Displaying items by tag: Steve H Broadnax III

Goodman Theatre launches its 2025/26 season at the Owen with Revolution(s), a world premiere musical that thunders with urgency and defiance. Written by Zayd Ayers Dohrn—2016 Horton Foote New American Play Prize winner and son of Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground—the play carries the weight of history and the pulse of rebellion. With music by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fame and direction by Steve H. Broadnax III, Revolution(s) explodes onto the stage as both a call to arms and a meditation on generational resistance.

Dohrn’s daring script weaves two timelines into one charged narrative. In 1989, African-American veteran Leon (Al’Jaleel McGhee) and his quick-thinking, idealistic wife Emma (Jackie Burns) find themselves fugitives, forced to flee with their newborn twin sons. Their flight captures the uneasy tension of a generation torn between paranoia and hope—a time when the dream of revolution still felt urgent and within reach. Fast forward to 2016, and those twins, now adults, grapple with the legacy their parents left behind. Hampton (Aaron James McKenzie), scarred by his service in Afghanistan, abandons his post and returns to Chicago’s South Side and to Lucia (Alysia Velez), his undocumented girlfriend who anchors him to a fragile sense of home. His brother Ernie (Jakiem Hart), once a prodigy on the guitar, has withdrawn from both his talent and the world—until Hampton’s unraveling forces him to confront the very past he’s been avoiding.

Broadnax directs with a ferocity that mirrors the play’s title, blending moments of tenderness and chaos with cinematic precision. He builds scenes that combust with tension and intimate ache, often within the same breath. The design work—gritty projections, steel scaffolding, and stark, rhythmic lighting—evokes both the bunker of a warehouse and the battlefield. There’s an immediacy here: revolution is not a metaphor, but a lived inheritance.

(L-R) Jakeim Hart and Aaron James McKenzie in Revolution(s).

Then there’s the music—pure Morello. The score, straight from the Rage Against the Machine playbook, fuses electric rebellion with spiritual yearning. Songs like “Battle Sirens,” “Hold the Line,” and “Whatever It Takes” roar as anthems of resistance, while “Rise to Power” and “Promenade” reveal unexpected warmth and vulnerability. The songs don’t so much advance the narrative as expand it, offering philosophical texture instead of plot propulsion. In Revolution(s), music is both protest and prayer—an act of survival.

What happens when the spirit of rebellion is passed down like trauma? What does it mean to inherit both resistance and loss? Revolution(s) suggests that revolution isn’t merely an act—it’s a legacy, coded into the body like memory or pain. Leon and Emma’s defiance becomes both a beacon and a burden for their sons, who carry the scars of a fight they didn’t choose but can’t escape. For Hampton, rebellion manifests as a restless need to confront authority—even when the war he’s fighting is within himself. For Ernie, it’s the refusal to participate, a quieter but no less radical protest against expectation. The play’s most haunting insight is that revolution reshapes generations; its victories inspire, but its wounds linger.

Dohrn’s writing captures this duality with compassion and fury, showing that to inherit rebellion is to inherit a question—how do you keep fighting without becoming consumed by the fire your parents lit?

Revolution(s) is a work of conviction—raw, restless, and unapologetically alive. It asks hard questions about legacy, freedom, and what we’re willing to sacrifice for change. In a cultural moment of complacency by our elected representatives, Revolution(s) doesn’t just remind us of what rebellion sounds like—it dares us to remember why it matters.

Highly Recommended

When: Through Nov. 16th
Where: Goodman Theater (170 N. Dearborn)
Tickets: $34-$104
Info: goodmantheatre.org

*This review is also shared on https://www.theatreinchicago.com/!  

In a masterful stroke of programming, Steppenwolf Theatre Company presents the Chicago premiere of "The Book of Grace," Suzan-Lori Parks' incendiary companion piece to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "Topdog/Underdog." Director Steve H. Broadnax III has crafted a searing production that peels back the layers of American family dysfunction with surgical precision.

Set in a small Texas border town, the play centers on an explosive triangle: Grace, played with luminous warmth by Zainab Jah, a waitress who fills her notebook with life's quiet moments of beauty, collecting them like precious stones to ward off darker thoughts.; her husband Vet (Brian Marable), a soon-to-be-honored border patrol agent, maintains order with an iron grip that hints at something more dangerous beneath the surface, and Vet's estranged son Buddy (ensemble member Namir Smallwood), whose arrival ignites a powder keg of long-suppressed trauma.

Parks, who won a Pulitzer for "Topdog/Underdog," has crafted something remarkable here - a play that feels both intimately personal and sweepingly political. She uses this family's dysfunction as a lens to examine larger American wounds: the violence we inherit, the borders we create, the ways we fail to protect what we claim to love.

Zainab Jah, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a young Cicely Tyson, delivers a tour de force performance as Grace. Her portrayal is pure magic embodied, infusing the character with an effervescent optimism that makes her eventual disillusionment all the more devastating. As the rigid patriarch Vet, Brian Marable brings a chilling authority to the role, while Namir Smallwood's Buddy simmers with contained rage, his every gesture a loaded gun waiting to go off.

Parks' script continues her exploration of fractured American identity and familial bonds. Where "Topdog" examined the relationship between brothers through the lens of historical reenactment, "Grace" turns its gaze to the combustible dynamics between fathers and sons, set against the backdrop of America's ongoing border crisis.

The circular stage becomes a cage in Broadnax III's hands. With audience members boxing in the action from all sides, the performers have nowhere to hide – much like the fractured family they portray. It's claustrophobic and intense, exactly as it should be. As the drama unfolds in Steppenwolf's intimate arena, you can feel the tension building like a pot about to boil over. The production strips away theatrical artifice to expose the raw nerves of a family—and by extension, a nation—at war with itself.

What emerges is a gothic horror story dressed in kitchen-sink realism, where the monsters aren't supernatural beings but the ghosts of American history itself: racism, violence, and the cyclical nature of trauma. Parks continues to prove herself one of American theater's most vital voices, crafting work that refuses easy answers while demanding we confront our most uncomfortable truths.

"The Book of Grace" may be a companion to "Topdog/Underdog," but it stands as its own testament to Parks' genius—a play that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until its devastating final moments. In the hands of this exceptional ensemble, it's not just theater; it's an exorcism of American demons that feels more relevant now than ever.

Some plays entertain. Others leave scars. Suzan-Lori Parks' "The Book of Grace" belongs firmly in the second category, delivering a gut-punch of a production that lingers long after the house lights come up.

Highly Recommended

When: Through May 18

Where: Steppenwolf Theatre 1650 N. Halsted

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Tickets: $20 - $110 ($15.00 student tickets)

www.steppenwolf.org/tickets--events/

*This review is also featured on https://www.theatreinchicago.com/!