Invictus Theatre, going gangbusters on Irving Park Road, is cementing a reputation as the home of epic American drama. Following on from its huge success this summer with Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” this small company is now taking on Marcus Gardley’s “The House That Will Not Stand,” a show first seen in Chicago in 2016 in an exciting Victory Gardens Theater production directed by Chay Yew, two years before the show’s off-Broadway premiere.

Gardley, who had a writing fellowship in Chicago around a decade ago, wrote about the circumstances in which some Black lives were lived in pre-Civil War New Orleans. At the time, French planters often formed domestic and sexual relationships with free women of color, or sometimes enslaved women, in what were called mariages de la main gauch

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