Friday night was dinner (good Chinese, particularly yummy szechwan pork) and theater at Stage Left to see the new David Rush play directed by Drew Martin (who's a friend). Rush is a Emmy & Jeff award-winning playwright; Martin won a Jeff (the Chicago theater equivalent of the Tony's) for directing David Rush’s play Leander Stillwell ( Read more... )

Chicago has been host over the last month or so to an August Wilson festival. Two plays were featured (Radio Golf & Joe Turner's Come and Gone) as well as a number of other events, one of which was last night's cast reading of Fences. It was supposed to be the crowning event in fact, but the host of the event, Chuck Smith (the Goodman's Artistic ( Read more... )

So our little theater group toddled off for Thai followed by August Wilson's Radio Golf at the Goodman last night.

I haven't seen all 10 of the works of Wilson's play cycle, but of the few I've seen this is the most conventional in its dramatic structure, and the most accessible and clearly laid out to the audience in terms of the issues being ( Read more... )

I sat through three and a half hours of Robert Fall's Lear plus 45 minutes or so with the dramaturge & a bunch of the cast (Edmund, Edgar, Goneril, Oswald) after.

Un-fricking believable - the weirdest, most bizarre Lear I have ever seen in my entire life - Fall's basically made it about everyone except Lear (Stacy Keach wandering around in an ( Read more... )