steppenwolf theatre company
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For the Culture: Spend This Long Weekend With Some of Our Greatest Authors and Artists
Right about now, you’re hopefully on your third (or fourth) round of leftovers, giving new meaning to the term “comfort food”—and no judgments, since we can use all the comfort we can get as this tortured year comes to a long-awaited close. But as you’re feeding your body, don’t forget to nurture your mind and…
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Love, Loss, and Living to Tell the Tale: Lindiwe Is a Celebration of Song Wrapped in a Familiar Story
Perhaps the best way to approach a play like Lindiwe, a Love Story is not to ask it to be a play at all—at least, not in the conventional sense. After all, the script was largely written to reunite legendary music group Ladysmith Black Mambazo with the equally famed Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago; a relationship…
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Brother’s Keeper: Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size Explores the Mythology and Painful Reality of Brotherhood
To say Tarell Alvin McCraney is masterful at articulating black male coming-of-age stories in America would be an understatement. His play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue (now better known as the 2017 Academy Award-winning screenplay Moonlight) gave us a lens onto a black boy’s reckoning with emotional abandonment and his burgeoning sexuality in the…
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'I Am What I Am': In Concert and Conversation, Audra McDonald Pulls Back the Curtain on a Brilliant Career
When you get an opportunity to see Audra McDonald perform, you take it. The record-breaking six-time Tony Award winner, Grammy and Emmy winner and 2015 National Medal of Arts recipient has conquered both stage and screen with her acting and singing and is lauded across the globe as one of the brightest lights of Broadway.…
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True West: With a Reimagined Revival, a Classic Sam Shepard Play Reminds Us That We, Too, Are America
“It’s a very universal story. It’s a play about brothers,” says actor Namir Smallwood when asked about his role in True West, Sam Shepard’s classic play about toxic sibling rivalry, now in production at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Despite the universally relatable theme, there is something distinctly different about this critically acclaimed revival; it’s the first…
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‘I Can’t Stop’: With Ms. Blakk for President, Moonlight Writer Tarell Alvin McCraney Campaigns as an Unlikely Candidate
“The most transparent way is the truth.” Tarell Alvin McCraney is telling me about the circuitous journey that led him and longtime collaborator Tina Landau to the real-life character of Ms. Joan Jett Blakk. That’s “two t’s, two k’s,” as she reminds us during her run for president at Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre, where McCraney…
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African, American: Danai Gurira Hits Home with Her Latest Play, Familiar
An elegantly appointed middle class living room in Minnesota, punctuated with poinsettias and a wreath to celebrate the holidays—plus the rare (and oft-disappearing) piece of African art. Frankly, it could’ve been my childhood home in the same Midwestern state, but instead, it is the setting of Danai Gurira’s Familiar, an emotional family dramedy that explores…