Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

When you think of the blues, you probably think of guitars (acoustic and electric), piano, harmonica, maybe even the bass and drums in a full band. Saxophone, on the other hand, is much more closely associated with jazz and R&B. Sax players do exist in the blues, of course, but you usually see them only in bigger, better-established groups—and despite high-profile exceptions like Eddie Shaw, who led Howlin’ Wolf’s band, they’ve often had to take gigs in other genres to maintain their careers.

Case in point: J.T. Brown, a saxophonist who not only gigged with legends such as Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James but also played with the early blues-rock configuration of Fleetwood Mac. Brown should be at least as well-known as Shaw and fellow horn man A.C. Reed, and the Secret History of Chicago Music is here to help make it happen.

John Thomas Brown was born in Mississippi on April 2, 1918, to Sam and Cecelia Rimmer Brown. Much of his early life is obscure. The first musical outfit he’s known to have joined was the long-running Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, whose roster over the decades also included Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, Louis Jordan, and Rufus Thomas—not to mention players who built audiences in Chicago, among them Big Joe Williams, Maxwell Street Jimmy, and Johnny “Daddy Stovepipe” Watson. 

Black theater owner and entrepreneur Patrick Henry Chappelle formed the Rabbit’s Foot Company in Florida in 1900. He assembled five dozen or so Black performers to stage a touring musical comedy show called A Rabbit’s Foot, which traveled by rail and played theaters as well as tents. Chappelle avoided describing “the Foots” as a minstrel show, for obvious reasons. After his death in 1911, though, a white businessman from Michigan, Fred Swift Wolcott, bought the production and began marketing it that way. He moved the company’s headquarters to Port Gibson, Mississippi, in 1918, the year Brown was born. The troupe’s annual tours remained popular into the 1940s, and their last show appears to have been in 1959. 

Brown traveled all over the country with the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, and by historians’ best guesses he landed in Chicago in the mid-40s. A man of many nicknames, he was alternately known as Saxman Brown, J.T. “Big Boy” Brown, Bep Brown, “Nature Boy” Brown, and J.T. “Blow It” Brown. 

Brown had a famously distinctive saxophone tone: “He’s the only man I know could make a horn sound like a nanny goat,” guitarist Jody Williams told Jim O’Neal (founder of Living Blues magazine) in a 1977 essay for German label Bear Family Records. Brown played on and off with pianist Little Brother Montgomery for 20 years, at clubs such as the Hollywood Rendezvous near 39th and Indiana (where Little Walter often played), the A&B Lounge at 63rd and Cottage Grove, and the White Rose in Phoenix, Illinois. They frequently sat in with guitarist J.B. Lenoir.

Brown recorded in Chicago with Roosevelt Sykes and St. Louis Jimmy Oden in 1945, and as far as I can tell, that session was his first—though I can’t be super confident about discographical information more than 70 years old for an artist who used at least half a dozen names. Brown’s raw saxophone stylings also graced late-40s sides by Washboard Sam and Memphis Jimmy Clark. 

In 1947, Brown led a five-piece billed as “J.T. Brown’s Boogie Band” that backed Little Eddie Boyd on the 78 rpm platter “I Had to Let Her Go” b/w “Kilroy Won’t Be Back.” A different group called “Brown’s Blu-Blowers” supported Corporal Booker T. Washington on the 1949 single “St. Louis Boogie” b/w “Good Whiskey.” That same year, Brown’s Blues Blowers played behind Grant Jones on the Apex release “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water (And Sleep in a Hollow Log)” b/w “When the Deal Goes Down.” 

Brown’s first session as a bandleader was in 1949, also for Apex: “Blackjack Blues” b/w “Brown’s Boogie” is credited to J.T. Brown & His Blu-Blowers. The O’Neal essay for Bear Family says Brown’s first session was in 1950 for Harlem Records, but Apex was affiliated with Harlem and the single came out on both labels—it seems likely that later year is just wrong.

In 1951, Brown was signed to the brand-new United Records as Nature Boy Brown & His Blues Ramblers, and his first of three 78s for the label featured the local anthem “Windy City Boogie.” The instrumental jump-blues release did well enough that Brown put together a touring band that included trumpeter King Kolax. “J.T. and I worked together about five or six months,” Kolax told O’Neal. “We went to LaSalle, IL, Louisville, Montgomery, AL. It was Brown, myself, Art Tarry on piano, Hillard Brown on drums and Ernest Ashley on guitar, and he picked up a bass player out of Chattanooga at Harry Brown’s place on East 9th Street. J.T. had an act and he could draw a crowd.” 

That Chattanooga bass player was Tommy Braden, also lead singer for R&B act the Four Blazes, who had a hit for Chicago’s Delmark Records in 1952 with the saucy “Mary Jo.” That same year, Brown jumped to the Meteor and J.O.B labels, cutting jumping tunes such as “Round House Boogie” and “Boogie Baby” under his own name and as Bep Brown.

The early 50s were arguably the peak of Brown’s career. He continued to gig constantly in Chicago clubs and tour whenever he could, but he never got comfortable enough that he didn’t have to worry about money. In Jody Williams’s interview with O’Neal, the guitarist recalled accompanying Brown on a tour supporting a popular California vocal group called Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, whose leader and guitarist likely influenced Chuck Berry with his rhythmic playing. Williams said Brown threatened Moore with a beating on that tour, accusing him of withholding $100 from Brown’s group after a show at the armory in Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

At this point Fleetwood Mac were still a blues-rock group—they were years away from hiring Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—and the place they afforded Brown among the city’s blues royalty reflects what I’ve always thought his stature should be. He even sang a tune of his own, “Blackjack Blues,” on the UK band’s double album. 

