Kris Vire wasn’t born and raised in Chicago. Unlike the origin story of a lot of people in the Chicago theater world, he also didn’t move here to study theater at DePaul, or Columbia College Chicago, or Northwestern, and then become part of an ensemble. But the native of Fayetteville, Arkansas, became a trusted and vital voice for the community as a critic and arts journalist in the aughts and beyond—first with Gapers Block, then with his lively blog, Storefront Rebellion, and most prominently as a staff writer and eventually the theater editor for Time Out Chicago. Most recently, Vire had been serving as editor of arts and culture for Chicago Magazine. He also contributed to American Theatre, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Sun-Times.
Vire, 47, died on Monday, November 18, nearly a year after receiving a dual diagnosis of esophageal and colon cancer. His illness had largely been kept quiet by his circle of friends and “found family” in Chicago, as well as his family back home in Arkansas, which made the news of his death even more shocking as it broke on Facebook through a public post from his longtime partner, Joe Torres. As Torres noted in the announcement, “Despite being chronically online and a prominent, talented voice in the Chicago arts and culture scene, Kris was a private person.”
I was one of the people who didn’t know that Vire was ill, though in retrospect I noted that I hadn’t seen him out at the theater recently. We never worked with or for each other, but he was one of the colleagues I most enjoyed running into on opening nights (and occasionally kibitzing with in sidebar DMs about some roiling controversy in the theater world). I went back and looked at his original Storefront Rebellion blog (he resurrected it briefly as a Substack in 2020), and was struck anew by the way Vire created a forum for lively, passionate, and (mostly) respectful dialogue around a range of issues, from the tendency of some theater pundits to still look to New York as the arbiter of success for Chicago artists, to defending critics who pan shows from charges of hurting the community. (He and I definitely bonded over our pronounced dislike for “star” ratings systems in reviews.)
Writer and performer Jeremy Owens (creator of the long-running storytelling series You’re Being Ridiculous), became friends with Vire at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where both men were theater majors. Owens moved to Chicago in 2000, and he notes that Vire moved here a year later. “He’s like my family, like my brother or something,” says Owens in a phone conversation about his late friend. Vire, like Owens, originally came to Chicago with the intention of pursuing acting (he performed in the ensemble of the late Defiant Theatre’s rollicking The Pyrates). But, Owens notes, “I can tell you that he was always really a writer. Not that he wasn’t a good actor.” Owens adds that Vire had even talked about going to grad school at Medill when he first moved to Chicago.
“When blogs were first like a thing, and that was like a hot moment, he had a blog that was called Angsted It Prone, where he was sort of working out being a cultural critic, a theater critic,” says Owens. “There was a time where he would write things on the blog that were essentially like theater reviews. He was sort of figuring that out and perfecting it and realizing that that was a skill that he had.”
Vire’s cultural interests weren’t just in theater. In a phone conversation, Torres tells me that he and Vire (who met online in 2016) “kind of matched each other’s nerd. You know, when people say, ‘You matched my freak.’ We matched each other’s nerd because we connected on so many things like music, pop culture, movies, and just like similar perspectives on life and just also just figuring stuff out together.”
Torres, who works as a user experience designer at a Chicago firm, was decidedly not a theater person when he and Vire first got together. He remembers that the first show he attended with Vire was a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s three-and-a-half hour family drama, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “In hindsight, it’s insane to drop someone into the fire like that,” recalls Torres. “But I remember just loving this very dense theater experience.”
Torres adds, “You could think of me jumping in as someone who had zero context. And now after like eight, nine years of seeing all this theater, I feel like I have a much stronger understanding. Theater was such a small part of our lives overall though. I think when he was a reviewer it was harder. So there was some amount of sort of spreading the wealth of like, ‘Hey, can a friend join me? Like as a plus one?ʼ”
Owens, who also frequently attended shows with Vire, says, “He knew that he had a job to do and what it meant, what the ethics of that was, and he just wanted to be taken seriously and to do the very best job possible. I have known him for so long, so we have, like, a different sort of language and a way of being. And so I would always sort of feel like a chihuahua running around him, being silly or whatever, and then remembering, ‘Oh, I’m basically in your office right now, and I have to settle down.ʼ” Torres notes that Vire adhered to the “two-block rule”: they had to be two blocks away from the theater before beginning any discussion of the show they had just seen.
