I’m thinking it’s time to bring this series to a close. Not because I’m not continuing to go out, but because I’m often doing it more than once a month now, and writing about it is no longer the reward I give myself for having gone out, but has instead become a tedious duty I keep trying to put off: the going out is its own reward now, and I’m more and more disinclined to put in the effort to translate my individual aesthetic experiences into something that can be understood, if only fleetingly, by others. Like most things I find myself writing about, it was easier when I’d had less experience of it.

So this might be the last Going Out entry, which feels appropriately symmetrical: the first was in June 2025, and a year is longer than most of my self-imposed writing projects have ever lasted. Plus I’m gearing up for an enormous writing project that will extend across all of 2027, and I feel the need to conserve and focus my energies. Going out and seeing shows can just be for me, like it is for most people.

But let me tell you about the first Thursday of June anyway, while I have you here.

You’ll recall, perhaps, that last month I saw Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the Goodman Theatre. Naturally that put me on the venue’s mailing list, so it wasn’t long before I was notified about Covenant, another African-American drama about music and passion set during Jim Crow between the world wars. Unlike Ma Rainey, venerable enough to be considered a classic, Covenant is a newer play — it debuted Off-Broadway in 2023, and its 2026 Chicago run at the Goodman’s black-box Owen stage is described in the program as a “homecoming,” since the author, York Walker, is from Chicago.

The marketing for this run, when I clicked through my email, leaned heavily on comparisons to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — both works take the mythology of the Deep South bluesman who sells his soul to the devil as a jumping-off point — and although I hadn’t seen Sinners (and still haven’t! movies are a much lower priority for me than the forms of media I already have difficulty getting around to enjoying), anything set in the interwar South, among the Black communities of Jim Crow, is within my broad area of interest.

I would like to go long on the text of the play, but it’s worth seeing unspoiled if you ever get the chance, so I’ll just note that Walker’s bait-and-switch, seeming to present the story of a devilish bluesman but really presenting the story of a circle of women for whom he is only a tangential, though devastating, element, is a remarkably sure-footed piece of dramaturgy. The quasi-mythic elements of the play, literalized in the script by a series of soliloquies that illuminate various parts of the characters’ troubled, all too human histories, were great fun to experience —— there were jump scares as effective as any film’s, and I especially enjoyed seeing it with an audience as willing to scream with fright as to experience any tenderer emotion. The final scene, recasting everything that has gone before in a new light (although I’d suspected, or perhaps wishful thinkinged, some of it from the first scenes) is particularly dramatically effective, and Ashli René Funches’ performance as the most vulnerable of the quartet of women impacted by bluesman Johnny James has stuck with me all month.

One thing doing this newsletter for a year has taught me is that I’m a better music critic than I am a theater critic, and I’m not much of a music critic either. If I’m anything recognizable to the publishing industry I’m a cultural historian, but without the formal training: more than anything I’m a collagist interested in the juxtaposition of cultural artifacts across space and time, which means that little squibs like this newsletter are unsatisfying, having to stand alone instead of (as it should be) being part of a broad, considered analysis that would take in the discographies of Son House and Robert Johnson, the writing of Harlem Renaissance artists like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in addition to more recent auteurs like Toni Morrison and August Wilson, films like Sinners, Us, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and Is God Is (adapted from a play which, when staged in Chicago in 2023, also featured Funches in a major role). It would take months to write, I wouldn’t be the best person to write it, and anyway Covenant has already been closed at the Goodman for almost a month; I saw it in the last weekend of its (extended) run.

For the first time in a while, I don’t yet know what I’ll be going to see next month. Maybe something in the free concert series at Pritzker Pavilion, although nothing is standing out the way it did last year. Maybe I’ll find something I’m willing to pay for. Maybe I’ll finally check out one of Chicago’s many improv theaters, I hear they’re supposed to be good. But if I react to them at all publicly, it’ll probably be on Bluesky. In the meantime, I’ll try to think of something else to do with this space.

Hasta la próxima,

Jonathan