Muddy Waters’s son Mud Morganfield nodded to Brown’s legacy by opening his 2012 album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son with a version of Brown’s “Short Dressed Woman.” Perhaps more important, compilations of Brown’s work have been appearing since 1977, when Delmark released the retrospective Windy City Boogie via its Pearl imprint, which it had acquired in 1974. (Delmark is still kicking, and the record is still in print.) As recently as 2005, The Chronological J.T. Brown: 1950-1954 arrived on the French label Classics.

Read More

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

When you think of the blues, you probably think of guitars (acoustic and electric), piano, harmonica, maybe even the bass and drums in a full band. Saxophone, on the other hand, is much more closely associated with jazz and R&B. Sax players do exist in the blues, of course, but you usually see them only in bigger, better-established groups—and despite high-profile exceptions like Eddie Shaw, who led Howlin’ Wolf’s band, they’ve often had to take gigs in other genres to maintain their careers.

Case in point: J.T. Brown, a saxophonist who not only gigged with legends such as Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James but also played with the early blues-rock configuration of Fleetwood Mac. Brown should be at least as well-known as Shaw and fellow horn man A.C. Reed, and the Secret History of Chicago Music is here to help make it happen.

John Thomas Brown was born in Mississippi on April 2, 1918, to Sam and Cecelia Rimmer Brown. Much of his early life is obscure. The first musical outfit he’s known to have joined was the long-running Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, whose roster over the decades also included Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, Louis Jordan, and Rufus Thomas—not to mention players who built audiences in Chicago, among them Big Joe Williams, Maxwell Street Jimmy, and Johnny “Daddy Stovepipe” Watson. 

Black theater owner and entrepreneur Patrick Henry Chappelle formed the Rabbit’s Foot Company in Florida in 1900. He assembled five dozen or so Black performers to stage a touring musical comedy show called A Rabbit’s Foot, which traveled by rail and played theaters as well as tents. Chappelle avoided describing “the Foots” as a minstrel show, for obvious reasons. After his death in 1911, though, a white businessman from Michigan, Fred Swift Wolcott, bought the production and began marketing it that way. He moved the company’s headquarters to Port Gibson, Mississippi, in 1918, the year Brown was born. The troupe’s annual tours remained popular into the 1940s, and their last show appears to have been in 1959. 

Brown traveled all over the country with the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, and by historians’ best guesses he landed in Chicago in the mid-40s. A man of many nicknames, he was alternately known as Saxman Brown, J.T. “Big Boy” Brown, Bep Brown, “Nature Boy” Brown, and J.T. “Blow It” Brown. 

Brown had a famously distinctive saxophone tone: “He’s the only man I know could make a horn sound like a nanny goat,” guitarist Jody Williams told Jim O’Neal (founder of Living Blues magazine) in a 1977 essay for German label Bear Family Records. Brown played on and off with pianist Little Brother Montgomery for 20 years, at clubs such as the Hollywood Rendezvous near 39th and Indiana (where Little Walter often played), the A&B Lounge at 63rd and Cottage Grove, and the White Rose in Phoenix, Illinois. They frequently sat in with guitarist J.B. Lenoir.

Brown recorded in Chicago with Roosevelt Sykes and St. Louis Jimmy Oden in 1945, and as far as I can tell, that session was his first—though I can’t be super confident about discographical information more than 70 years old for an artist who used at least half a dozen names. Brown’s raw saxophone stylings also graced late-40s sides by Washboard Sam and Memphis Jimmy Clark. 

In 1947, Brown led a five-piece billed as “J.T. Brown’s Boogie Band” that backed Little Eddie Boyd on the 78 rpm platter “I Had to Let Her Go” b/w “Kilroy Won’t Be Back.” A different group called “Brown’s Blu-Blowers” supported Corporal Booker T. Washington on the 1949 single “St. Louis Boogie” b/w “Good Whiskey.” That same year, Brown’s Blues Blowers played behind Grant Jones on the Apex release “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water (And Sleep in a Hollow Log)” b/w “When the Deal Goes Down.” 

Brown’s first session as a bandleader was in 1949, also for Apex: “Blackjack Blues” b/w “Brown’s Boogie” is credited to J.T. Brown & His Blu-Blowers. The O’Neal essay for Bear Family says Brown’s first session was in 1950 for Harlem Records, but Apex was affiliated with Harlem and the single came out on both labels—it seems likely that later year is just wrong.

In 1951, Brown was signed to the brand-new United Records as Nature Boy Brown & His Blues Ramblers, and his first of three 78s for the label featured the local anthem “Windy City Boogie.” The instrumental jump-blues release did well enough that Brown put together a touring band that included trumpeter King Kolax. “J.T. and I worked together about five or six months,” Kolax told O’Neal. “We went to LaSalle, IL, Louisville, Montgomery, AL. It was Brown, myself, Art Tarry on piano, Hillard Brown on drums and Ernest Ashley on guitar, and he picked up a bass player out of Chattanooga at Harry Brown’s place on East 9th Street. J.T. had an act and he could draw a crowd.” 

That Chattanooga bass player was Tommy Braden, also lead singer for R&B act the Four Blazes, who had a hit for Chicago’s Delmark Records in 1952 with the saucy “Mary Jo.” That same year, Brown jumped to the Meteor and J.O.B labels, cutting jumping tunes such as “Round House Boogie” and “Boogie Baby” under his own name and as Bep Brown.

