Category Archives: The Gospel of the Kingdom

IRISH THEATRE OF CHICAGO: MOLLY SWEENEY – HAVING EYES BUT NOT SEEING

Molly Sweeney (1994), presented by the Irish Theatre of Chicago at the Chopin Theatre, is the second of two plays (the other is The Faith Healer (1979),  in which the great Irish playwright Brian Friel (1929-2015) explores the subjects of religion and science, faith and disappointment, and seeing and understanding. Healing is the topic of […]

CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE’S AS YOU LIKE IT: NON-STOP JOY

In the early 1970s countless undergraduate and graduate stage directing students had the “happy idea” of setting Shakespeare’s As You Like It in a then new and en vogue  Back-to-Nature commune,  populated mostly by trust fund baby revolutionaries fleeing Richard Nixon’s America. Arden was a Vermont ashram, the center of the American counterculture, home to […]

NEW WEBSITE: THE S YMBOLIC WORLD- Chesterton for the 21st Century

                  G.K. Chesterton called them  fairy tales. They inspired C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. SOME solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war […]

IN THE SEASON OF PARSIFAL

The coincidence of a world-wide pandemic and the liturgical season of Lent may prompt some people, stuck at home, to consider Richard Wagner’s masterpiece, PARSIFAL. Set in a mythological world in which the land is suffering because the king is dying, a young Holy Fool, so naive that he doesn’t even know his name, arrives […]

THE MET’S PORGY AND BESS: It’s Got Plenty of Vigor and Talent

The distinguished opera historian and critic Charles Osborne considers George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to be “the most successful American contribution to twentieth century opera.”[i] Like all works for the stage, the final product is the result of a collaboration among many creative artists working to transform the play Porgy into a musical work. The […]