January 2026 Issue: Players 50 (Print Edition)

Players 2026

Meet the fifty people who really perform for Chicago

"Is Chicago theater back? That was the sentiment at photographer Joe Mazza’s studio, where my visit to an icy, dark alleyway led to a doorway leaking warm light and frantic jazz energy. Inside, this year’s Players, from theaters small and large, aired a spirit of optimism." (Todd Hieggelke)

Ghosts of the Underground

Nocturnal life on the Marilyn Houlberg trail

"Chicago has always been haunted—not by specters or superstitions, but by a restless creative energy that will not die—even as the spaces that nurture it vanish: basements, lofts, abandoned warehouses. Pop-up exhibitions fueled by borrowed light, borrowed money and borrowed time. This fragile, improvised ecosystem shaped Chicago’s underground art scene: a place where rebellion, experimentation and cultural collision found room to breathe." (Rowynn Dumont)

El by the Numbers

Under the girders, reading the signs

"I was seeking urban hieroglyphs the other afternoon, as I’ve spent many a recent passage of golden hour, charting and recording traces of advertising and faded word formations, remnants, palimpsests—ghosts, even—of painted signs and forgotten notices on buildings and sidings that have dared survive this Chicago century’s swarm of teardown and build-up, when I discovered simple stencils adorning the girders holding up the El tracks."  (A Photo Essay by Ray Pride)

An Anthropologist in Action

Hamza Walker and the “Monuments” project

"It started as a thought experiment, a theoretical exercise, inside the small, red-brick building at 518 North Western Avenue in Los Angeles, its new director Hamza Walker trying to get staff to think outside of the usual constraints of limited physical space, human resources and finite budgets. 'What should we be doing; what’s going on; what’s pressing?'" (Jon Bonfiglio)

Arts & Culture

Art: At the age of ninety, Diane Simpson is having a moment

Dance: The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival expresses the complexity of the human experience

Design: The costumes of Paul Tazewell

+ Mood: Lighting

Film: Gus van Sant on moviemaking and “Dead Man’s Wire”

Lit: Midwest as muse in “Lingering Inland” 

Music: How the ICE raids brought despair and defiance to Chicago’s music community

Stage: Robert Falls, the freelancer

Reviews

Start the new year by catching up

Poetry

Who Among Us: A new poem by Mike Puican

Shipping within the United States is included in the price.