The early 50s were arguably the peak of Brown’s career. He continued to gig constantly in Chicago clubs and tour whenever he could, but he never got comfortable enough that he didn’t have to worry about money. In Jody Williams’s interview with O’Neal, the guitarist recalled accompanying Brown on a tour supporting a popular California vocal group called Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, whose leader and guitarist likely influenced Chuck Berry with his rhythmic playing. Williams said Brown threatened Moore with a beating on that tour, accusing him of withholding $100 from Brown’s group after a show at the armory in Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

At this point Fleetwood Mac were still a blues-rock group—they were years away from hiring Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—and the place they afforded Brown among the city’s blues royalty reflects what I’ve always thought his stature should be. He even sang a tune of his own, “Blackjack Blues,” on the UK band’s double album. 

Muddy Waters’s son Mud Morganfield nodded to Brown’s legacy by opening his 2012 album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son with a version of Brown’s “Short Dressed Woman.” Perhaps more important, compilations of Brown’s work have been appearing since 1977, when Delmark released the retrospective Windy City Boogie via its Pearl imprint, which it had acquired in 1974. (Delmark is still kicking, and the record is still in print.) As recently as 2005, The Chronological J.T. Brown: 1950-1954 arrived on the French label Classics.

Read More

British playwright Caryl Churchill is having a bit of a moment this month in Chicago. Court Theatre opens her rarely produced 1983 play, Fen, under the direction of Vanessa Stalling on February 10. And Curious Theatre Branch opens This Is Not a Churchill—four plays inspired by her work—this weekend at the Facility Theatre in Humboldt Park.

Churchill, who turned 84 this past September, is hardly an unknown quantity. Her first professionally produced play, Owners, went up in London 50 years ago. She’s the author of around 50 plays (not all of which have been produced). In the early days, a lot of her work was created through collaborations with Joint Stock Theatre Company (an experimental troupe dedicated to deep research among communities as part of the creative process) and the feminist company Monstrous Regiment, which also used an intensive workshop method in creating new scripts. 

But she’s not produced regionally in the U.S. nearly as often as her contemporaries, such as the late Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. The latter, at 85, just had a Broadway premiere of his 2020 play Leopoldstadt (one of 21 Broadway productions he’s enjoyed, including revivals and multipart plays). By contrast, Churchill has had two brief Broadway runs with Serious Money in 1988 and Top Girls (perhaps her most-produced play since its 1983 premiere) in 2008. In Chicago, the most recent productions of her work include Red Theater’s revival of Vinegar Tom(from 1976) this past November; Remy Bumppo’s Top Girlsin 2020; and—of more recent vintage—2012’s Love and Information, produced at Trap Door in 2019.

Fen2/10-3/5: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; audio description and touch tour Sat 3/4 2 PM (touch tour at 12:30 PM), open captions Sun 3/5 2 PM, ASL interpretation Sun 3/5 7:30 PM; Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $28.50-$66 previews (2/10-2/17), $40.50-$82 regular run (2/18-3/5)This Is Not a Churchill2/3-2/25: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, facilitytheatre.org, $15 or pay what you can

But for both Stalling and Curious Theatre Branch’s Beau O’Reilly, who is curating and producing This Is Not a Churchill as part of his BeauTown Cabaret series (formerly housed at Jimmy Beans Coffee), Churchill’s influence as a writer and theatrical visionary cannot be overstated. 

The current project isn’t Curious’s first outing with Churchill. They produced her 1994 dystopian horror epic, The Skriker, in 2019 as part of Rhinofest. “It was one of my favorite productions that I’ve ever done, frankly,” says O’Reilly. “And it’s a very, very powerful play.” (The story follows a vengeful shapeshifting entity, known as a “skriker” in British folklore, who pursues two single working-class mothers in England, and is notable for the singsong, fragmented wordplay of the title character.)

While teaching a workshop at the University of Iowa after that production, O’Reilly came across a collection of Churchill’s works featuring plays he hadn’t read before, including 1999’s This Is a Chair, in which a series of fraught domestic scenes are presented with labels suggesting political conflicts, such as “The Labour Party’s Slide to the Right” and “Pornography and Censorship,” that at first seem to have nothing to do with the onstage action.

“I was intrigued by the form even more than the content,” O’Reilly notes. “There’s a title that’s a big announcement that was from the news of the day when she was writing it. And then there’s these little domestic scenes. At first, I didn’t understand how they connected. Now I have come to understand something about it, which is that the titles are about violence—public violence. And the little scenes are domestic violence, which are often presented in quite subtle ways, like just an unpleasantness in tone between people. That affected me a lot.”

Unable to acquire the rights to produce This Is a Chair, Curious decided to move forward with part of the original plan, which always included the idea of having four local writers create their own responses riffing off Churchill. Those pieces include The Umbrella Disguise, written by O’Reilly and directed by Chris Bower; (Not) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, written by Jayita Bhattacharya and Ira Murfin and directed by Jeffrey Bivens; How To Fix Your Fatigue (Do This Everyday), written and directed by Bower; and This Is Not a Play by Caryl Churchill, Titled This Is a Chair, written and directed by Chris Zdenek.

O’Reilly notes that, while Bhattacharya and Murfin were both already Churchill fans, Bower and Zdenek were not as steeped in her work. But the support of the entire team for this project means a lot to O’Reilly right now: he’s in the middle of treatment for cancer, and has found that the energy required to direct all the pieces as well as produce the show would be overwhelming without his Curious family. “It was obvious to me that I couldn’t do all the rehearsals in the rehearsal process,” he says.

(Not) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, part of Curious Theatre Branch’s This Is Not a Churchill at Facility Theatre Credit Jeffrey Bivens

For Stalling, Fen is her first time out directing Churchill. The project came together after she directed Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51 at Court in 2019. Court artistic director Charles Newell asked her what her dream follow-up project would be. “And I just was like, ‘Well, uh, it’s a play that I don’t think anyone would wanna do, and no one would wanna produce,’” Stalling says with a laugh. “He was like, ‘What is it?’ And I just said ‘Fen by Caryl Churchill.’ Charlie just said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it! Go for it.’”

