So you can’t go to the theater because (gestures weakly toward everything). Sure, there are streaming productions galore right now—even if they lack the communal experience of live performance. But there is also a special thrill to curling up with a great script and becoming a director in your own mind, imagining how this world on the page looks and feels in three dimensions.
Mark Larson’s Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater (2019, Agate Midway Books) is an exhilarating, exhaustive (700 pages and 300 interview subjects) overview of the organisms that made Chicago theater world-class, from the 1950s on, focusing on artists and companies both legendary and overlooked.
Isaac Gomez made his Steppenwolf debut in 2018 with La Ruta, a searing drama about the women who work in the maquiladoras (and have been murdered or disappeared in huge numbers over the past few decades) in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from Gomez’s hometown of El Paso. That play was based on interviews Gomez conducted with the women of Juarez. But he also created a one-woman show, The Way She Spoke, also drawn from interviews, that premiered in 2019 with New York’s Audible Theater, starring Kate del Castillo. It’s available as a download with Audible.
