Festival season in the Midwest, despite being chillier than Cannes and Venice, is a real feast of new films, both domestic and foreign. I had the pleasure of attending some screenings both at home in Chicago and in my old stomping grounds of Iowa City. The first installment of this
Here Are Some Plays We Like is a one-of-a-kind "half play reading, half party, and all one-of-a-kind theatre experience" produced by AJ Schwartz, a Chicago-based director who quite radically decided to ask artists what kind of work they would like to
In 2002, Caryl Churchill took on the moral concerns wrapped up in cloning and wrote A Number, a two-hander about a family fractured by the selfishness and remoteness of the father, who had his son cloned to bring on a fresh start. Churchill is more interested in the son’
Lately, it seems as if all horror movies need to be about something. Is this the genre filmmakers’ version of “we demand to be taken seriously”? Or a cynical response by the studios to the rise of "elevated horror" in the 2010s? Writer-director Alexander Ullom’s It
The work of legendary Chicago performance collective The Neo-Futurists and the sitcom Frasier seem worlds apart at first blush. Alé Ramirez, a longtime member of the collective’s ensemble, would beg to differ. Ramirez’s new play Spinoff, now running through May 16th at the Neos’ home, The Neo-
Henry Hanson is a Chicago-based filmmaker whose feature-length debut Dog Movie is now on The Criterion Channel as part of the collection Tramps, Troublemakers, and Trailblazers: Trans Filmmakers, curated by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay. I was lucky enough to interview Henry to talk about the
In a stroke of programming genius, the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago turns its screens over to long watches every January with their Settle In series. Last month, I used the inclusion of Éric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons in the series as an excuse to
Joachim Trier clearly thinks a lot about how people connect. His international breakthrough, 2022’s The Worst Person in the World, co-written with Eskil Vogt, follows one woman through her twenties and early adulthood’s many starts and stops. He expands this perspective in his latest, Sentimental Value, turning
Hi Simplerheads! Today we have a guest essay from the extremely talented writer, dramaturg, and producer Margo Ascher. I’m a big fan of her writing and also we are married. So what? Anyway, here’s an amazing essay Margo wrote about Veal by Jojo Jones, which just closed at
Welcome back for another week! The fourth episode of The Chair Company, “Bahld Harmon birthplace (disputed)”, was a dive into the Trosper domestic sphere, shedding light on the conditions that have led Ron to this moment. Beginning with a flashback to six years ago, we see Ron and Barb sneak
This week on The Chair Company, Ron went further down the rabbit hole. What’s great about The Chair Company is that the whole show is built around a classically Robinsonian crash out, but here it’s extended over 4 hours rather than 5 minutes as it might be in
Welcome back to the Chair Company recap! When we last left our intrepid hero Ron Trosper, he was chasing down a man who hit him with a pipe. Ron’s prey evaded capture by unbuttoning his patterned shirt and slipping out of it, but perhaps that was a foolish idea.