Randy Hardwick

Eric Bogosian’s award-winning 1987 play seems somehow less relevant today than it did 20 years ago. The play takes place in a Cleveland radio studio of that time over the course of an evening as radio talk host Barry Champlain serves up his nightly dish of hang-ups, insults and drivel. In fairness, it’s the callers who serve up the drivel; and that is the point of the play: that society has become so voyeuristic that the banal details of people’s dreary lives have become their entertainment. Bogosian was dead-on when he nailed the genre back in ‘87, but that was before Rush Limbaugh was a household name and back when the Larry King Virus was still somewhat contained.

Timeline Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere of Tony Award-winning The History Boys is an absolutely smashing production. It is an irreverent and amusing show that will touch your heart and make you think about what it means to become an educated person. In case you saw the movie,

Steppenwolf’s young adult matinee series is an absolute treasure in terms of exposing young people to quality theatre. The shows in the series are selected by Steppenwolf’s Young Adults Council, a group of high school students who want to learn the inner workings of the theatre

The latest selection of short works from Side Project’s Cut to the Quick series, this one collectively titled after/math, is not for everyone. It is a collection of six works mostly under thirty minutes that are loosely held together by some common threads: they are all original

Director Tina Landau uses her extraordinary troupe of actors to maximum advantage in creating the extraordinary island world of The Tempest. The result is pure entertainment…and pure Shakespeare.

Mark Young is one of a handful of playwrights who captures the imprecise, highly contextualized language of younger Americans. His ear for cadence, inflection and oblique comment is pitch-perfect and his knack for getting the language on paper gives his contemporary young characters an authenticity that allows the audience to feel that they are eavesdropping on private conversations

Lynne McMahon’s The Bird Sanctuary is a one-act drama about group of late middle-aged friends – two married couples – and their unspoken disappointments with their lives. It plays with another one-act, Mark A. Young’s The Rocks, which deals with a similar topic from a 20-something point of view.

Matei Vişniec’s absurdist tale of hyper-patriotism gets a fresh new look in director Radu-Alexandru Nica’s stylish new staging now playing at Trap Door Theatre. Told in three successive scenes of women sending their men off to war, Horses at the Window explores the insanity created when war is constant and no one remembers life without it. The departure of the soldier is inevitably followed by the arrival of a messenger bearing red flowers and some bad news: a son has been blown apart, a father has been driven mad, a husband has been trampled to death by his own fleeing comrades.

Inspired by Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller By Raúl Dorantes Directed by Marcela Munoz A Moving Spin on the American Dream in Latin Voice Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is an American classic. It tells the story of the flawed protagonist, Will Loman, and his delusional descent into insanity and suicide. The … Read more

Like the white-on-white painting at the center of Yasmina Reza’s masterful play Art, now at Steppenwolf, the show itself is open to interpretation