Productions & Events featuring Nick Bowling

TimeLine presents the Chicago premiere production of the 2022 Tony Award winner for Best Play!

Told in three parts over one evening, The Lehman Trilogy is the quintessential story of western capitalism, rendered through the lens of a single immigrant family. On a cold September morning in 1844, a young Jewish man from Bavaria stands on a New York dockside dreaming of a new life in the new world. He is soon joined by his two brothers, and an American epic begins. 163 years later, the firm they establish—Lehman Brothers—spectacularly collapses into bankruptcy, triggering the largest financial crisis in history. Weaving together nearly two centuries of family history, this theatrical event charts the humble beginnings, outrageous successes, and devastating failure of the financial institution that would ultimately bring the global economy to its knees.

Throughout its production history, The Lehman Trilogy has been met with extraordinary international acclaim. The Guardian proclaimed the original production “a kaleidoscopic social and political metaphor” and “an intimate epic about the shifting definition of the American Dream.” The Chicago Tribune praised it as “a masterwork” and The New York Times as “a vivid tale of profit and pain.” Vanity Fair raved that it is “true blockbuster theatre that will hold you captive until the final curtain call,” with Time Out New York saying “it leaves you dazzled.” And the Wall Street Journal declared that The Lehman Trilogy “surpasses all praise.”

The Lehman Trilogy is supported in part by Richard and Diane Weinberg

Single tickets to The Lehman Trilogy are only available through Broadway In Chicago. Please visit their website to purchase.

A digital lottery for a limited number of $25 seats will be held for every performance of The Lehman Trilogy. Seat locations and the number of tickets awarded by the lottery are always subject to availability. Click here for details and to enter.

CONTENT ADVISORY: To learn more about the specific content and themes of this production, please visit our content advisory page.

Join us via Zoom video conference for this virtual panel discussion featuring cast members Mitchell Fain, Anish Jethmalani, and Joey Slotnick, alongside co-director Nick Bowling, chatting about their experience bringing The Lehman Trilogy to the stage.

This event has already occurred, but you can now watch a recording of the discussion on demand, embedded above and available on TimeLine’s YouTube channel!

Based on the true story of Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker, who formed the first political consulting firm in U.S. history, Campaigns, Inc. is a hysterical and jaw-dropping inside look at the underbelly of politics through the lens of two of the undeniable founders of “fake news.”

IT IS 1934, and famous novelist Upton Sinclair is all but guaranteed to become the first Democratic governor of the state of California—until a young, unknown pair of consultants from the shadows of the challenger’s campaign attempt to take him down. As Frank Merriam and Sinclair battle it out in the spotlight—seeking endorsements from the likes of Charlie Chaplin and FDR—Baxter and Whitaker work behind-the-scenes to methodically construct one of the most spectacular, unbelievable, and star-studded smear campaigns ever.

This world premiere play was developed through TimeLine’s Playwrights Collective, launched in 2013 to support Chicago-based playwrights in residence and create new work centered on TimeLine’s mission. Campaigns, Inc. is the third play developed through the Collective to receive a full production, following Brett Neveu’s To Catch a Fish (2018) and Tyla Abercrumbie’s Relentless (TimeLine and Goodman Theatre, 2022). Campaigns, Inc. received its first public reading as part of our inaugural First Draft Playwrights Collective Festival in 2018.

HE’S BACK! We’re dipping into the archives to revisit TimeLine’s hit production of the musical Fiorello! (first produced in 2006 and remounted in 2008). We’ll reminisce with performance clips from our production and hear behind-the-scenes stories from members of the cast and crew. What was it like to revive this ahead-of-its-time musical? Who was Fiorello H. LaGuardia? How did he help take down the Tammany political machine?

You’ll see clips from our productions and hear recollections from Eva Breneman, Linda Fortunato, Terry Hamilton, Josephine Kearns, Michael Kingston, Andy Nagraj, Doug Peck, PJ Powers, Cassie Slater Wooley, Bethany Thomas, and Mike Tutaj—plus engage with a discussion moderated by Carol Ann Tan and featuring director Nick Bowling; former Illinois State Senator, current Senior Advisor to the Governor on Cannabis Control, and TimeLine Board Member Toi Hutchinson; and Fiorello LaGuardia biographer Mason B. Williams (author of City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York).

