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Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Yahoo
Afternoon Briefing: Trump administration cuts jobs at Lovell health care center
Good afternoon, Chicago. Joseph Czuba has been convicted of murdering 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi, a hate crime fueled by the Plainfield landlord's hostility toward Palestinians and his anger over the Hamas attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. A Will County jury deliberated for for just over an hour before reaching a verdict of guilty. Czuba did not display any visible signs of emotion when the verdict was read. The panel also found him guilty of attempted murder of the boy's mother, two counts of aggravated battery and two counts of committing a hate crime. Here's what else is happening today. And remember, for the latest breaking news in Chicago, visit and sign up to get our alerts on all your devices. Subscribe to more newsletters | Asking Eric | Horoscopes | Puzzles & Games | Today in History The James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago is the only facility in the country that cares for both veterans and active-duty personnel simultaneously. Read more here. More top news stories: Two reputed Mexican cartel figures brought to Chicago in historic prisoner transfer Mayor Brandon Johnson to appoint Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa to lead Park District The software sounds a chime if a passenger attempts to board their flight before their assigned group is called, alerting the gate agent and the customer to the error. It will not accept the boarding pass of someone assigned to a later group. Read more here. More top business stories: CHA launches 'year of renewal' as the agency grapples with executive leadership exodus Harvey Lofts draws strong interest, sparking hope and skepticism for city's downtown If your dad were savvy enough to buy 1% of the Sox in 1981 for around $200,000 and left it to you when he died, you could now sell it for $18 million. Not bad for being born to the right parent. Read more here. More top sports stories: Chicago Sky will host Caitlin Clark and Indiana Fever at the United Center for 2 historic games this summer How the Chicago Bears' offseason road map could start in the middle. Brad Biggs' 10 thoughts from the NFL combine. The James Beard Foundation has named the recipients of its America's Classics Awards, meant to recognize 'locally and independently owned restaurants with timeless appeal.' Read more here. More top Eat. Watch. Do. stories: Review: 'A Lie of the Mind' is a Chicago-style treatment of Sam Shepard's most difficult play Review: Tense 'Last Breath' is a thrilling and human retelling of true events President Donald Trump cut short talks with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy over a deal for U.S. access to that country's rare earth minerals after shouting at him in the Oval Office. Trump berated Zelenskyy for being 'disrespectful.' More top stories from around the world: Texas measles cases rise to 146 in an outbreak that led to a child's death 'Spring forward' as daylight saving time 2025 is set to begin
Chicago Tribune
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘A Lie of the Mind' is a Chicago-style treatment of Sam Shepard's most difficult play
With 'Fool for Love' playing at the Steppenwolf Theatre and now 'A Lie of the Mind' at the thriving Raven Theatre, Chicago is having something of a Sam Shepard revival. The late, great bard of the lonely American prairie and desert went out of favor here for a while; it's good to have his work back and being interpreted by a younger generation of artists. I found Steppenwolf's 'Fool for Love' overly styled and tentative, but that's far from the case with director Azar Kazemi's Raven production, filled with compelling young actors such as Ian Maryfield, Arash Fakhrabadi, John Drea and Gloria Imseih Petrelli going for broke in Raven's intimate theater. Now 40 years old, 'A Lie of the Mind' started out as a three-act, four-hour play, although Raven is using the revised version, first produced by the New Group in 2010, that clocks in at around 2 hours and 40 minutes — still nearly twice as long as 'Fool for Love.' The piece has accurately been described as the final episode in a quintet of familial dramas that also includes Shepard's 'Curse of the Starving Class,' 'Buried Child,' 'True West' and 'Fool for Love' and it's probably fair to say that it's Shepard's last great 20th century masterpiece. His 'Long Day's Journey Into Night,' kinda. All of those plays deal with broken families and romantic relationships, some subject to healing, some not. All of them are about the disconnect between the sparse natural environment in these United States and the human craving for intimacy. And all deal with American iconography: more specifically, the nation's foundational reliance on mythology and self-dramatization and the largely detrimental impact of all of that on, well, just making love and having children and trying to keep the wolf from the door. Whatever else I have to say about Kazemi's show here, this is a most serious production, one that understands this great writer strikingly well and that wrestles admirably with what is, I think, his most difficult work. All the characters in 'Lie of the Mind,' even the parental figures played here by Meighan Gerachis (in an exceptional stretch of her long career in Chicago theater) and Rom Barkhordar, who plays Baylor, the classic brutal Shepard father figure. The plot? It involves a young marriage where there has been horrific domestic abuse and both parties, aggressor and victim, have gone back to their original families in a kind of psychic retreat. Things go from there. Thus the piece tells the story of two agonized families striving for, oh, I don't know, coherence? Forgiveness? Self-awareness? Revenge? Redemption? Probably all of the above. Compared to other productions, which have fused much music into the show and used a sparser and more experimental or meta visual aesthetic, Kazemi situates the play more in terms of domestic realism or, if you like, a storefront Chicago gestalt. That's fair enough, especially given the resources at Raven, and it often works very well in terms of helping us identify with these struggling characters and reminded us of the autobiographical underpinning of all this man's plays. At other times, though, it fights Shepard's more surreal inclinations, especially as the play goes on and its non-realistic elements become more and more pervasive. The show's strength is the potent and courageous ensemble acting, as adroitly and generously directed by Kazemi (it will get yet better too). Its weakness is an intermittent lack of vulnerability and an occasional disinclination to leave all of that behind and pull out individual characters who have figured out that their travails flow from the difficulty of stopping American family life from turning into a Sam Shepard play. Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@ When: Through March 22 Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes
