Selected Works
Photo: Liz Lauren
A Christmas Carol (The Goodman Theatre, 2020-2024)
"After 47 years of excellent productions of this humorous and heartbreaking holiday classic, I thought I knew this play. But each year this theatre surprises me with exciting new surprises that make their production feel fresh, different and even more extraordinary than the previous year… Director Jessica Thebus is back at the helm again this year, spicing up Tom Creamer’s faithful stage adaptation with several new twists. Her production is earthy, straightforward and yet offers just the right amount of mirth and magic."
- Colin Douglas, Chicago Theatre Review (2024)
“This year’s director, Jessica Thebus, has deftly thread the needle of tradition and mild innovation, streamlined the show in places and underlined its emotional oomph. Most importantly, she has thrown the show more to the audience. Andy White, another veteran, now narrates the story by inviting audience participation. It works quite beautifully."
- Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune (2021)
Birthday Candles (Northlight Theatre, 2023)
“In roughly 100 tear-jerking minutes, Noah Haidle’s “Birthday Candles” manages to capture one of the defining dichotomies of human existence. Our lives are utterly unique, yet they are also — save a very few — equally unremarkable as we cycle from childhood to adulthood to dotage… Thebus does a superb job in drawing raw, authentic emotion from her ensemble. And while Haidle’s script veers toward sentimentality, its spare exposure of love’s inevitable flip side — loss — is sharp as a scalpel.”
- Catey Sullivan, Chicago Sun-Times
“Directed with a tender hand and much love and care by the talented Jessica Thebus, this production will go down in the history of Northlight Theatre as one of its finest and most memorable… Every audience member, particularly those of a certain age, knows the joy, pain and life lessons found in this play. They certainly aren’t new but they bear repeating.”
- Colin Douglas, Chicago Theatre Review
“Many of Thebus' lyrics are haunting, especially her determination to find some hope and comfort in the story…Thebus is uncommonly good at depicting heartbreak in the theater with simplicity: As Catherine feels the loss of her friends, you feel the same sting… In one of the most interesting and haunting motifs, Thebus and her collaborators pick up on the cruel irony that the women were creating timepieces even as they shortened their own time on this planet with every lick of paint.”
- Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
“Jessica Thebus lovingly and thoughtfully directs her own script…This musical, with its beautiful, emotionally mellow score…celebrates the undaunted spirit of the American worker and condemns all the lies and deception perpetrated in the name of big business.”
- Colin Douglas, Chicago Theatre Review
Shining Lives: A Musical (Northlight Theatre, 2015)
"Despite all its intricate (and often ingenious) puppetry, digital projections and sound effects, the most intriguing part of this Shakespearean adaptation is the central thesis, which posits that perhaps Prospero doesn’t need to sink a ship and physically unleash his vengeance on his usurping brother Antonio in order to seek retribution."
- Zach Freeman, Newcity Stage
"Those already familiar with The Tempest had the richest experience of this production. Prospero had succeeded in transforming his world; Magueri and Thebus likewise succeeded in transforming The Tempest into something yet more rich, and strange."
- Regina Buccola, Shakespeare Bulletin
The Feast: an intimate Tempest (Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 2012)
Our Town (Lookingglass Theatre Company, 2009)
"Youth, the saying goes, is wasted on the young. That pithy philosophical truth comes to mind during this production of Our Town. Chicago's Lookingglass Theater usually produces edgy new work or ambitious, highly physical adaptations, but this exceptionally straightforward, sincere and affecting show represents a far more self-reflective effort. The group's take on Thornton Wilder's play - featuring an ensemble of forty-somethings in both adult and young roles ponders the perspective of middle age, looking back with ever-increasing nostalgia and ahead with an ever-increasing acknowledgment of mortality."
- Steven Oxman, Variety
“There's another amazing moment between Schwimmer and Laura Eason, who plays his girlfriend, Emily. Perched on ladders, as Wilder intended, the pair look at the stars and talk about homework. Both actors -- who are much older than is traditional in these parts -- lean into each other in the most touching way. They're like middle-age people, whose lives have become terribly complex, yearning after their simpler youth, when life was simple, sweet, equitable and, above all, manageable.”
- Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
2012 Production, Next Theatre
"Myatt and director Jessica Thebus handle the story with graceful sensitivity, and silence often conveys emotion more powerfully than the words."
- Chad Jones, San Francisco Chronicle
"Thebus has given Jenny's story vigorous life, free of artifice. She deftly balances the action with the elegiac passages. There are moments of tender pathos, as when Jenny's new friends bake her a cake and the candles burn down. And moments of horror, with the pop of a balloon flipping Jenny into a combat flashback."
- Bill Varble, Mail Tribune
Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2008)
“Director Thebus, who has known Ruhl for years, seems deftly in sync. With the help of a smartset design from Todd Rosenthal, Thebus wisely resists any temptation to overproduce work that could have been drowned on this stage. The piece is skillfully cast. Vulnerable and credible, Fisher is in fine fettle as Lane, a repressed if fundamentally decent woman trying to adapt to life's shifting clouds of dust. Lemos, who has played this role before, offers just the right quirky sense of uncertain certitude. And although Estabrook's Virginia seems straightforward, domestic and confined, that actually masks considerable profundity.”
- Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
“Director Jessica Thebus has done a splendid job of capturing the play's subtle beauty, surprisingly steely whimsy and imaginative stylistic tricks.”
- Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times
Clean House (The Goodman Theatre, 2006)
“Director Jessica Thebus and her cast…focus with warmth and sympathy on each character's aching need for human touch: this piece is all about the textures. As the seamstress, Velma Austin is contained in her dignity, but when her watchful integrity clashes with her carnal desires, she's mesmerizing and damn near heartbreaking to watch.”
- Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader
“Intimate Apparel is a skillful work, deftly directed by Jessica Thebus (and with a masterfully evocative set by Todd Rosenthal, supported by Ann Wrightson's subtle lighting effects and inspired period costumes from Linda Roethke) under whose supervision, a marvelously accomplished cast create whole, real, and often flawed, characters.”
- Rick Reed, Windy City Times
Intimate Apparel (Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 2005)
Salao, or The Worst Kind of Unlucky (Redmoon Theatre, 2002)
“One indication that you are in the presence of a great work of theatrical art is that it imperceptibly alters your sense of time and place. By that criterion alone, Redmoon Theatre's Salao – The Worst Kind of Unlucky, now in its world premiere in the intimate upstairs space of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is a masterpiece. And of course, there is much more at work in this endlessly ingenious, exquisitely hand-crafted, profoundly moving 90-minute piece.”
- Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
“In the midst of all the shadow puppetry, the darting fish, the weather-beaten wooden planks dominating the set inspired (according to program materials) by Cuban artist Kcho and the box-within-box constructs of Joseph Cornell, there is always Santiago, vulnerable in his short-sleeve shirt and short pants. Gently tugging his line and wishing aloud for the company of his young friend, the longtime apprentice now with another, luckier boat, he is a first-rate creation. If it's at all your kind of spectacle, Salao may leave you feeling the best kind of lucky.”
- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
They All Fall Down (Lookingglass Theatre Company, 2001)
"For this is no literal page-to-stage, documentary style transfer of the tale of a local hero who believed in the sanctity of great architecture. It is a fabulously imaginative, tragicomic theatrical rendering of a Chicago story that still bears telling. And it is also a riveting portrait of a man who fell in love--not wisely, but too well--with stone and terra cotta and the perfect proportions of the objects of his desire."
- Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
“An earlier segment wittily portrays the sensuality of Sullivan's ornamentation. Each of three women seated beneath slides of his work (Michael Brosilow designed the projections, many taken from Nickel's photographs) teasingly describes an aspect of it ("the terra-cotta skin molded over the framework"), then slides out of her coat, leaving it draped over the chair like a lovely shell. Capturing the tactile nature of Sullivan's architecture and our fragmentary experience of it, this sequence helps us understand how it mesmerized Nickel, who filled a huge room at Navy Pier with pieces he salvaged."
- Kerry Reid, Chicago Tribune
