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GhostlightImage: IFC Films

Hollywood studios have, over the last quarter-century, uncannily missed no opportunity to undercut the value proposition of their product. But under-discussed among the myriad reasons for cinema’s increasingly slack grasp on our collective culture is a very simple and straightforward one: Much of the most popular...

Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson imbue the paradoxes of performing arts so deeply into their film Ghostlight that it even extends to the title. In a poetic sense, the light stand that illuminates an unpopulated theater isn’t for human eyes. It’s to appease or rebuff spirits, depending on who’s asked. But in a practical sense, the ghost light exists to help the living—mostly to avoid a fate like falling into the orchestra pit and joining the dead.

Life subsumes legend for O’Sullivan and Thompson in a worthy follow-up to their previous collaboration on the small-scale humanist triumph, 2020’s Saint Frances. Their ambition broadens significantly in Ghostlight, though their firm footing in sincerity and simplicity isn’t diminished in the slightest. The creative and life partners deliver a moving apologia for the value of theater by exploring its central contradiction: a performance is an act of honesty,...

Chicago – The late playwright August Wilson left a gift to the world in the form of his “American Century Cycle,” a series of plays each individually set in a decade of the 20th Century, focusing on the black experience. Chicago’s Goodman Theatre presents Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” now through May 19th, 2024 (click here).

Play Rating: 5.0/5.0

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is set in the 1910s, only a couple generations past slavery, regarding a group of black folks at a boarding house, both living in and representing their era. The house is run by Seth and Bertha (Dexter Zollicoffer and TayLar), and contains semi permanent residents Bynum (Tim Rhoze) and guitar-playing Jeremy (Anthony Fleming III). One day, a stranger named Loomis (A.C. Smith) and his daughter Zonia (Kylah Jones) take a room. Their mission is a journey to find Loomis’s wife and the mother of Zonia,...