As someone who has been covering theater for three decades, I can attest to how difficult it can be to keep a healthy social life going while also attending shows several nights a week. A constant theme both in the online tributes to Vire and in talking to Torres and Owens has been how well he created space for his circle of friends in Chicago and his family in Arkansas. Torres tells me that the couple held a monthly dinner with friends until COVID-19 hit, and also regularly attended a bar trivia night hosted by another friend.
Vire’s professionalism and craft was noted by many on Facebook, including Christopher Piatt, the first theater editor at Time Out Chicago who brought Vire onboard. (Piatt went on to create the long-running live magazine show, the Paper Machete). On a public Facebook post, Piatt wrote, “As the theater editor at Time Out, I originally hired him as a freelancer, after digging the writing on his blog, Storefront Rebellion. (Do they still make blogs? I heard they quit making magazines.) Anyway, his words appeared in the very first issue in March of 2005, and after maybe about a year we hired him as the full-time theater writer. Whatever skills I eventually developed as an editor, I first learned through editing him.
Kris and I sat next to each other for about three years, and even though I was technically the boss, we definitely saw our time together as a collaboration, even (and sometimes especially) when we disagreed. We were united in our enthusiasm for the independent storefront scene and our frequent, eye-rolling boredom with whatever silly dreck the major theaters were producing.”
Vire’s job at Time Out Chicago, notes Torres, had expanded to covering things like burger fests and other nontheater activities before he was let go in 2018. In an interview with Rob Weinert-Kendt of American Theatre after his dismissal, Vire reflected on the tension of reviewing nonprofit theater for profit-oriented media companies in Chicago.
“The scene, as you know, has a long and rich history of being nurtured by local media, by the Chicago Reader, which for decades would review anybody that asked them for a review, and the Tribune under Richard Christiansen’s long tenure—he was famously adventurous in terms of going out to see shows in nightclubs and basements and all that. I have to say that a lot of the favorite things I’ve seen in those years of reviewing have been the kinds of shows that crop up in non-traditional theatre spaces and have played with immersive techniques or just been done with no evidence of a budget at all.
I’ve always felt a responsibility to try to see that kind of stuff, to see new theatre companies where I can champion stuff that doesn’t have huge a marketing budget of its own. I do think that the pressures that are being felt by all kinds of media as we move into more of a digital age are bound to affect what shows are able to get that kind of word out.”
Vire definitely was more likely to talk about his profession than his personal life in public. (Among my favorite professional experiences with Vire over the years were the times we served as judges for Stage Left Theatre’s annual DrekFest of deliberately awful short plays, where I found myself working hard to keep up with the superlative snark Vire proffered during the feedback/roast sessions.)
But Owens notes that Vire did tell a story about coming out to his then girlfriend in college for a 2015 Pride edition of You’re Being Ridiculous. “I asked him to write a story about it. And then, we were friends with the woman that he was dating, so I also asked her to write about the same story separately. And so it was sort of this magical thing in the show of them telling their experiences. And then after he told his story first about the experience of coming out to her, she right after told her story about him coming out to her. And so it’s like midway through her story, everyone realized that they were the couple, that this was really the joint story. Honestly, of all the things that have ever happened in the show, that might be my favorite.”
Vire obviously was someone whose integrity and loyalty inspired the same in return from his friends. Torres notes to me that Vire decided to not publicize his cancer diagnosis because “he didn’t want cancer to be the constant conversation.”
In his Facebook announcement, Torres notes, “The last play we saw together was Primary Trust at the Goodman last month, and there was a quote that deeply resonated with me as we were watching, given the circumstances we were in and the limited time that we knew we had: ‘Even though we will lose everything in the end, it is the finding that is important. And it is a privilege to love everything before death touches it.’”
Vire is survived by his parents Keith and Jan Vire, his sister Julie Weegens (Aaron), nephew Jonah Weegens, grandmother Nelda Farthing, and many aunts, uncles, and cousins, along with his found family: Kelly Gilbride-Loris, Jeremy Loris, Brooke Allen, Jeremy Owens, Andy Fine, Julie Starbird, and Neal Starbird.
Donations in his memory can be made to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Esophageal Cancer Action Network.
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