Richard Christiansen

Does the name Elmer Rice mean anything to you? Probably not. Since his death in 1967, and even before then, this once-eminent playwright has been in the shadows of American...

Deeper and darker, curiouser and curiouser goes Jeffrey Sweet's "Immoral Imperatives," taking us, and the playwright, into a territory that's risky to explore. As in "Bluff" and "Flyovers," two of...

War, in "Mother Courage and Her Children," is not an abstraction or an environment. It is a voracious, implacable, almost palpable and inevitable force of destruction. There are no battle...

Even with a recent $1 million infusion, producers of the national tour of "The Full Monty" plan to postpone the rest of the show's 2001 dates, including Washington, D.C., and...

One does not ordinarily view The Second City, home of cutting-edge satire, as a place of refuge, but in this extraordinary time, our venerable cabaret theater is indeed a haven...

Chicago's entertainment industry, still feeling its way through an uncertain period, is moving to shore up its business and encourage its audiences. In the wake of the Sept. 11 events,...

Congo Square Theatre Company, which began its first season last year, swept all six top categories in the seventh annual Black Theatre Alliance Awards. The troupe's "Before It Hits Home,"...

For reasons of curiosity, nostalgia and guilt, and because Sept. 16-23 had been declared Museum Week by the City of Chicago, I promised myself early this month that sometime soon...

The scene you're going to remember forever from JoAnne Akalaitis' production of at Court Theatre is the Diet Coke bit. In the second act of this historical drama, Queen Elizabeth...