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Sideshow Theatre Company Offers Artistic Residency to Playwright Preston Choi

CHICAGO (July 22, 2021) – Sideshow Theatre Company has announced they will be offering a nine-month artistic residency to Chicago-based playwright Preston Choi. Through the residency, Sideshow will provide Choi with artistic and dramaturgical support as he develops his full-length play Drive-In to the End of the World. The residency will culminate in March 2022 with a reading of Choi’s final script. This residency strengthens the existing artistic partnership between Sideshow Theatre and Choi, who had previously been selected to participate in Sideshow’s new-play development program, “The Freshness Initiative.”

Artistic Director Regina Victor expressed their excitement for Sideshow’s continued partnership with Choi: “Preston originally joined us in collaboration for The Freshness, but as many of us have experienced, quarantine and working remotely have drastically altered the process. We have instead decided to innovate and devise a residency that would once again center this talented playwright, whom we are fortunate to host. This was a thrilling opportunity to take a step back from the capitalist mindset and center ourselves in practices of process over product and the limitless potential world-building of Black Radical Imagination.”

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‘Lipstick Lobotomy’ at Trap Door Theatre Explores Gender in Mental Health

Lipstick Lobotomy, written by Krista Knight and directed by Kate Hendrickson, takes place in a women’s sanitarium in the early 1940’s, conveyed here by a delightfully unsettling green-and-white color palette across the production that evokes the eerie sanitized atmosphere of a hospital. We meet our main character, Ginny (Ann Sonnevile), as she arrives at the hospital straight off the heels of separating from her husband. Ginny immediately meets and befriends fellow patient Rosemary Kennedy (played with a lovable charm by Abby Blankenship, and who is, yes, of those Kennedys). Rosemary struggles with her own mental disability, and against her family’s desire to make her undergo a lobotomy, while Ginny undergoes the opposite struggle. She wants to get a lobotomy in order to stave off her lifelong depression, but her family is understandably horrified at the prospect.

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‘The Tasters’ at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble Builds a Dystopian World

Fresh out of Victory Garden’s 2019 IGNITION Festival, Meghan Brown’s The Tasters, has found an apt home in this World Premiere production at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble. Set in a dystopia where food shortages are the norm and the markers of democracy are quickly fading away, this play, directed by RTE member Devon de Mayo, focuses on the “tasters,” the people of this world tasked with tasting food for poison before it is eaten by government leaders. The production excels at displaying this dystopia on stage; however, the direction seems more attentive to the worldbuilding and design than these women’s relationships or struggles.

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Past and Present Collide in ‘Leopard Play, or sad songs for lost boys’ at Steep Theatre

Often nostalgia and trauma share the same home. For Isaac Gomez, that place is El Paso, Texas. His new script, Leopard Play, or sad songs for lost boys, features a character who is only billed as “Son.” After ten years, Son returns to El Paso for a memorial in honor of his uncle who died of a heart attack — or at least that’s what the autopsy says. In a search for answers surrounding his uncle’s mysterious death, Son must confront painful family dynamics and his own romantic relationships. In Steep Theatre’s world premiere production, directed by Laura Alcalá Baker, the past squares off against the present for an electrifying and emotive piece of theatre. The Leopard Play will have you wanting to call your parents and go out dancing.

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‘Grace and the Hanukkah Miracle’ at Chicago Immersive is a Kid-Friendly, Time-Traveling Romp Through Jewish History

Grace and the Hanukkah Miracle is an immersive theatre piece in which an unnamed, protagonist in a cowboy hat (Anderson Lawfer) asks the audience to go on a wild time-traveling  adventure so as to retrieve his wife Grace’s (Nicole Bloomsmith) family menorah and present it to her as a Hanukkah gift. The rest of the show unfolds almost like a video game, as you and your fellow audience members progress through different rooms in the basement of Grace Lutheran Church in Evanston — collecting clues, solving basic puzzles, and interacting with characters from various points in Jewish history. Continue reading “‘Grace and the Hanukkah Miracle’ at Chicago Immersive is a Kid-Friendly, Time-Traveling Romp Through Jewish History”

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‘Cold Town/ Hotline: A Chicago Holiday Story’ at Raven Theatre

(left to right) Jeanne T. Arrigo, Sam Linda, Dennis Garcia and Caroline Chu. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

The bitter cold and the holiday season are both barreling into Chicago, and no one is immune from the overwhelming combination. In an effort to combat this special brand of wintry blues, Raven Theatre’s Cold Town/ Hotline: A Chicago Holiday Story takes it back to 1983, where a ragtag group of Chicagoans volunteer their time at a holiday hotline called the Yule Connection. Folks are invited to call in and chat about their seasonal stressors, but when one young caller makes an in-person visit, the team bands together to find a little connection of their own. Like a lot of holiday memories, this world premiere, written and directed by Eli Newell, has bursts of heartwarming holiday sentiment that break through a series of meandering moments.

