Andy Warhol's films raise the question of what exactly you're supposed to do with them. Are they regular "films" meant to be seen in a movie theater? Or some other sort of art? In today's art world, they'd probably be seen more in line with the video art that you...

The Eugene O'Neill festival now in its final days at Chicago's Goodman Theatre wasn't exactly designed as an introduction to this great American playwright. Nor was it a celebration of his best and most famous works. Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh were nowhere to be...

A hundred years ago, political tensions were running high in Illinois. Everyone wanted to know the answer to one suspenseful question: Who would be the new U.S. Senator from Illinois?

The struggle to answer that question would stretch on for four years, as charges of bribery and corruption rocked Springfield...

American Buffalo came and went pretty damn fast on Broadway this fall. The reviews were not exactly glowing for director Robert Falls's revival of David Mamet's drama, which is widely regarded as one of the playwright's best plays. It's worth remembering, though, that critics did not greet American Buffalo with...

As just about everyone pointed out on Tuesday night, Barack Obama's election as president was a moment of huge historical significance for the nation. Obama's eloquent election-night speech in Grant Park is also surely one of the great moments in Chicago history.

Forty years ago, when protestors and police clashed...

The news from Wall Street is prompting a lot of comparisons with the Great Depression, but the history books are filled with other similar financial crises. Throughout the 1800s, when the government barely regulated the financial markets at all, speculative bubbles and piles of bad loans caused several panics. History...

The Building Stage takes on familiar topics and makes them feel new. The three-year-old theater group has already reinterpreted Hamlet and Moby-Dick into its own stage language, which founder Blake Montgomery calls "physical theater." On Friday night, a remarkable rendition of Bram Stoker's classic horror novel Dracula opened at the...