Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says Illinois should have a statewide gun registry. As the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times reported, his plan is likely to run into much resistance.

Emanuel's idea isn't new. Mayor Richard J. Daley (the first Mayor Daley, that is -- father of Richard M. Daley)...

It isn't easy pinning down the details of a ghost story. Rumors and urban legends circulate, but how often do you read a firsthand account from someone who says they actually saw one of those supposedly famous ghosts? More often than not, what we get are stories far removed from...

Chicago's fall theater season opened over the past few weeks with a flurry of major opening nights that might make you feel the way Tribune critic Charles Collins did back in 1936. I happened the other day across this quote from Collins, who had just seen several plays on Chicago...

I was lost in a dream for three hours one night last week in New York -- wandering through the rooms of a haunted hotel, running up and down stairs as I chased after the characters from a Shakespeare tragedy, witnessing blood spilled and washed off their bodies, watching it...

Each time I see a play by Mickle Maher, it reminds me of how much I love words. And it's pretty obvious that Maher -- an Evanston playwright, actor and member of Chicago's Theater Oobleck -- is in love with words, too. Maybe that isn't saying much. What writer doesn't...

Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre is on a hot streak. One of the reasons is its strong ensemble of actors. Certain faces at Steppenwolf are looking very familiar lately to regular audience members: Tracy Letts, Amy Morton, Francis Guinan, Kate Arrington, Ian Barford. These actors are just...

The Nov. 29 issue of The New Yorker has a wonderful essay on Keith Moon's drumming by literary critic James Wood. Reading this appreciation of Moon's insanely great drumming made me think of the following article, which I wrote in 2007 for Pioneer Press Newspapers, looking back on...

Did the word puppeteer originate in Chicago? The evidence suggests that it did, although it's never easy to close the book on any etymological investigation.

In the July issue of Chicago magazine, Graham Meyer compiled a fascinating list of "The Top 40 Chicago Words -- Our Contributions to...

There are at least two levels in just about every great piece of theater. On one level, we should believe the characters we're seeing onstage are real. On another level, we're fully aware of the fact that we're watching a performance. Of course those people talking and walking onstage aren't...

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...