Kerry Reid

1 day ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

In my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novel, Mother Night, the author writes early on, “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut’s story involves an American spy who works as a double agent for the Nazis, broadcasting fascist propaganda. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well for him.

1 day ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

Like a slow-burning comedy routine, Charles Smith’s Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues takes its time with the setup, but the payoff is worth it. Directed by Smith’s longtime collaborator, Chuck Smith, in its local premiere at American Blues Theater and starring longtime ABT ensemble member Dennis Cockrum, the play taps into the bitter nostalgia of aging vaudevillians that won former vaudevillian George Burns an Oscar in 1975’s The Sunshine Boys.

3 days ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

Catherine Miller remembers the night they came out as nonbinary. They were coming home from a 2017 Lizzo concert at Thalia Hall with Chicago actor and musician Em Modaff and some other fellow performers they’d met through the Fly Honey Show.

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

In some ways, it might be a bit odd to describe something as “physical theater.” Doesn’t all theater involve some degree of physicality? As Marc Frost and Alice da Cunha, the married cofounders of Physical Theater Festival Chicago, note during our Zoom interview, the narrowing of the definition of theater is a relatively newer phenomenon. “The beginnings of theater are the court jester and commedia dell’arte,” says da Cunha.

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

Despite the title, Will Arbery’s 2018 play, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,took a while to make it to the Chicago area. First Floor Theater’s local premiere, directed by Micah Figueroa, provides a rich buffet for a quartet of actors, and they dig into Arbery’s mix of existential dread—and the mundane distractions and joys we seek to avoid dealing with that dread—with heart and gusto, which helps override some of the more self-conscious elements in the story.