Like This Is a Chair and many of Churchill’s other plays, Fen unfolds in a series of short scenes that often focus on domestic tension and terror that reflects the larger forces of unbridled capitalism and misogyny. The title refers to the English marshlands in the eastern part of the island, which has been rich farmland for centuries. As corporate agriculture moves in, the farm workers in Churchill’s story find themselves facing growing economic terror that turns inward. 

Stalling appreciates that, while Churchill’s politics are always clear, her storytelling offers nuance and layers. “Part of that is that she challenges the idea that it’s easy to understand. We start in scene one, blaming a certain source of power. And then we find later on, ‘No, no, it’s this actually, let’s look above that. It’s that person.’ It’s not so simple to say, ‘Oh, you know, those are the bad guys.’ There’s not one villain in this play. Everybody is really kind of a cog in something that if it was super easy to explain or just point at—well then, wouldn’t it be fixed?”

But Stalling also notes that, though the women may be treated as cogs by systems beyond their immediate control, Churchill gives all of them, even the most minor of characters, their own names and, thus, their own agency. Given the attacks on women’s rights and health unfolding across the nation, that makes Fen feel particularly timely. But it’s the language and theatricality of Churchill’s vision that Stalling, like O’Reilly, also feels compelled by. 

“To me, the play is a compounding experience,” she says. “It’s not like you watch the play and you’re like, this event leads to this event, leads to this event, leads to this event. I hope the audience has the experience I feel like we’re having in the [rehearsal] room where it’s like the end of the play is this incredible joy and incredible grief at the exact same time.”

Dimming the house lights: Adrianne Cury (left) and David Rice in And Neither Have I Wings to Fly, the last production at Oak Brook’s First Folio Theatre. Courtesy First Folio

Farewell to First FolioIn December 2021, the board of First Folio Theatre in Oak Brook announced that they planned to close up shop at the end of the 2023-24 season. That changed to closing at the end of this season, with their final production being a staging of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in spring 2023.

Earlier this week, the company, founded in 1996 by the husband-and-wife team of David Rice and Alison C. Vesely, announced that they are now closing with the end of their current production of Ann Noble’s And Neither Have I Wings to Fly on February 26. 

The reasons for closing at all were, as Rice made clear when I spoke to him about the first announcement, mostly to do with fundraising and personnel. He and Vesely (who died of ovarian cancer in 2016) could tag team as managing director and artistic director without taking market salaries for running an Equity theater. But after Vesely’s death, Rice realized that continuing the theater without a solid succession plan wasn’t feasible. As he told me in 2021, “The only way you could be sure you’re going to have the ongoing funding for something like this is if the funding had already been in place for years, which it hasn’t been, or if you could set up an endowment.”

It’s a bittersweet announcement. Though I’m glad that they’re ending largely on their own terms and without the kind of acrimony that has brought down other theaters recently, I’ve enjoyed many productions at First Folio over the years, both in their outdoor summer Shakespeare presentations on the lush grounds of the Mayslake Peabody Estate and in the atmospheric Peabody mansion and the adjoining hall. It was a helluva run.

Non-Equity Jeff nominationsChicago’s answer to the Tonys, the Joseph Jefferson Awards are presented in two different ceremonies annually: one for Equity theaters, and the other for non-Equity (which essentially means union vs. non-union houses. Or bigger regional and midsize theaters vs. smaller storefront operations, if you prefer.)

The non-Equity nominations came out earlier this week, and they cover productions from July 2021 to December 2022. The extension recognizes that some theaters didn’t start producing after the pandemic shutdown until later in 2021. The theater with the most nominations out of the more than 100 productions seen by the Jeff Awards committee members was Theo Ubique (or, as it’s now known, Theo), with a grand total of 19 nominations from five productions. They were followed by Kokandy Productions with 16 nominations (their production of Sweeney Todddrew the most for a single show, with nine); Blank Theatre Company with 14; and Invictus Theatre with 13.

The complete list of nominations is available at jeffawards.org. The ceremony will be held Monday, March 27, at Park West.

Curtain raiser for Chicago Theatre WeekFinally, if you find yourself downtown on Monday, February 6, around noon, head over to the Harold Washington Library Center for a panel discussion cosponsored by the Reader, Chicago Public Library, and the League of Chicago Theatres. “A New Year for Theatre: New Leaders, New Directions, and Exciting New Productions” serves as an appetizer for Chicago Theatre Week (February 16-26). I’ll be talking to Mica Cole, executive director of TimeLine Theatre; Marti Lyons, artistic director of Remy Bumppo Theatre; Marcela Muñoz, co-artistic director for Aguijón Theater; and freelance director Grace Dolezal-Ng. It’s free, but reservations and information are at leagueofchicagotheatres.org.

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British playwright Caryl Churchill is having a bit of a moment this month in Chicago. Court Theatre opens her rarely produced 1983 play, Fen, under the direction of Vanessa Stalling on February 10. And Curious Theatre Branch opens This Is Not a Churchill—four plays inspired by her work—this weekend at the Facility Theatre in Humboldt Park.

Churchill, who turned 84 this past September, is hardly an unknown quantity. Her first professionally produced play, Owners, went up in London 50 years ago. She’s the author of around 50 plays (not all of which have been produced). In the early days, a lot of her work was created through collaborations with Joint Stock Theatre Company (an experimental troupe dedicated to deep research among communities as part of the creative process) and the feminist company Monstrous Regiment, which also used an intensive workshop method in creating new scripts. 

