**We understand not everyone is comfortable being in a crowd without masks yet, so City Lit has designated 2 performances where masks are required. Sunday, March 10, 2024 and Sunday, April 7, 2024 are the designated performances for Two Hours in a Bar. Masks are encouraged but no longer required for all other performances.
Now On Sale
The world stage premiere of Waiting for Tina Meyer, the only collaboration between Thatcher, City Lit's resident playwright, and Shue, the late playwright of the farces The Nerd and The Foreigner. Written while they were best friends and resident actors at Milwaukee Repertory Theater in the 1980s, it concerns a pair of best-friend actors sitting in a bar because one of them is expecting to be met there by Tina Meyer, a woman he doesn't know who sent him a note backstage earlier that evening.
The world premiere of Text Me was commissioned from longtime City Lit collaborator, Kingsley Day, as a companion piece to Thatcher and Shue's play. In this musical version of life at the bar, 21st Century dating patterns get tangled up in 21st Century technology, and the age-old questions of love and romance persist as two gay men who have previously met only online plan their first in-person meeting.
Season 44 Subscriptions Now on Sale
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THE HOUSE OF IDEAS
World Premiere
by Mark Pracht
Directed by Outgoing Artistic Director Terry McCabe
August 23, 2024 - October 6, 2024
(Previews Aug. 23 - Aug. 31)
It was in the 1960s that Marvel Comics began creating dozens of memorable characters, one after another over a period of years, and built a single cohesive world for them to inhabit. In comic books, this was revolutionary. But the two men at the center of this renaissance struggle with the idea of credit now that they’ve made it something worth struggling over. The House of Ideas examines the rise of Marvel and the fraught relationship between the Lennon and McCartney of comic books, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Part Three of The Four-Color Trilogy, about the men and women who created a body of literature Americans both embraced and loathed.
SEVEN GUITARS
30th Anniversary Production
by August Wilson
Directed by Manny Buckley
October 18, 2024 - December 1, 2024
(Previews Oct. 18 - Oct. 26)
The Chicago storefront premiere of this searing August Wilson drama about six friends in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1948 mourning the death of their friend Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a rising blues star trapped by his circumstances and cut down in his prime. One of Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” of ten plays depicting the African American experience in each of the 20th Century’s decades.
GLASSHEART
Chicago Premiere
by Reina Hardy
Directed by Incoming Artistic Director Brian Pastor
January 10. 2025 - February 23, 2025
(Previews Jan. 10 - Jan. 18)
Chicago premiere of a new play by Chicago-based playwright Reina Hardy. A modern-day reimagining of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. The Beast has moved into a low-rent district in Chicago with his last loyal friend, a lamp named Only. They meet a neighborly witch and a young woman who might, somehow, still break the curse.
R.U.R. (ROSSUM'S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS)
World Premiere Adaptation
by Karel Capek
freely adapted by Bo List
Directed by Incoming Artistic Director Brian Pastor
May 2, 2025 - June 15, 2025
(Previews May 2 - May 10)
In 1920, Karel Čapek’s early science fiction classic R.U.R. coined the term “robot” and looked ahead to the wonders and dangers of artificial intelligence decades before it was cool to worry about such things. “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (“R.U.R.” for short) is a mysterious island factory that manufactures artificial human beings, run by the eccentric scientist Harry Rossum. When Helena Glory arrives to advocate for the rights of these machines, a series of events is set into motion that sees Harry and Helena married against the backdrop of a global robot uprising.
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