Join us to remember TimeLine’s landmark production and (re)discover why LaGuardia remains one of the most enduring figures of the 20th century.

Watch the Recording

DIG DEEPER:

— Read the 2006 Backstory
— Read the 2008 Backstory

Although TimeLine’s production of Campaigns, Inc. has been postponed, we can still start the conversation!

Set in 1934, Campaigns, Inc. follows The Jungle novelist Upton Sinclair as he is challenged in his bid to be the first Democratic governor of California, exposing a timely true story about the power that persuasion, deceit, and perception hold in the U.S. electoral system.

This live virtual event will feature playwright Will Allan, dramaturg Maren Robinson, and special guest speaker Jessica Lee (Snopes.com) in a panel discussion exploring a notable early example of “fake news” and how we got from there to today’s political climate. Introduced by director Nick Bowling and moderated by TimeLine Company Member Anish Jethmalani, the event will also feature scenes from the play performed by cast members Charles Andrew Gardner, Terry Hamilton, Larry Baldacci, and Tyler Meredith.

This FREE & one-night-only event will be presented live on YouTube.

If you want to let us know you plan to watch, you can still register via the “Buy Tickets” link below. But there are no tickets required to watch the livestream. Just settle in via your preferred viewing platform before 7:30pm (CDT), and enjoy!

Watch the Livestream

“A riveting political thriller.”
— Associated Press

Don’t miss TimeLine’s Chicago premiere of the 2017 Tony Award® winner for Best Play—a remarkable story about the unlikely friendships, quiet heroics, and sheer determination that pushed two foes to reach something neither thought truly possible—peace.

When the Israeli prime minister and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993, the world had no idea what it took to orchestrate that momentous occasion. Behind the scenes, a Norwegian diplomat and her social scientist husband hatched an intricate, top secret, and sometimes comical scheme to gather an unexpected assortment of players at an idyllic estate just outside Oslo. Far from any international glare, mortal enemies were able to face each other not as adversaries, but as fellow human beings.

J.T. Roger’s’ Oslo is a humorous, surprising, and inspiring true story about the people inside politics, and the incredible progress that is possible when we focus on what makes us human—together.

This glorious, raw, and bittersweet look at one of opera’s most formidable talents was the Tony Award winner for Best Play in 1996.

Witness a master class conducted by legendary opera diva Maria Callas. Glamorous and demanding, Callas critiques and regales a new crop of opera’s finest. Both frustrated and amazed by the students thrust before her, she escapes into recollections of the glories and failures of her past, remembering her rise as one of opera’s biggest underdogs. This authentic and musically rich Master Class presents a portrait of a fading star who refuses to be anything but unapologetically herself.

TimeLine’s production stars Company Member Janet Ulrich Brooks, a six-time Jeff Award nominee for roles at TimeLine (including 33 Variations, A Walk in the Woods, and All My Sons), where she mostly recently appeared last season as Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience.

“If you stick round long enough, the same ideas come round again and again. Wearing a different coloured tie.”

A portrait of a dynamic and provocative woman—the symbol of a nation—as she weathers decades of history and political strife. Every Tuesday afternoon for more than 60 years, Queen Elizabeth II has met with her Prime Ministers in a private audience, a gesture of unity between government and Crown. Through moments of tension, negotiation, war, and unrest, these conversations with political leaders from Winston Churchill to Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher have remained a constant across the years. Playwright Peter Morgan re-imagines these meetings, giving us a glimpse at the queen’s role in guiding the circumstances that have shaped Great Britain, and a window into the mystery, compassion and humor of the woman behind the iconic crown.

TimeLine presents a new and rare staging of this exquisite, internationally acclaimed play about love, math, and how the past and future connect. In 1913, a clerk in rural India named Srinivasa Ramanujan sends a letter to famed mathematician G.H. Hardy, filled with astonishing mathematical theorems. In the present, a math professor and a businessman fall in love. Told in a mesmerizing whirlwind of vignettes spanning history and time, A Disappearing Number is a love letter to numbers, blending the beauty of everyday relationships with the mysticism of the cosmos.

Winner of the 2007 Critics’ Circle Theatre, Evening Standard, and Laurence Olivier awards for Best New Play.

“Do you think girls are smart enough to run a country?” … “Girls are smart. They just aren’t legal.”

Katherine Parr has just been crowned the sixth wife of King Henry VIII. In the process, she’s started an illicit affair, inherited three children, and begun her own political career. Now’s not the time to lose her head. The Last Wife is a bold and contemporary return to Tudor England that confronts issues as relevant today as they were 500 years ago.

In June 1989, as the Chinese government cracked down on a pro-democracy rally in Tiananmen Square, the iconic image of one man standing alone in front of a military tank captivated the world. Twenty years later, a photojournalist searches for the truth about that mysterious “Tank Man” in an epic, global adventure that explores the complex relationship between twin superpowers China and the United States.

Acclaimed as a “rip-roaring, grit-your-teeth production” (Chicago Sun-Times), “a refreshingly political piece” (Chicago Tribune) and an “urgent, cinematic, and breathlessly intense … dose of thinking theater” (Stage and Cinema), this show is a political conspiracy thriller (based on true events) in the vein of House of Cards, Kill the Messenger and All the President’s Men.

Originally on Broadway in 1959, this timeless musical has never been seen in Chicago, until now!

During the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, the fearless matriarch of a destitute household holds her family together in the face of her husband’s carousing. With fortunes about to turn, the family strives to rise above the political and social unrest around them. This epic, humorous and heartbreaking tale of survival is told through honest and powerful anthems such as “I Wish It So,” “We’re Alive” and “On a Day Like This.”

Originally premiered Off-Broadway in 1985, TimeLine’s production is the first Chicago staging of this landmark play that “blasts you like an open, overstoked furnace” (The New York Times) since its Tony-Award winning Broadway production in 2011. Set at the height of the public and private indifference to the AIDS plague in the early 1980s, this searing drama will feature acclaimed actor/director David Cromer in his return to the Chicago stage as a passionate activist leading the fight to awaken the world to the crisis. Along the way he, and the community he leads into the battle, must face the deeply held fears that led so many to remain silent for too long.

This spy thriller—named one of the Top 10 plays of 2011 by The New York Times — goes deep inside the secret United States intrigue that powered the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. A CIA operative struggles against conditions on the ground and politics in the halls of Washington to stop the Soviet Army’s destruction of Afghanistan. As alliances shift and the outcome of the Cold War appears to hang in the balance, he and an Afghan warlord find that the only one they can trust is each other. This bold new play unmasks the actions of men behind one of recent history’s greatest events — the repercussions of which still shape our lives.

TimeLine’s 2012-13 season opener is an elegant waltz between past and present, fact and speculation, a mother and daughter, and art and life. One of classical music’s enduring riddles is why Ludwig van Beethoven devoted four years of his diminishing life writing 33 variations of a mediocre waltz. Two hundred years later, a modern-day music scholar is driven to solve the mystery even as her own health and relationship with her daughter crumbles.

The result is an extraordinary new American play — accompanied throughout by a live pianist playing the variations themselves — about passion, parenthood, and the moments of beauty that can transform a life.

Lee Blessing’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama, filled with unexpected humor and extraordinary humanity, is an absorbing, revealing and brilliant debate on the eternal hope and relentless futility of high-stakes politics. Two superpower arms negotiators— one a witty but cynical Russian veteran and the other an idealistic American newcomer — meet informally in the woods after long, frustrating hours at the bargaining table. TimeLine’s production is presented with a twist: The two characters (originally written as two men) are portrayed by TimeLine Company Members Janet Ulrich Brooks and David Parkes.

In this landmark comedy set inside the crowded pressroom at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building during the 1920s, a group of reporters cover a controversial execution and expose the rampant corruption, scandal and hi-jinx associated with Windy City politics and journalism. TimeLine is thrilled to revive a quintessential Chicago classic and to highlight for audiences the wealth of local history embedded in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s hilarious and semi-autobiographical script.