Funerals are plays. Most organized rituals are. There is pageantry, a purpose, a prescribed order of events. I went to a lot of them when I lived with my grandparents for much of my youth. When you're old, funerals are a pretty major social activity. I appreciate the way Incomplete Conversations  by writer/director Nell Voss, produced by Silent Theatre captures the backstage drama of the funeral ritual. The show centers around the funeral of a beloved young pastor, James Edward Klein played by Victor Holstein, who may or may not have been murdered. Klein's ghost is watching his own funeral, and flashing back to various events of his life, and the often tumultuous relationships with his family and colleagues. The show is immersive and site specific, taking place in the various different rooms of the Tapestry Church on Irving Park. I've seen site specific shows before, I recall a fine production of Hamlet  I watched in a mansion on a north side beach once several years ag...

Jack the Ripper. Everyone knows the name, most know the story of the never identified serial killer who murdered five streetwalkers in 1880s London. I remember when I first heard the name. I was about six or seven years old on a foggy night in Evanston walking with my dad and as dads do, he noted it was the kind of night Jack the Ripper would have done his work. The character is now an infamous antihero starring in plays, books, movies etc. The other night I got to see the first reading of a brand new play Women of Whitechapel by Kate Black-Spence and Chris Brickhouse that asks the question, why does this anonymous, masturbating psychopath get more attention than the human beings he viciously butchered? The play simply presents the five women: Catherine Eddowes (played in the reading by Lisa Herceg) Annie Chapman (Courtney Jones) Mary Anne "Polly" Nichols (Song Marshall) Mary Anne Kelly (Jess Ervin) and Elizabeth Stride (Jess Maynard) sitting together in the afterlife finally...