by Bryn Magnus • Curious Theatre Branch at Chicago Dramatists — I loved this little, mysterious and well-executed play for its beauty. The main character is a novelist who hires a private detective to monitor not his wife but a rival novelist who writes every morning in the coffee shop where his wife works. He wants to know his secret. …

The Writer I recommend both plays I saw in Edgewater, my Chicago neighborhood, this weekend, though they might not both appeal to the same person. Play number one was Steep Theatre’s The Writer, by British writer Ella Hickson, and directed by Georgette Verdin. The story arc is of a female playwright who…

I wanted to hate Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but the many rave reviews from friends whose opinions I respected told me I wouldn’t. I wanted to only because I don’t like the idea of films being bankrolled by consumer products, even if they are allowed to be subversive. It’s the classic…

The Picasso problem is a mass media problem. Notes on “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” at the Brooklyn Museum June 1–Sept. 24, 2023 — When I arrived at my friend’s place in Washington Heights for a long weekend this past June, the spare set of keys she handed me were attached to a knit likeness of Picasso. She offered the disclaimer, “Might be controversial.” But I loved it. I thought Picasso as a tiny…

I want to acknowledge the magnitude of this accomplishment. Many on the Left were saddened by the closeness of this election, but to me that was evidence of our ongoing, inexcusable misunderstanding of our opponents. We’ve been able to escape doing that work because we isolate ourselves in cities (where…

Capitalism doesn’t work. There, I said it. But according to Slavoj Zizek in 2019’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism, “the dissonance of an ideology is its ultimate stability: only in a specific situation — a change in ideological sensitivity — does the…

Despite panic that she’s a huge liability, I think we are lucky to have Elizabeth Warren in this race. Bernie is an ideologue, in my opinion. I thank God that he appeared when he did speaking truth to power and paving the way for this complete turnaround in the Democrat’s…

We are told that water and electronics don’t mix. But what of the rain? What of the inevitable dropping of the phone into dishwater, and the leaves falling on Lake Michigan. Who authorized me to speak, anyway? What of the Mississippi? Ten tons of sand attest that Michigan gets to say what cliffs go where, and visitors are only allowed to watch, and hope, like a civilized audience. What of the road mist coating the camera? What of the search for water on Mars, and the quaint rain gauge in my grandparent’s garden?

There are two different kinds of people, and when I say there are two different kinds of people I mean of course they exist on a continuum whatever a continuum can mean when that is an impossibility of language, hopefully conveyed somewhat in the u’s, or perhaps in the way you cannot say it without becoming a continuum. We can say spectrum but that’s not quite as effective. We can say R.G. Biv. or Killimanjaro, or Ronnie B. Specter. We can say Hallelujah Chorus played on a zither by Rudy Giuliani. Hell, that would be terrible.