But she’s not produced regionally in the U.S. nearly as often as her contemporaries, such as the late Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. The latter, at 85, just had a Broadway premiere of his 2020 play Leopoldstadt (one of 21 Broadway productions he’s enjoyed, including revivals and multipart plays). By contrast, Churchill has had two brief Broadway runs with Serious Money in 1988 and Top Girls (perhaps her most-produced play since its 1983 premiere) in 2008. In Chicago, the most recent productions of her work include Red Theater’s revival of Vinegar Tom(from 1976) this past November; Remy Bumppo’s Top Girlsin 2020; and—of more recent vintage—2012’s Love and Information, produced at Trap Door in 2019.

Fen2/10-3/5: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; audio description and touch tour Sat 3/4 2 PM (touch tour at 12:30 PM), open captions Sun 3/5 2 PM, ASL interpretation Sun 3/5 7:30 PM; Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $28.50-$66 previews (2/10-2/17), $40.50-$82 regular run (2/18-3/5)This Is Not a Churchill2/3-2/25: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, facilitytheatre.org, $15 or pay what you can

But for both Stalling and Curious Theatre Branch’s Beau O’Reilly, who is curating and producing This Is Not a Churchill as part of his BeauTown Cabaret series (formerly housed at Jimmy Beans Coffee), Churchill’s influence as a writer and theatrical visionary cannot be overstated. 

The current project isn’t Curious’s first outing with Churchill. They produced her 1994 dystopian horror epic, The Skriker, in 2019 as part of Rhinofest. “It was one of my favorite productions that I’ve ever done, frankly,” says O’Reilly. “And it’s a very, very powerful play.” (The story follows a vengeful shapeshifting entity, known as a “skriker” in British folklore, who pursues two single working-class mothers in England, and is notable for the singsong, fragmented wordplay of the title character.)

While teaching a workshop at the University of Iowa after that production, O’Reilly came across a collection of Churchill’s works featuring plays he hadn’t read before, including 1999’s This Is a Chair, in which a series of fraught domestic scenes are presented with labels suggesting political conflicts, such as “The Labour Party’s Slide to the Right” and “Pornography and Censorship,” that at first seem to have nothing to do with the onstage action.

“I was intrigued by the form even more than the content,” O’Reilly notes. “There’s a title that’s a big announcement that was from the news of the day when she was writing it. And then there’s these little domestic scenes. At first, I didn’t understand how they connected. Now I have come to understand something about it, which is that the titles are about violence—public violence. And the little scenes are domestic violence, which are often presented in quite subtle ways, like just an unpleasantness in tone between people. That affected me a lot.”

Unable to acquire the rights to produce This Is a Chair, Curious decided to move forward with part of the original plan, which always included the idea of having four local writers create their own responses riffing off Churchill. Those pieces include The Umbrella Disguise, written by O’Reilly and directed by Chris Bower; (Not) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, written by Jayita Bhattacharya and Ira Murfin and directed by Jeffrey Bivens; How To Fix Your Fatigue (Do This Everyday), written and directed by Bower; and This Is Not a Play by Caryl Churchill, Titled This Is a Chair, written and directed by Chris Zdenek.

O’Reilly notes that, while Bhattacharya and Murfin were both already Churchill fans, Bower and Zdenek were not as steeped in her work. But the support of the entire team for this project means a lot to O’Reilly right now: he’s in the middle of treatment for cancer, and has found that the energy required to direct all the pieces as well as produce the show would be overwhelming without his Curious family. “It was obvious to me that I couldn’t do all the rehearsals in the rehearsal process,” he says.

(Not) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, part of Curious Theatre Branch’s This Is Not a Churchill at Facility Theatre Credit Jeffrey Bivens

For Stalling, Fen is her first time out directing Churchill. The project came together after she directed Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51 at Court in 2019. Court artistic director Charles Newell asked her what her dream follow-up project would be. “And I just was like, ‘Well, uh, it’s a play that I don’t think anyone would wanna do, and no one would wanna produce,’” Stalling says with a laugh. “He was like, ‘What is it?’ And I just said ‘Fen by Caryl Churchill.’ Charlie just said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it! Go for it.’”

Like This Is a Chair and many of Churchill’s other plays, Fen unfolds in a series of short scenes that often focus on domestic tension and terror that reflects the larger forces of unbridled capitalism and misogyny. The title refers to the English marshlands in the eastern part of the island, which has been rich farmland for centuries. As corporate agriculture moves in, the farm workers in Churchill’s story find themselves facing growing economic terror that turns inward. 

Stalling appreciates that, while Churchill’s politics are always clear, her storytelling offers nuance and layers. “Part of that is that she challenges the idea that it’s easy to understand. We start in scene one, blaming a certain source of power. And then we find later on, ‘No, no, it’s this actually, let’s look above that. It’s that person.’ It’s not so simple to say, ‘Oh, you know, those are the bad guys.’ There’s not one villain in this play. Everybody is really kind of a cog in something that if it was super easy to explain or just point at—well then, wouldn’t it be fixed?”

But Stalling also notes that, though the women may be treated as cogs by systems beyond their immediate control, Churchill gives all of them, even the most minor of characters, their own names and, thus, their own agency. Given the attacks on women’s rights and health unfolding across the nation, that makes Fen feel particularly timely. But it’s the language and theatricality of Churchill’s vision that Stalling, like O’Reilly, also feels compelled by. 

“To me, the play is a compounding experience,” she says. “It’s not like you watch the play and you’re like, this event leads to this event, leads to this event, leads to this event. I hope the audience has the experience I feel like we’re having in the [rehearsal] room where it’s like the end of the play is this incredible joy and incredible grief at the exact same time.”

