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Whether it's Miriam Margolyes' one-woman show about the women in Dickens' life and work, or Lionel Bart's musical which rendered Oliver Twist accessible, there's plenty of non-seasonal Dickens on tap this week.

Dead playwrights are alive and well and still serving to inspire — sometimes wisely and sometimes not — theater artists of today.

This is the perfect time to be a young actor. Sure, the global economy sucks, but when has it ever been a good time for a career in the arts? 

Eastland wishes to be an elegy and not an exclamation point, an ache rather than a terrible wound, and at this it is highly successful.

As the American Theatre Critics Association comes to Chicago, Jonathan Abarbanel reflects on what it really means to be a critic.

Sure there are plays out there about roller derby and boxing. But you can fit all the other sports plays in a thimble compared to the vast dramatic literature about baseball, not to mention the treasury of baseball literature beyond theater. 

What fascinates contemporary theater about torture is precisely what Medieval, Elizabethan and Jacobean theater didn't question: the moral ambiguity of it.