I’m terrible at top-ten lists. For one thing, even though I saw about 125 shows this year, that’s not nearly enough of a sample to weigh in confidently. For another, it always feels a little reductive and mechanical to try to sum up an entire year of performances in one tidy numbered list. And let’s face it—there’s probably also some fear of commitment. What if I decide later that this show should have been on the list in place of that one? I have enough trouble sleeping already since the election. Who needs the extra guilt and stress?
But even the process of deciding what shows to talk about here in a (probably vain) attempt to give some context to what happened on- and offstage in 2024 suggests that there are shows that stood out to me. And of course that’s the point: nobody goes to the trouble of creating a production thinking, “Well, I sure hope they’ll forget this one!” As a former acting teacher of mine once put it: “We only speak to change the world.”
I don’t know if anything that happened in Chicago theaters this past year will change the world (though god knows it could use some positive changes). But I do know that even as the world grows darker and the future looks grim for now, I’m grateful for the people who believe down to their bones that the simple act of telling stories gives us a place to begin understanding ourselves and each other a little bit better.
Since it’s coming up again in a few weeks, it feels appropriate to start this journey through the calendar by mentioning the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival—the largest celebration of puppet arts in North America. The festival, headed by Blair Thomas, started out as a biannual event in 2015. Its growth over the past decade (they offer workshops year-round in addition to the now annual festival and have also launched a digital archive) has been exhilarating to witness. Puppetry is also a way for all kinds of performers and visual artists to explore their identities, as the Readerʼs Micco Caporale found in reporting on the Puppetqueers collective in March. As founder Lindsey Ball told Caporale, “There’s such an inherent joy in puppetry, no matter the content, and I think people are drawn to that.” (A couple of weeks ago, I came across the beloved Puppet Bike in Andersonville and it indeed filled me with simple joy.)
Another ongoing source of civic pride happens every fall with Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, presented by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance. In addition to international and national artists, the festival provides a showcase for several local Latine companies, which this year included work from Colectivo El Pozo, Teatro Tariakuri, Subtext Studio Theatre, Repertorio Latino Theater Company, Visión Latino Theatre Company, and Aguijón Theater Company. The presence of so many local companies highlights that Chicago is also one of the most important incubators of Latine theater and performance in the nation. Though they weren’t a part of Destinos this year, Humboldt Park’s UrbanTheater Company produced the absorbing world premiere of Chicago Lore(s), Sammy A. Publes’s portrait of José “Cha Cha” Jiménez and the Young Lords. (The death of Juan Ramirez, the longtime artistic director of the influential Latino Chicago Theater Company, right before this year’s Destinos kicked off added a reminder of how deep the roots for Latine theater go in Chicago soil.)
Inevitably, given the direction we’re moving, stories of resistance and defiance hit extra hard for me. I’m not blaming Refracted Theatre Company for the election results (over 77 million people have a LOT to answer for on that count), but their decision to stage Laura Winters’s Coronation, about a dystopic U.S. where women can’t catch a break against the viciousness of patriarchy and environmental collapse, felt pretty eerily prescient in retrospect. On the other hand, seeing Nothing Without a Company’s raw, funny, and straight-to-the-solar-plexus pop-punk musical by Kevin Sparrow, Sofa King Queer, days after the election felt like just the “fuck you, we’re not going anywhere” message we all need.
Harmony France, cofounder of the feminist musical theater company Firebrand, decided to resurrect the company after the election. Black Ensemble Theater (BET) announced they were moving forward with plans to create a “cultural village” across the street from their Uptown home that will include a cafe, recording studio, and affordable housing for artists. (I talked to Jackie Taylor, BET’s founder and CEO, when they first moved into their current theater in 2011, and she was talking then about acquiring the space across the street that was occupied at the time by the Japanese American Service Committee. Never bet against Jackie Taylor.)
Haven Chicago closed out their 11-year run with Hedwig and the Angry Inch—also the first show they ever produced. TimeLine Theatre, which hopes to finally open its own long-awaited space in Uptown in 2026, finished their storied tenure in their longtime Wellington Avenue home with Dolores Díaz’s Black Sunday—a play about forced deportations in the 1930s that also feels like it might be depressingly prescient. Northlight Theatre announced that they will soon begin breaking ground on their new space that will finally bring them back to Evanston. Collaboraction, which has bounced around a lot in its history, is landing in Humboldt Park’s Kimball Arts Center. Free Street, the oldest continuously operating off-Loop company and one with an unwavering commitment to social justice and inclusivity, found a new Back of the Yards home, while improv and sketch company the Revival moved up from Hyde Park to the South Loop.
Of course theater is more than real estate. The latter may give us the illusion of permanence, but as we’ve learned in the past month or so, the ground can shift under our feet pretty damn quickly. If being a theater writer has taught me anything, it’s to embrace ephemerality as the only constant in life and to realize that collaboration is at the heart of every endeavor.
Among the great collaborators and storytellers we lost this year in addition to Juan Ramirez: actor Mike Nussbaum, Kuumba Theatre Workshop founder Val Gray Ward, former Muntu Dance Theatre executive director Joan Gray, Greg Kandel (founder of Evanston Theatre, forerunner of Northlight), actor Molly LeCaptain, costume designer John Nasca, actor Cristin McAlister, performer/sound designer/filmmaker Larry Nance, actor and teacher Erin Philyaw, playwright and Center Stage cofounder David Rush, director and longtime Loyola theater professor Jonathan Wilson, and theater journalist and editor Kris Vire.
I’m frightened as hell for the future right now. But I feel confident that a lot of Chicago artists are ready to stand together and tell the stories we need to hear in the years to come, and remind us that the bastards don’t get to steal our joy.