Displaying items by tag: Zayd Ayers Dohrn

Coincidentally (or not), Victory Gardens’ new play about a controversial campus speaker opens just days after the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Returning from a lengthy hiatus, Victory Gardens once again lights up the Biograph Theater with the world premiere of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new play “The Humanities”.

This thrilling play takes place on an American college campus where an opinionated voice is scheduled to speak. At the top level, an intellectual battle brews between professors and the college administration, while the students openly revolt.

Jonas (Ernest Bently) is a new professor on campus, hand selected by the department chair Martin (Steve Pickering) and his professor wife Margot (Naomi Evans). Jonas is young and ambitious, unwilling to get involved in the petty troubles of students and faculty. Martin and Naomi have other ideas. When Martin invites Luka (Daniil Krimer), an ultra-right-wing speaker on campus he kicks off a series of events that could lead the college, and Jonas, to ruin.

Carole (Sabine Wan) straddles the line between education and commerce as the dean while trying to appease the students and queer professor Milta (Isa Arciniegas). On the ground, students Hampton (Derrick Sanders III) and Xander (Piper Murphy) are taking action into their own hands.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s script is densely packed, structured in parts much like a college lecture. Each professor has their own somewhat incomprehensible monolog that speaks to how people can say so little with so many words. That’s not to say these passages are empty, and that’s the point. What college student could actually follow these verbal gymnastics though? Perhaps these speeches say more about how some educators are afraid to share their real opinion. Afterall, feelings aren’t facts.

“The Humanities” is a riveting exploration of the cost of free speech. Of course, our first amendment protects it, but it doesn’t account for good taste. Luka is played so smooth and charmingly by Daniil Krimer that you almost forget he’s a neo-Nazi, until he starts his speech. And that’s the unsettling part; under the law he’s just as entitled to hate speech as to tolerance messaging. And that those who criticize him in this play aren’t exactly perfect themselves.

Dohrn paints a rather cynical portrait of higher education, but in other ways he has a lot of faith in youth. Without the radical intentions of Xander and Hampton, there would be no point in rehashing the systematic problems of American academic institutions. In many ways it’s what makes this play so unique.

For those wondering if Victory Gardens has been restored to its former glory under new leadership, “The Humanities” proves they’ve still got it. Edward Torres directs a great cast. While originally billed as starring SNL alum Nora Dunn, British American actress Naomi Evans seems better fit for the role. She has a sleekness about her that makes some of the sexual plotlines a bit more palatable. Steve Pickering embodies that stodgy professor in this era almost as pitifully as Albee’s George was to the 1960s. There’s a certain tragedy in his performance.

While maybe a bit of trimming could help file this play down to a finer point, Victory Gardens choosing Dohrn’s script as their season opener is a brave choice. Almost an admission of self-awareness in an ever-dividing world in which institutions are no longer held on the same pedestals.

Through October 4 at Victory Gardens Theater. 2433 N Lincoln Ave. (773) 871-3000)

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/!