Kerry Reid

Chicago

Writer at Freelance

Theater Critic and Editor at Chicago Reader

Featured in: Favicon

chicagoreader.com Favicon

chicagotribune.com Favicon

orlandosentinel.com Favicon

playbill.com Favicon

chicagomag.com Favicon

staffordshire-live.co.uk Favicon

americantheatre.org Favicon

windycitytimes.com Favicon

biorxiv.org Favicon

nature.com + 3 more

Articles

Terminal human conditions

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

Sickness is both the most commonplace human experience and the most surreal. We live in our bodies, but also tend to take them for granted—until they start doing things they’ve never done before, or stop doing things we rely upon without even thinking about it. Even if we’ve seen debilitating illness in other people, we seldom seem prepared for the physical or psychological dimensions when it hits close to home, particularly when we know it’s a terminal condition.
That's What Friends Are For celebrates three first ladies of pop and soul

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

By now, we all know the drill when it comes to most Black Ensemble Theater (BET) shows: there will be a storyline (often in the form of a reunion) that gives an excuse for various artists to come together. They’ll reminisce, provide some outlines of their lives in and out of the music industry—and then they’ll knock you on your ass with some tremendous vocal style.
Not quite airborne

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

It’s not often I feel as thoroughly divided about a show from one act to the next as I do for 42 Balloons, Jack Godfrey’s musical about Larry Walters. If the name isn’t familiar, maybe you remember him best as “Lawn Chair Larry”—the moniker he earned in 1982 after ascending 16,000 feet over San Pedro, California, in a lawn chair to which were attached 42 (43 in some tellings) weather balloons. In 42 Balloons, Walters (Charlie McCullagh) is both a dreamer and a scientist.
Man with a camera

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

Any play that makes Thomas Edison the villain is A-OK with me (the man electrocuted an elephant, for fuck’s sake!); for that reason alone, Chase Wheaton-Werle’s The Curious Circumstances of Louis Le Prince at Factory Theater (directed by Becca Holloway) is worth the trip to Howard Street. But for fans of cinematic history, Wheaton-Werle’s drama/mystery also holds interest.
Stop making sense

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

In its 49th revue, Chaos Theory of Everything, Second City e.t.c. moves away from the high-concept style of shows like last fall’s Best Kept Secret: Tell Everyone, which,as the title denotes, focused on deception and hidden truths. But since everything is, well, chaotic at the moment, maybe the most honest thing a sketch show can do is lean into the random. Chaos Theory of EverythingOpen run: Thu 8 PM; Fri–Sat 7 and 10 PM, Sun 7 PM; Second City e.t.c., 230 W.
Remembering Scott Vehill 1956–2025 - Chicago Reader

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

I first met Scott Vehill in 1987, when I was directing a student production at Columbia College Chicago of Tom and Jerry, a play by Jim Geoghan about two squabbling stand-up comedians tearing each other apart in the green room. Someone told me that Prop Thtr (then located on North Clybourn) had a poster of Lenny Bruce, which I thought would be perfect for the set. With the insouciance of youth, I sauntered into the Prop space and asked about borrowing the poster.
Real life is right now

2 weeks ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

When I first saw David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2000 play, Kimberly Akimbo, I didn’t love it. I described the story of a teenage girl in New Jersey with a progeria-like condition and dysfunctional parents as “two hours of self-absorbed diatribes punctuated by occasional Hallmark moments of tenderness.”Well, whatever I didn’t like about the straight play, the 2021 musical version, featuring a terrific score by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire, has rendered obsolete.
Iraq, But Funny lives up to its title

2 weeks ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

Early on in Atra Asdou’s Iraq, But Funny, a character proclaims, “Where there’s a genocide, there’s England.” And indeed the, British Empire, embodied by Asdou as our narrator and tour guide, the English Gentleman (TEG for short), shows up in all the “teensy-weensy genocides” that unspool over the course of this story of five generations of Assyrians in what is now Iraq— from right before World War I to the present day. “Ripe material for a comedy,” TEG proclaims. As promised by the title—it is.
Rate of de novo mutations in the three-spined stickleback - Heredity

2 weeks ago | nature.com | Chaowei Zhang |Kerry Reid |Mikkel Heide Schierup |Hongbo Wang |Ulrika Candolin

AbstractAs a fundamentally important genetic parameter and evolutionary force, germline mutation rates have many applications in evolutionary biology. However, accurate estimates of de novo mutation (DNM) rates are still relatively scarce, even for extensively studied evolutionary biology models. We estimated DNM rates for the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), the ‘supermodel’ of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre connects Black stories of the past and present

2 weeks ago | chicagoreader.com | Kerry Reid

Stages of Survival is an occasional series focusing on Chicago theater companies, highlighting their histories and how they’re surviving—and even thriving—in a landscape that’s become decidedly more challenging since the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown. Founded in Evanston in 1979 as Foster Community Theatre, Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre (FJT) has been a home for plays from the African and African American diaspora for 46 years, operating by the motto “Umoja!! . . .