Dimming the house lights: Adrianne Cury (left) and David Rice in And Neither Have I Wings to Fly, the last production at Oak Brook’s First Folio Theatre. Courtesy First Folio

Farewell to First FolioIn December 2021, the board of First Folio Theatre in Oak Brook announced that they planned to close up shop at the end of the 2023-24 season. That changed to closing at the end of this season, with their final production being a staging of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in spring 2023.

Earlier this week, the company, founded in 1996 by the husband-and-wife team of David Rice and Alison C. Vesely, announced that they are now closing with the end of their current production of Ann Noble’s And Neither Have I Wings to Fly on February 26. 

The reasons for closing at all were, as Rice made clear when I spoke to him about the first announcement, mostly to do with fundraising and personnel. He and Vesely (who died of ovarian cancer in 2016) could tag team as managing director and artistic director without taking market salaries for running an Equity theater. But after Vesely’s death, Rice realized that continuing the theater without a solid succession plan wasn’t feasible. As he told me in 2021, “The only way you could be sure you’re going to have the ongoing funding for something like this is if the funding had already been in place for years, which it hasn’t been, or if you could set up an endowment.”

It’s a bittersweet announcement. Though I’m glad that they’re ending largely on their own terms and without the kind of acrimony that has brought down other theaters recently, I’ve enjoyed many productions at First Folio over the years, both in their outdoor summer Shakespeare presentations on the lush grounds of the Mayslake Peabody Estate and in the atmospheric Peabody mansion and the adjoining hall. It was a helluva run.

Non-Equity Jeff nominationsChicago’s answer to the Tonys, the Joseph Jefferson Awards are presented in two different ceremonies annually: one for Equity theaters, and the other for non-Equity (which essentially means union vs. non-union houses. Or bigger regional and midsize theaters vs. smaller storefront operations, if you prefer.)

The non-Equity nominations came out earlier this week, and they cover productions from July 2021 to December 2022. The extension recognizes that some theaters didn’t start producing after the pandemic shutdown until later in 2021. The theater with the most nominations out of the more than 100 productions seen by the Jeff Awards committee members was Theo Ubique (or, as it’s now known, Theo), with a grand total of 19 nominations from five productions. They were followed by Kokandy Productions with 16 nominations (their production of Sweeney Todddrew the most for a single show, with nine); Blank Theatre Company with 14; and Invictus Theatre with 13.

The complete list of nominations is available at jeffawards.org. The ceremony will be held Monday, March 27, at Park West.

Curtain raiser for Chicago Theatre WeekFinally, if you find yourself downtown on Monday, February 6, around noon, head over to the Harold Washington Library Center for a panel discussion cosponsored by the Reader, Chicago Public Library, and the League of Chicago Theatres. “A New Year for Theatre: New Leaders, New Directions, and Exciting New Productions” serves as an appetizer for Chicago Theatre Week (February 16-26). I’ll be talking to Mica Cole, executive director of TimeLine Theatre; Marti Lyons, artistic director of Remy Bumppo Theatre; Marcela Muñoz, co-artistic director for Aguijón Theater; and freelance director Grace Dolezal-Ng. It’s free, but reservations and information are at leagueofchicagotheatres.org.

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“Regarding the Missing Objects,” a group exhibition on view at the Hyde Park Art Center, takes absence as its theme. There is the absence of one of the artists whose work is included in the show, Dana Carter, who died before the exhibition opened. Then there are the missing objects of the show’s title, a subtle reference to a not-so-subtle act of institutional censorship which resulted in this show, an earlier iteration of which was meant to take place at the Spertus Institute in 2019.

That show, tentatively titled “Inquiry 02: Material Investigations into the Spertus Collection,” would have been the culmination of the Spertus’s second Chicago Jewish artist fellowship, of which the eight artists here were a part of. The fellows spent several months developing a project in relation to items from the Spertus’s eclectic 15,000-piece collection, which were meant to be displayed along the final works. Four months before the opening, leadership at the institution refused to show a piece proposed by artist Tirtza Even, who subsequently withdrew. Once the rest of the artists were informed of what had happened, they too withdrew, in solidarity, and the curator and director of the fellowship program, Ruslana Lichtzier, resigned. 

Institutional censorship, of course, is nothing new. Private institutions in particular, like the Spertus, are free to make any decisions they want; they don’t answer to the public. What is different about this instance is that the artists and curator kept working together. Now, more than three years after that first show’s cancellation, “Regarding the Missing Objects” presents newly articulated works, sans the original items from the collection. Each artist interpreted the idea of absence differently. Ben Segal wrote wall text, installed throughout the galleries, that explores ideas of isolation and censorship. Elana Adler’s ghostly hanging sculpture, I see through your barriers, evokes the Eruv, an enclosed area “permitting various activities on the Sabbath.” 

Maggie Taft, an art historian, makes visible the absence of the Spertus Institute, the missing objects from the collection, and the canceled exhibition. In the final room of the gallery sit chairs and a table, where a partial archive of the activities of the Spertus fellows is chronicled: emails, notes, research materials, all open to public perusal. 

“It felt like rather than sort of allowing the institution to tell the story or to erase the story of that fellowship, this could be an opportunity to build a counter archive, to insist upon the existence of this program and what emerged out of that program,” Taft says.

The opening of the Hyde Park Art Center show, in November 2022, is the first time that the participants are speaking publicly about their experience, with the hope that the exhibition and its public programming will inspire a productive dialogue on censorship and institutional denial. “It’s usually an individual who experiences censorship,” Lichtzier says. “So we have so much privilege to bring this conversation and open the door to talk about it. . . . That is why I think it was really important for us to think about how we civically engaged in a conversation, that it’s about us [cultural workers] being under threat.”