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Key Reviews: Multimedia Edition

The Key: Young Critics Mentorship Program is back with this year’s Multimedia Edition. After a class session with Vulture staff writer Angelica Jade Bastien, we encouraged our students to write about any piece of art that was not live theatre. The topics chosen range from the legacy of Breaking Bad in media, to the Joffrey Ballet’s Jane Eyre, to William Tyler’s album cover art. Finding your passion is a key component of a sustainable career in arts journalism!  This year’s cohort: Ada Alozie, Alisa Boland, Anyah Royale Akanni,  Hannah Antman, Mariah Schultz, and Yiwen Wu. The viewpoints of the authors are entirely their own. The Key is co-facilitated by Oliver Sava and Regina Victor. 

Ada Alozie, Breaking Bad: “When Breaking Bad was airing, it was hard to escape the personification of Walter White as an anti-hero: the word critics used to describe a white man with nebulous ethics, involved in shady (albeit) criminal activity. The anti-hero felt like it was everywhere in the early 2010s. I accepted the anti-hero label without thought when I was younger. As I was rewatching the series now, I couldn’t help thinking why the word anti-hero had been used to describe this character when it was so clear to me that Walter White was a straight-up villain.” – Read Ada Alozie’s full critique and learn more about the author!  Continue reading “Key Reviews: Multimedia Edition”

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Pride is the Prerogative in ‘Ms. Blakk For President’ at Steppenwolf Theatre

Ms. Blakk For President is a world premiere play performed at Steppenwolf Theatre, co-written and directed by Tina Landau and written by Tarell Alvin McCraney. The show is about Chicago’s very own LGBTQ activist Terence Alan Smith,  better known as the drag queen Joan Jett Blakk, who decided to run a political campaign with Act Up and Queer Nation to bring visibility to the Gay community in crisis during the 90s. It’s a pretty unknown story to someone, like me, who was born in the very late 1990s without context on figures who are often censored in our pop culture. Steppenwolf’s lobby dramaturgy does a great job with filling the atmosphere and historical context about the show. The dramaturgy display (Polly Hubbard) is filled with an engaging Chicago timeline that traces Joan Jett Blakk and the AIDS crisis from the 1970s to present today. There are also a few art installations and a memorial to Marsha P. Johnson. Continue reading “Pride is the Prerogative in ‘Ms. Blakk For President’ at Steppenwolf Theatre”

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‘EthiopianAmerica’ Offers A New Perspective on the American Drama

Walking into EthiopianAmerica, the audience is greeted by the almost ceaseless dancing of the main character Johnny (Simon Gebremedhin). It’s a durational pre-performance which gives the audience a hint of what’s to come. Sam Kebede’s world premiere play directed by Sophiyaa Nayar shows us a slice in the life of an Ethiopian-American family living in southern California, Two brothers, Johnny and Danny (Freedom Martin), are apparent opposites Johnny is a nerd at school and a frenetic ball of energy at home who impulsively watches the same movies again and again. Danny, the younger brother, is a jock at school, but at home he’s distant and lethargic, biting his tongue often and choosing to sketch in his journal instead. As we watch the family move through a day in sped up time, we begin to realize that the children’s behaviors are indicative of a larger imbalance in the family’s power dynamics. Continue reading “‘EthiopianAmerica’ Offers A New Perspective on the American Drama”

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Inside Look – Free Street Youth Ensemble’s “Parched: Stories of Water, Pollution and Theft”

When did water become a privilege? This is one of the questions up for interrogation in Parched: Stories of Water, Pollution, and Theft, devised by Free Street’s HQ Youth Ensemble. For this nearly 50-year-old, historic theatre company, putting Chicago on stage rightfully includes youth—and they don’t come to play. Continue reading “Inside Look – Free Street Youth Ensemble’s “Parched: Stories of Water, Pollution and Theft””