The Good, the sad, and the funny A night in the mind of Jenny Magnus (Campbell 2024)

“…The Good is a theoretical framework set in a play that often breaks into song in the same way you might hum your way through a stressful driving scenario, just for courage…”

“Magnus speaks her (and maybe our) mind” (Allyn 2024)

“…This new show The Good now on view at Chicago Dramatists is short and sneakily big.  The  things she has to say, the conversation she starts, will tickle your mind and intrigue you, even while challenging you and herself…” (Allyn)

“We Don’t Want To Get Bigger — We Want To Get Deeper”: Jenny Magnus on 35 Years With Curious Theatre Branch (Reid 2023)

“For Magnus, what’s lacking in the current scene is a funding commitment to companies like Curious that are devoted to sustainability, rather than growth for its own sake.” (Reid).

Jenny Magnus Stays Behind the Scenes of the Charmingly Absurd (Not) Another Day (Hayford 2018)

“Magnus, as is her wont, digs for deeper veins, exploring the debilitating compulsion to press on when no useful ideas or guiding principles are in sight” (Hayford).

Art and Life with Jenny Magnus (VoyageChicago 2018)

“I use language and structure to take someone on a ride, and my desire is to have that person leave the experience a little different than they were walking in. It has always seemed true to me that in the final analysis, all we have are our ideas, and our bodies” (Magnus).

Jenny Magnus, One of the Fringe Theater’s Most Literate Scribes, Gets Her Due (Hayford 2014)

“[Magnus is] the closest thing to a mother hen that Chicago’s unruly fringe theater scene’s got” (Hayford).

Rhinofest Stages Seven Plays by a Storefront Theater Legend (Landon 2014)

“Because Rhinofest can be so expensive and unwieldy, everyone involved does it purely for a love of theater—or perhaps because they’re masochists” (Landon).

Rehearsing the Rehearsal: Jenny Magnus and Curious Theatre Branch Prepare “Still In Play” at the MCA (Westin 2011)

“This “embodied dramaturgy” in the MCA space allowed the company to figure out how they fit in at the museum with which they have a fifteen-year relationship—from “dating” to “going steady” (Westin).

Round and Round: a SexFarceTragedy Performance Playwright — Jenny Magnus (Reed 2001)

“Magnus' vision is a kind of a Les Liaisons Dangereuses for post-modern times, a riff on the perfidy of romantic entanglement, sexuality and the search for human connection” (Reed).

Theater People: Jenny Magnus’ Big Trip (Hayford 1996)

“Even with their chairs placed unimaginably close to the stage, the audience leaned in. It seemed they couldn’t get close enough” (Hayford).

Fringe Dwellers (Adler 1994)

“On a practical level, Jenny took a stand against Lefty Fizzle’s bigger non sequiturial leaps, especially insofar as they involved spontaneously trashing musical arrangements that had taken hours to devise. More subtly, I think, she introduced a tightly wound antithesis to Beau’s chain-of-the-brain flow.” (Adler).