Chris Jones

6 days ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

Director Braden Abraham sends his audience into total darkness at the top of his gorgeous staging of writer Brian Friel’s “Translations,” a rich and prescient Irish drama from 1980 with characters previously played by the likes of Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea and Brian Dennehy. “Translations’ seemed to be everywhere in the last two decades of the 20th century but now, like most of Friel’s masterworks, is rarely seen in the American theater.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

NEW YORK — Every high-school kid knows Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” the allegorical play seemingly about the Salem witch trials but really fighting the chill of McCarthyism.  In that play sits John Proctor, a righteous American farmer who finds his earlier affair with a dangerous girl named Abigail makes him vulnerable to her lies, as used in service of those who will take him down. Miller intended Proctor as a flawed hero, maybe a man not unlike himself.

1 week ago | thederrick.com | Chris Jones

NEW YORK — In “Smash,” the 2012 NBC-TV series chronicling the fraught making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, we learned about the two writers of the show-within-a-show having a sweet tradition. As played by Debra Messing and Christian Borle, the pair celebrated their new shows by visiting some lowly community staging of one of their previous hits. So they go to a little high-school production and, to their surprise along with the viewers, the show is …. great.

1 week ago | miamiherald.com | Chris Jones

NEW YORK - In "Smash," the 2012 NBC-TV series chronicling the fraught making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, we learned about the two writers of the show-within-a-show having a sweet tradition. As played by Debra Messing and Christian Borle, the pair celebrated their new shows by visiting some lowly community staging of one of their previous hits. So they go to a little high-school production and, to their surprise along with the viewers, the show is …. great.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

A defining theme of the plays of David Mamet, from “American Buffalo” to “Edmund” to “Race,” is an individual’s search for a moral center in a wholly transactional world. “Henry Johnson,” his fascinating 2023 work now in its Chicago premiere at the reopened Biograph Theatre from the gutsy director Eddie Torres, makes that quest as raw and explicit as anything he’s previously written.