Nighthawks

Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, which hangs in the Art Institute, has been the subject of much literary exploration. Stuart Dybek and Joyce Carol Oates are among the authors who’ve used the painting in their own fictional explorations. Hopper himself was inspired, according to some reliable accounts, to create the masterpiece after reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, a short story set near Chicago at a diner much like the one in the painting. The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will team up with Phantom Collective, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, and Oak Park Brewing Company to create an intimate staged reading. June Sawyers’s original script Nighthawks: A Theatrical Meditation on Solitude and Loneliness brings Hopper’s 1942 iconic painting to life through the intersection of music, poetry, and fiction. Bookended by the songs of Tom Waits and incorporating the work of Hemingway and Dybek, among others, Nighthawks is a hybrid theatre piece directed by J. R. Sullivan and starring acclaimed Chicago actors Si Osborne as Edward Hopper and Amy Montgomery as his wife, and fellow artist, Jo Hopper. Doors opened at 5 p.m. for those wishing to dine off of OPB’s menu.