BE WRITE THERE: Celebrating New Voices in Chicago Theatre
More perspectives in the room. More opportunities. This is what we want for our city and our industry. Inclusion onstage and in our audiences begins with diversity on both sides of the table. There are wonderful shows in our community featuring work from playwrights with different voices, and some new voices to Chicago. Let's go and see some shows, shall we?
Victory Gardens Theatre presents The House That Will Not Stand
Written by Ensemble Playwright Marcus Gardley
Directed by Artistic Director Chay Yew
Inspired by Federico García Lorca’s THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA - In early 1800s New Orleans, a time when free women of color entered into common-law marriages with rich white men, Beartrice has become one of the city’s wealthiest women. After the mysterious death of her husband, the life Beartrice has built for herself and three daughters threatens to collapse as the household turns on each other in their fight for survival. Told through music, dance, and poetry THE HOUSE THAT WILL NOT STAND byMarcus Gardley and directed by Chay Yew is a bewitching new drama filled with desire,
jealousy, murder, and voodoo.
Ticket Price $35-60
Get tickets HERE
Sideshow Theatre presents Caught
Written by Christopher Chen
Directed by Seth Bockley
A Chinese dissident artist and activist publishes an incredible account of his harrowing confinement at the hands of the government. But can he prove it? Layers of perception peel back, with echoes of Ai Weiwei, Mike Daisey and Jonah Lehrer, until reality itself comes into question. A hallucinatory new experience featuring celebrated visual and performance artists, Caught explores what happens when we blur the dangerous line between story and truth.
Produced in collaboration with Xiong Art Gallery
Ticket Price $20-30
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Lookingglass Theatre presents Thaddeus and Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure
Written by Ensemble Member Kevin Douglas
Directed by Ensemble Member J Nicole Brooks and Krissy Vanderwalker
It’s 1908 and Chicago’s Majestic Theatre is the jewel of the vaudeville circuit. The only thing stopping Thaddeus and Slocum from becoming the next great stage act is as simple – and complicated – as black and white. Will laughter triumph and friendship endure as racial boundaries threaten to destroy their dreams of making the “big time?”
Lookingglass dives deep into the divided heart of American culture and show biz for a daring cavalcade of slapstick, song and dance, and burlesque as two best friends risk everything to make it to the top together.
Ticket Price $37.50-60
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Interrobang Theatre presents The North Pool
Written by Rajiv Joseph
Directed by James Yost
Khadim has no idea why he's been called into the Vice Principal’s office at Sheffield High. At first, Vice Principal Danielson is cagey, using a minor violation to keep the boy at school for detention. It doesn’t take long for tensions to mount around a crime that Khadim may (or may not) have committed. The truth is ever-shifting in what amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse. As the clock winds down on the last hours of the semester, both Danielson and Khadim must carefully maneuver hauntingly unexpected revelations. THE NORTH POOL is a psychological drama that explores the complexities of racial and cultural profiling and personal accountability.
Ticket Price $14-24
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The Greenhouse Theatre Solo Celebration presents The Way She Spoke: A Docu-Mythologia
Written by Isaac Gomez
Directed by Laura Baker
When an actress enters an empty warehouse to read a new play about the missing and murdered women of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, she embarks on an expedition through the broken roads of a city offering far more questions than answers. With thousands of women disappearing every year, who is responsible for these crimes? “The Way She Spoke: A Docu-mythologia” is an daring solo-performance piece pulling from hundreds of interviews collected down a rabbit hole of drug cartels, ex-convicts, unsavory reporters and resilient women; asking audiences what lies in the shadows of telling a story that isn't yours?
Ticket Price $42-48
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Congo Square Theatre presents A Small Oak Tree Runs Read
Written by Lekethia Dalcoe
Directed by Harry Lennix
In A SMALL OAK TREE RUNS RED, audiences enter a realm between reality and purgatory with historical figures Mary Turner and Sidney Johnson. Shackled and trapped someplace between a dream and a nightmare, Mary and Sidney struggle to move on, but like the rest of us, have to piece together their past to ensure that history doesn’t repeat.
Ticket Price $22
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Fleetwood Jourdain Theatre presents A Song for Corretta
Written by Pearl Cleage
Directed by Artistic Director Tim Rhoze
On February 6, 2006, hundreds of people began lining up at dawn outside of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church to pay their respects to the late Mrs. Coretta Scott King. When a cold rain began to fall at sunset, the crowd had dwindled to a determined few. Five of the remaining women shared, with joy, memories of Mrs. King’s extraordinary life and reveal things about themselves that free them up to move forward in life with a more determined purpose.
Ticket Price $12
Get tickets HERE
