Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – The Chicago report: New works at STEPPENWOLF, GOODMAN, CHICAGO SHAKES, and COURT enliven the spring theater season

• By drediman
• May 6, 2026
• No Comments

This past week, I found myself in the Windy City, where I was able to bask myself in Chicago’s storied theater scene. This spring season, diverse new works were the name of the game at some of the city’s most prestigious theaters (interestingly, both the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and The Goodman Theatre are currently celebrating landmark anniversaries). As always, read on for my further thoughts on my Chicago theater adventures.

WINDFALL
Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Through May 31

One of the centerpieces of Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s 50th anniversary season is the world premiere of Windfall (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) by ensemble member Tarell Alvin McCraney (an Oscar-winner for the film Moonlight). McCraney’s latest builds upon a catalog of sensitively-wrought Black stories from his previous works, particularly expanding the queer reach of these loosely intersecting narratives. Set in Chicago, the play tells the story of “Mr. Mano”, an older man who is faced with the dilemma of whether to take a cash settlement and move on from the loss of his trans son to police brutality — who, as it turns out, may or may not still be alive. Seemingly taking a cue from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — but an inverted version of it — Mano is consecutively visited by three mysterious visitors who attempt to convince him, increasingly forcefully, to accept the settlement. In Windfall, McCraney continues to push forward the theatrical form to disorienting effect, regularly breaking the fourth wall to pull us into the action, while at the same creating a distancing effect via techniques the playwright has established in his other plays (most notably the incantation of stage directions). Watching such accomplished actors as Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood in relatively minor roles (the two played the leads in Purpose and Bug, respectively, both at Steppenwolf and on Broadway), I was hit by just how much I missed Steppenwolf’s team-oriented ensemble approach to theater-making. The play works brilliantly in-the-round in the Ensemble Theater, where director Awoye Timpo is able to beautifully establish a ritualistic mode of theatrical storytelling, whereby urgent moral questions can be posed and explored in pseudo-mythical settings.

FAULT
Chicago Shakespeare Theatre
Through May 24

A far more traditional style of playwriting can be found in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s world premiere production of Scooter Pietsch’s Fault (RECOMMENDED), which can currently be seen at The Yard, the company’s wonderfully flexible performance venue on its Navy Pier campus. In many ways, the new work is a sort of next generation iteration of plays like August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — in other words, it essentially depicts a bitterly entrenched battle royale between the two halves of a mature married couple. But instead of the stylized flourishes that Strindberg and Albee lavished on their respective plays, Pietsch puts Fault squarely in the realm of adult sit-com land (unsurprisingly, Seinfeld‘s Jason Alexander directs accordingly on set designer Paul Tate dePoo III’s well-appointed luxury apartment living room set). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the play’s main concern is to elicit laughs from the audience, and it largely earns them through a breezy 90 minutes of witty back-and-forth jabs. In fact, this comedically broad approach is probably for the best, since neither character is very likable — actors Enrico Colantoni and Rebecca Spence play Jerry and Lucy, a ruthless investment banker and his adulterous wife (also in the mix is a young man, played by Nick Marini, who serves as collateral damage in the brutal exchanges). Indeed, if their acts of betrayal and untethered ambition weren’t satirically portrayed, I suspect that the resulting play would have been a tough sit. Thankfully, Colantoni and Spence deliver big-swinging, larger-than-life turns that do well to distract audiences from the characters’ despicable moral philosophies. At the end of the day, Fault is lightweight fare, but it sure makes for escapist entertainment that goes down easily.

Theater of the Mind
Goodman Theatre
Through July 12

One of the more out-of-the-box outings of my Chicago theater adventures was Theater of the Mind (RECOMMENDED). Masterminded by inquisitive singer-songwriter David Byrne and writer Mala Gaonkar and presented in association with the Goodman Theater — which this season is celebrating its centennial milestone — the production is an immersive and interactive experience that contemplates the nature of memory and how we perceive life, often erroneously, through our senses. Experienced in groups of only up to 16 people at a time, the intimate 70-minute experience begins with a funeral, in which each audience member takes on the persona of one of the close relations of the deceased during their lifetime. Miraculously arising from their coffin, the deceased — David — greets his mourners and subsequently takes them on a tour of his “memory palace”. As the audience is led from room to room, you’re encouraged to engage in a series of theatrically immersive experiments that display exactly how our senses (vision, hearing, taste) don’t necessarily reflect and accurately translate the universe around us. Clearly, a lot of time and resources have been put into director Andrew Scoville’s polished production, as evidence by the detailed environments that have been custom-built specifically for the show. But as illuminating and entertaining as the endeavor is, a part of me wishes that Byrne and Gaonkar’s script had created more conflict and higher emotional stakes to accompany its lessons. Indeed, strictly speaking from a dramatic standpoint, the production could have been a truly profound experience, especially given how our senses have a direct corollary to our pychological and emotional states. That being said, for what it is — which is essentially an interactive neuroscience museum — Theater of the Mind hits the mark.

OUT HERE
Court Theatre
Through May 10

Lastly, down in Hyde Park, there was Court Theatre’s production of the new musical Out Here (SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED). Featuring a score by Erin McKeown (music) and Leslie Buxbaum (lyrics), the piece tells the story of a heterosexual marriage that comes to an end when Dawn, the wife, tentatively leaves her husband Brian for Robin, a woman with whom she has had past romantic relations with. Given this plot description, it’s hard not to think of Falsettos, William Finn’s seminal queer musical from the 1980s and 1990s about a man who leaves his wife for another man. Unfortunately, such coming out stories no longer seem as radical as they once did, which is one of the conceptual stumbling blocks of McKeown and Buxbaum’s musical. But more importantly, their score doesn’t have the driving vitality nor the quirky wit of Finn’s work, which has wonderfully stood the test of time. Instead, the creators of Out Here have opted to craft a stop-and-start tapestry of deconstructed musical motifs that, at least currently, amount to very little. Although occasionally this results in fascinating musical juxtapositions, more often than not it leads to thematic dead ends that halt the story’s forward momentum. As if to camouflage the material’s deficiencies, they’ve also doubled down on meta-theatrical storytelling, having characters regularly and aggressively break the fourth wall. The effect is distracting and contributes little in terms of fleshing out the characters’ journeys and emotional inner lives. Indeed, there’s a glaring lack of specificity throughout Buxbaum’s book. That being said, the performances gleam with clarity and purpose — led by Becca Ayers as Dawn — and director Chay Yew’s clean staging pops with conceptual flair.