Review: Gwendolyn Whiteside is superb in ‘Come Back, Little Sheba’ at American Blues

Chicago Tribune / by Chris Jones / February 13, 2026

Gwendolyn Whiteside, the star of “Come Back Little Sheba” at American Blues Theater, is one of the great Chicago actors.

You might not know that because over the last 15 years or so, Whiteside has moved into directing and administrative roles, including building a new theater for American Blues in a former drugstore on Lincoln Avenue. But I’ve been around long enough to remember her on-stage work from 20 years ago. It was exceptional then, and it is yet more remarkable now as she returns to the American Blues stage.

Whiteside is playing one of the mid-century canon’s trickiest roles in Lola, the woman at the center of William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba,” a piece of domestic realism that once was so frequently produced as to be a virtual cliché, its raw honesty mistaken for sentimentality, but now has fallen into relative obscurity. Read More Here.