As canonical controversies go, who wrote Shakespeare’s plays is the literary equivalent of who’s buried in Grant’s tomb—a question that answers itself and a bad joke that doesn’t improve with retelling. Thanks to Roland Emmerich, English professors can count on …

It’s February. Eleven p.m. The air is cold, glittery, almost amniotically thick. There are all sorts of archetypal New York touches to the street scene outside: couples jaywalking, slabs of jury-rigged scaffolding over the sidewalks, fat tanklike dumpsters full of …

The fall of 2009 saw something of an apotheosis for Chicago theater. Following in the wake of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning August: Osage County—an epic family drama in the grand American tradition of O’Neill, Miller and Williams—a pair of plays set in …

At a time of exceedingly diminished expectations for the theater, few productions are more welcome than the Elevator Repair Service’s dazzling and conceptually rigorous Gatz, which played for a weekend last fall at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Simply put, Gatz is a …