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-Futurarium, uses
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 roots of
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 from
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.
Rough House Puppet Arts’ House of the Exquisite Corpse has become a bona-fide Chicago theater tradition since 2021, when it began producing its annual autumn shows under the Exquisite Corpse name. Every year in the fall, Rough House focuses their devising process on a theme, creating an immersive walk-through “puppet
Welcome, everyone, to the very first recap in Simpler history! For the uninitiated, I recapped the third and fourth seasons of Succession on my now-defunct (not really, you can still find it) Medium page, and now I’m turning my attention to another Sunday night HBO corporate drama, Tim Robinson
A performance by Bread and Puppet Theater, the legendary troupe out of Glover, Vermont, is always a singular experience. Their ramshackle, proudly political performances have been a linchpin of America’s protest theatre movement for over 50 years. Their show at Chicago’s Clarendon Park this past Tuesday, part of
Fiddler on the Roof is a totemic piece of midcentury Ashkenazi-American culture. Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick’s 1964 musical Based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the Milkman, has served, for better or for worse, as the last shred of the shtetl in the American zeitgeist