Jason King Jones, artistic director of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, shares details about PSF's current season, their plans to host the 2027 Shakespeare Theatre Association conference, and how he's retained his ability to laugh and his capacity for joy. Jason shares how he threads the needle of programming work that reaches his diverse audience; how the entire western canon of theatrical literature is descended from Shakespeare; how theatre is important to the health of the community; the virtues of hosting a really great party; how Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley is "Fest Central;" fantastic advice from playwright Ken Ludwig; and how Shakespeare is every modern playwright’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. (Length 21:17)

Carey Perloff (Pinter and Stoppard: A Director's View) discusses how she worked with Tom Stoppard to bring his last and most personal play Leopoldstadt to Chicago's Writers Theatre and shape it into a form American theaters will be able to produce more easily. Perloff, the former artistic director of San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatrewhere she directed the U.S. premieres of several of Stoppard's plays, reveals how she brings her personal history into this production; how much she enjoys working with Chicago actors; how this epic muscular work plays in an intimate non-proscenium space; how she's able to encourage the actors to "look after" important threads or information; and how she embraces Stoppard's firm and unshakeable belief that "ideas are sexy." (Length 19:10) (PICTURED, above: Adeline Rosenthal and Asha Dale Hopman in the Writers Theatre production of Leopoldstadt, directed by Carey Perloff. Photo by Hugo Hentoff.)

Caroline Bicks, the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair of Literature at the University of Maine, returns to continue our conversation about her new book, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. Caroline reveals her own terrifying fears and shares the kind of book she did not want to write; how she dared to infuse her academic writing with (gasp!) personality; her desire to become a bridge that connects King to the Renaissance to academia and back again; why anyone would want to sleep in room 217; the prospect of reading King aloud at bedtime to your kids; some surprising love for King’s underrated zombie novel Cell; and the most horrifying moment in cinema from the last thirty years. (Length 32:02) (Above photo: Austin Tichenor's King shelfie. Used by permission.)

In the glorious American Blues Theater production of Always...Patsy Cline, Molly Hernández discusses how her character of Louise brings a lively theatricality to what could be "just" a well-produced jukebox musical. Molly shares how she was encouraged to bring her authentic "chaos gremlin" self to the role; how this show differs from other shows she's done in Chicago (including Lookingglass Theater's Lookingglass Alice); the privilege of playing in theaters ranging from giant auditoriums to tiny storefronts; how she brings all her skills to convey an improvised unpredictability; and how The Actor's Gymnasium not only trained her to be a circus artist but literally changed her life. (Length 20:42)

In his own personal Year of Lear, Daniel Mothershed (above) is playing both King Lear and the Fool in the Bowls With The Bard production of King Lear, immediately after directing the second production of Austin Tichenor's adaptation of Christopher Moore's novel Fool. Daniel discusses this experiment with theatrical duality; how the RSC Podcast interview with famous Fool Adrian Scarborough unlocked Daniel’s interpretation (plus appreciation for the even deeper cut of this "Drawing on Shakespeare" conversation); shout-outs to previous Lears; and the potential danger of playing both roles driving you genuinely mad. (Length 24:40)

Chicago's City Lit Theater presents the world premiere of Kingsley Day's and James Grossman's Scaramouche: The Swashbuckling Musical! and City Lit's executive artistic director Brian Pastor and the show's director Beth Wolf discuss how this ambitious musical came to be. Brian and Beth reveal the secrets to being a good producer (spoiler: it’s creative problem solving) and directing new works; leaning into a show's style and heightened language; balancing a season both artistically and financially; the value of ambition and the power of intimate spaces; getting the word out; and how audiences must recognize their own responsibility to BYOF (Bring Your Own Fandango). (Length 21:30)

Improv: The Play at Chicago’s IO Theatre pairs an actor and an improviser performing a two-person scripted scene where only the actor knows their lines, followed by a team of improvisers who perform an extended improvisational scene inspired by the scripted scene they all just watched. Producer and cast member Cory Hardin reveals the show's inspiration from friend of the pod Matt Walsh (Veep); how narrative emerges in improv rather than being consciously created; how the goal is to stop thinking already and get out of your own head; and the incredible importance of teaching the value of joy and play to actors, and commitment and sincerity to improvisers. (Length 22:09) 

Helen Joo Lee and Lucky Stiff are two of the nine solo performers guiding audiences through the Goodman Theatre production of David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar's Theatre of the Mind, a uniquely interactive and immersive theatrical experience now running in Chicago through July 12, 2026. Helen and Lucky share stories about the audition process and reveal the new skills they get to call upon; how so many wildly different actors become David Byrne; the value of controlled violence and being a not-so-secret potty mouth; the variety of special interactions they've had with different audience members; how the show is like the world’s loveliest, sweetest escape room; and the power of giving (and receiving) a gender-affirming haircut. (Length 21:03)

At Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, Pericles boldly goes where no Pericles has gone before. Artistic Director Brian Isaac Phillips discusses how his space-age setting for Shakespeare's underrated Romance is weirdly more relatable than the maritime travel in the original; how they've changed very little language (apart from some references of ‘sea’ to ‘sky’); how there's nothing new under the sun (from any galaxy); how he and his cast are playing it straight and not campy or spoofy; how companies don't program Pericles unless they have a passion for it, which always shows; how this bucket-list show gives both actors and audiences the opportunity to complete their personal canons; and the rewards of producing a less-well-known play that carries less baggage for audiences than, say, Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. (Length 21:33)

Professor Caroline Bicks holds the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair of Literature at the University of Maine, and is the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives. That research has led to Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, her new book that digs deep into King's original manuscripts and discovers connections to William Shakespeare along the way. Bicks reveals how she was able to confront her fears sparked by King's books and meeting the man himself; how King initially conceived The Shining as a Shakespearean tragedy; how King's depictions of teenagers reaching "mental puberty" corresponded with her own investigation into Shakespeare's works; the importance of "public-facing scholarship;" and the incredible value of reading books for their literary value at the same time you're already reading for pleasure. (Length 30:35)