romance plays out as a board game in clever ‘Sylvester’
Using your socially connected friends and acquaintances as models for your fictional characters often leads to blowback. Just ask Truman Capote, who became an outcast when excerpts from his unfinished...
On a bigger stage, ‘Million Dollar Quartet’ is still a blast
For nearly eight years, "Million Dollar Quartet" packed the intimate Apollo Theater in Lincoln Park. The story of the fabled night that four giants of popular music all turned up...
‘The Heavens Are Hung in Black’ is a play set during Lincoln’s darkest hours
Early 2009 seems like a lifetime ago — a point when the inauguration of the first African-American president signaled that, while racism was far from over, it at least couldn't...