Illegal Use of Hands In a small town where buzzards feast on a dead Chevy and the local Wal-Mart hires only college graduates, three men [ABT ensemble member Steve Key (Broadway tour of August: Osage County), ABT Artistic Affiliate Dennis Zacek (founding artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater) and Howie Johnson (award-winning Killer Joe at Profiles Theater)] wait out the… (more…)
It’s A Wonderful Life: Live At The Biograph From the original director and Ensemble that brought this holiday tradition to Chicago since 2004. Join the American Blues family as we take you back to a 1940s radio broadcast of Frank Capra’s holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with live Foley sound effects, an original score, and a stellar cast of… (more…)
Waiting for Lefty Waiting for Lefty, inspired by the New York taxi strike of 1934 and first staged by the Group Theater in 1935, features powerful vignettes that offer a timeless treatise on societal inequities. “We’ve been kicked around so long we’re black and blue from head to toes,” opines a Depression-era American working stiff in Odets’ masterpiece. Presented by American… (more…)
Rantoul and Die From the writer and executive producer of “Two and a Half Men” and “Mike and Molly” comes a wickedly dark new play with four of the funniest, ugliest, and most heartbreakingly real characters ever, all crammed together in a grimy little world that makes the local Dairy Queen and Dante’s Inferno seem one and the same. The… (more…)
American Blues Theater: Blue Ink – Playwriting Contest American Blues Theater (ABT) is seeking submissions for a new annual playwriting contest, Blue Ink. The winner will be awarded a cash prize of $500.00 and receive a staged-reading of his/her manuscript by American Blues Theater. The winning play will be chosen by a selection committee comprised of ABT Ensemble members, most… (more…)
Happy 25th Birthday to American Blues Theater. Congratulations on two and a half decades of outstanding work! American Blues Theater
By Venus Zarris “Seems like the Lord just ain’t with us no more.” Jeeter Lester declares at the opening of Tobacco Road. That line pretty much front-loads the point of Erskine Caldwell’s story, adapted to the stage by Jack Kirkland. Starvation, ignorance, frightening immorality and a set of piss poor values that could turn Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey away… (more…)
Tobacco Road Tobacco Road examines the extreme lengths people will travel for survival. In a rural shack in Georgia during the Great Depression, the dysfunctional and desperate Lester family faces eviction from their own land. The patriarch Jeeter struggles to keep his farm’s deed, feed his starving family and arrange suitable marriages for his children despite no money, no seeds… (more…)
It’s a Wonderful Life: Live at The Biograph! The classic story, based on the 1946 Frank Capra masterpiece is performed as a period radio play complete with commercial breaks. The same creative team who brought this classic piece to Chicago audiences for six years once again brings the town of Bedford Falls to life, this time with a new adaptation… (more…)