Elana Adler, I see through your barriers, 2021Courtesy Hyde Park Art Center

“Inquiry 02: Material Investigations into the Spertus Collection” wasn’t the Spertus’s first brush with censorship. Back in 2008, the exhibition “Imaginary Coordinates,” which presented modern and historical maps of the Holy Land alongside contemporary artworks, was shut down a week after opening. 

“Imaginary Coordinates” was curated by Rhoda Rosen, who was the Spertus Museum’s director at the time—a position that no longer exists. It was only the second exhibition to be staged in Spertus’s gleaming new building, at 610 South Michigan. For Rosen, the glass-and-steel building, located near other cultural institutions, signified an openness to the greater public. “My charge, as I understood it, was to speak to all people and the way in which we are connected to one another,” Rosen says.

News reports from the time note pushback from the board and complaints from the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, a major donor to the Spertus. Michael Kotzin, then the executive vice-president of the Jewish Federation, called the exhibition “unwelcome and inappropriate,” and noted some works were “anti-Israel.” Rosen recalls receiving negative messages from people who hadn’t even seen the show, along with many messages of support.

“It showed something very positive, that people don’t often think about, maybe it showed the point of the museum actually, which is that the Jewish community isn’t a single community,” Rosen says. “It is a rich and varied community with all sorts of perspectives that many times, [because of the community’s powerful centralized power], have to be curtailed. But we all claim a space in it—whether we have to create alternative structures, or whether the institutional world will allow us in.” 

As the Reader’s Deanna Isaacs wrote at the time, “Imaginary Coordinates” was reorganized and reopened, for guided tours only, until it was officially shut down for good. The next year, longtime Spertus CEO Howard Sulkin left his position; he died in 2018. Rosen left the institution after the change in leadership, when it felt like the ability to think independently had narrowed. “The next [Spertus president] was definitely shrinking the vision to be more in line with the [Jewish] Federation,” she says. “It didn’t align with my own values.”

The impact of this sort of institutional denial is twofold. “Its function is to take people really concerned and interested in the question of Israel/Palestine and not allow them to work, not to give them the space to work,” Rosen says. But it also forecloses the opportunity for art to heal, to bring people together. “The beauty of bringing Palestinians and Jews together through art was vacated.”

The canceled exhibition garnered quite a bit of attention at the time. Lichtzier was aware of the incident before she joined the organization, though she hoped that things may have changed in the intervening years. Lichtzier originally ran the fellowship program with Ionit Behar, who was then curator of collections and exhibitions at Spertus. But in September 2018, a few months into the second fellowship, Behar had her own experience with censorship. 

Days before the opening of a show by Ukrainian-born Chicago artist Todros Geller, Spertus’s leadership objected to the inclusion of two nude works. The censorship led Behar to resign. In an email to the fellowship artists, she said the Spertus president offered “no explanation” or opportunity for dialogue regarding the decision, noting that their email was “disrespectful and insulting.” (Emails referenced in this story are open to the public via the archive on view at the Hyde Park Art Center.)

After Behar’s departure, the fellowship continued, with the exhibition slated to open in September of 2019, following a few postponements. From the start of the program, artist Tirtza Even, an experimental documentary filmmaker and professor at the School of the Art Institute, expressed interest in making work about Gaza. 

“I actually already then expressed some concern about the political kind of misalignment of the institution versus where my politics are,” Even says. “And I said that for the final show I will probably create a piece that will deal with the situation in Palestine and they were very open to that.”

The fellows were encouraged to explore the Spertus’s vast collection in order to find materials to inspire their own projects. Even chose a photograph by artist Jazon Lazarus, Untitled (Palestinian wall, east Jerusalem), from 2008. For the photo, Lazarus used a now-defunct web service, where you could pay a fee and someone would spray-paint a message of your choice on the Palestinian side of the Separation Wall in East Jerusalem. (The fees were used to renovate a youth center in Bir Zeit.) Lazarus’s message read, “Trying to imagine a clear view between Palestine and Israel.”

“I decided to react to that and actually go deeper and question this whole concept of viewership, which I feel like is a little more complicated than what is suggested by his language,” Even says. 

In April, an email thread about Even’s project began, between Lichtzier, Spertus dean Keren Fraiman, and Spertus president and CEO Dean Bell. Leadership was hoping to schedule a meeting with the artist to discuss her project, which Fraiman wrote had “significant challenges/questions.”

By the end of May, Spertus had declined to show Even’s proposed work, and she subsequently withdrew from the exhibition. At that point, the project was not even finished. In a later email, Bell called Even’s work “unnecessarily inflammatory,” “one-sided,” and “non-contextualized.”

According to Even and Lichtzier, there was scant opportunity for conversation about the work, or how it might be presented in a way that added additional context. Bell’s characterization of the work struck Even as particularly off-base, as context and an opportunity for dialogue was exactly what she’d hoped her work would offer. 

“I wanted to bring context but from the other perspective, not the one that is consistently endorsed by the institution,” she says. “I thought that it was crucial for me, as a Jew, to be the one who brings this critique. I think it’s more valuable in a way, that it comes from inside, so people start asking the right questions and maybe undo some of that indifference that I think is at the heart of a lot of the violence that’s allowed to happen.”

When Lichtzier told the rest of the fellowship artists about Even’s withdrawal, they quickly came together to form a group response. In an email to Bell and Fraiman, the artists wrote: “. . . we must stand together as a cohort in objecting to the censorship of our colleague’s work. We thus insist that the Spertus permit Tirtza Even to show her work as proposed. Otherwise, we will all recuse ourselves from the planned exhibition.”

The institution did not waver in their position, so the artists withdrew, Lichtzier resigned, and all mention of the show was promptly removed from the Spertus website. In fact, Spertus decided to formally end the fellowship program at the same time. 

Rosen sees Spertus’s decision as a direct result of the controversy around “Imaginary Coordinates.” “It’s not just that they’re related, right? You can’t look at Ruslana’s show without seeing the deep wounds that had been caused by my exhibition,” she says.

A statement provided by Spertus about the exhibition reads, in part, “The exhibition was never completed over concerns regarding a piece in the collection whose approach we believed was at odds with our institutional mission, values, and goals . . . We were clear then and maintain now that this decision in no way was an issue of censorship, but a sensitivity to institutional values and the commitment to providing opportunities for nuanced and complex discussion of important and sensitive issues.”

Despite this institutional denial, the fellowship group continued working together, meeting regularly throughout the pandemic to consider what a new exhibition might look like. Both Taft and Even credit Lichtzier for her work in this. “We owe the exhibition to her certainly,” Taft says. Even agrees, noting how important her vision was to the show. “She held us together,” Even says. 

The experience they all went through together forged a deep connection between them, and their dedication to showing work together was strengthened following the death of artist Dana Carter in July 2019.

In 2019, the Hyde Park Art Center agreed to host the exhibition, with no restrictions. “They were entirely open to the whole situation,” Even says, crediting HPAC director of exhibitions and residency programs Allison Peters Quinn. “It’s risky, since we are critiquing another institution in the city. Allison is just a very open-minded, courageous woman.”

Detail of William J. O’Brien’s Lost Family Pt. 2 – 2, 2022Courtesy Hyde Park Art Center

“Regarding the Missing Objects” is tucked away in HPAC’s second-floor Kanter Family Foundation Gallery, installed behind a black velvet curtain. The first work you see upon entering is Even’s video projection, Gaza Strip. The work is subtle, almost calming to behold. It shows a static shot of a Chicago pier extending into Lake Michigan. The day is overcast and looks cold and windy, with little evidence of life, save for a flock of seagulls. 

Your eye is drawn to the most dynamic part of the scene, a panoramic strip projected onto the wall of the pier. At first it’s hard to make out—the images are only a few inches in height. What you see are aerial shots, taken by drone, of the Gaza Strip, following Israel’s 2014 attack on the area.

An in-depth wall panel explains that the footage was taken by Palestinian residents, and made available through the Gazan company Media Town. The clarity of the images, similar to what Americans are used to seeing through Google Street View, doesn’t seem notable. But the panel, written by Even and Lichtzier, points out that until recently satellite images of Israel and Palestine were not publicly available at such high resolutions. A 1997 U.S. regulation, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, “limited the quality and availability of high-resolution satellite imagery” of the area, at the behest of Israel, ostensibly for national security purposes. In practice, the low resolution made it hard for Palestinians to prove human rights violations or settlement expansion. (Partly due to the growing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery from non-U.S. companies, the amendment was altered in 2020.)

While Even’s panoramic video is clear, showing vast destruction in Gaza, the image is not sensationalized. “I wanted to really make us see the fact that we don’t see and how we live oblivious of what goes on behind the wall,” she says. By juxtaposing the drone footage with Lake Michigan, she is bringing the war home, implicating herself and the viewer in the violence. “I chose to live here because I couldn’t support what goes on in Israel, but even by leaving, in some way, I’m endorsing certain kinds of passive nonparticipation. So it’s complicated.”

Gaza Strip’s wall text also makes America’s role in the conflict explicit, calling out General Dynamics, a weapons contractor to Israel, which is partly owned by Chicago’s Crown family. The Crowns are major philanthropists in the arts and in education, including to the Spertus.

Dana Carter’s book, Extract from Captain Stormfield Visit to Heaven, is on view in the final room of the exhibition.Courtesy Hyde Park Art Center

Throughout the galleries, and in an artist book on display, artist Dana Carver’s fabric drawings also evoke landscapes and satellite images. The saltwater drawings began by accident, when the artist’s studio had a leak during the winter, and street salt left stains on dark theatrical fabric. The resulting works are spectral abstractions, with lines of grayish salt moving fluidly across the fabric.

Jaclyn Mednicov’s work tackles both absence and presence. In Traces of Unclaimed Objects, the artist made photographic transfers onto acrylic polymer, which are hung from the ceiling. The images were taken by the artist while doing research about unclaimed post-World War II textiles, primarily shawls, in the Spertus collection. Referring to the pieces as “skins,” the patterned works signify complex layers of Jewish history. Her second piece, Memories of Objects, consists of nine cyanotype panels, featuring collaged photographs of personally meaningful objects that the fellowship participants brought to a workshop earlier in their program. The items in the collages are hard to make out: there seems to be a hairbrush, family photographs, jewelry. During the workshop, the participants had a conversation about what institutions collect, what they value, and what objects individuals find important to keep, to remember. 

Jaclyn Mednicov’s Memories of Objects features collaged photographs of personally meaningful objects that the fellowship participants brought to a workshop earlier in their program.Courtest Hyde Park Art Center

“It’s a grid [of separate units] but it’s completely united,” Lichtzier explains. “You cannot take one piece off . . . It’s important, for me at least, that like every artist that saw that work for the first time, they started tearing up because they really saw it as a group image.”

For Even, the community that formed out of this experience was an unexpected reward. “It’s really rich and broad and expansive and it went way beyond what I ever expected entering this fellowship,” she says. “I really didn’t know that that home would happen. Kind of oddly, it did serve exactly the goal that it set out to serve, but what brought us together was the walls that the Spertus chose to enforce.”

“Regarding the Missing Objects”Through 2/27: Mon-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10 AM-4:30 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Sun 10 AM-1:30 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, hydeparkart.org, free

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