Sultry striptease and karaoke are what this unique burlesque show is about tonight at the U.S. Beer Company. The audience cheers as the hosts and dancers appear on stage one-by-one, ready to shed their costumes.

But there’s more to burlesque, or the “classic striptease,” than what many think. American burlesque in the early twentieth century combined satire and social commentary with performance and of course, striptease. However, solo performer and producer for Flesh Tones Burlesque, Cathy “Maiden Sacrifice” Russell, says as it’s become more popular, it’s become difficult to find that style anymore.

“As it’s gotten bigger, people who don’t have quite the education yet as to the history and what it’s typically been about, why it’s important in our dance history and what that meant socially,” Russell says. “It’s really gone back to basics. It’s gotten a little conservative.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Thirteen Pocket ensemble: Mark Minton, Carin Silkaitis, Laura Rook, Jacob Lorenz, and Stephen Grush (left to right)

By Ilana Kowarski

With a baseball cap, wife-beater and exposed tattoos, Stephen Louis Grush may not look like the typical artist, but he says that he can’t imagine what his life would be like without art. “You can’t underestimate the importance of invention. The chaos it creates is the closest we can come to something that’s good and meaningful,” says Grush, an actor, director and playwright who has already performed in leading roles at Steppenwolf (most recently as Ethan Strange in “Sex With Strangers”) only four years after finishing the theater program at Roosevelt University. Grush’s mother was a professional actress, meaning theater has always been a part of his life. “I literally grew up in the theater. There were always actors in the green room taking care of me, trying to keep me out of trouble. They never did,” Grush grins. As a younger man, Grush had a few run-ins with the law, and he brings that same brand of rebelliousness to the theater. As the founding artistic director of new-work theater company Thirteen Pocket, Grush believes in causing trouble by making theater. He produces current, gutsy plays about controversial topics, like sexual promiscuity and cannibalism, because he says that “without examining these things we cannot hope to grow as a community or as a people.” “The reaction doesn’t always have to be positive, as long as there is a reaction,” Grush explains. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Liz Lauren

By Brian Hieggelke

Here’s how Mattie Hawkinson’s spending her summer in Chicago: babysitting for her friends, playing with their dogs, showing her extended family around the sites of Chicago—”I’ve been to the Art Institute so many times I almost bought a membership”—going for ice cream, taking walks in the park. “Anything innocent,” she says. Kind of a mother’s dream, when your twentysomething daughter’s living thousands of miles away in the big city.

Except that every day at 7:30pm, she steps onto the stage at the Biograph Theatre and steps into the role of Una, the victim of a pedophile more than a decade earlier when she was twelve. And that pedophile, who she spends the next ninety or so minutes locked into a confrontation with, is played by none other than Chicago theater’s reigning leading man, William Petersen, who famously deserted top billing in television’s top show, “CSI,” so that he could return to the town of his formative years, and play roles like that of the onetime child molester in David Harrower’s harrowing drama, “Blackbird.” Innocent daytime pursuits for Hawkinson are not youthful frivolity, but rather a necessary counterbalance to the darkly damaged soul she inhabits each night.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Peter Wynn Thompson

By Whitney Dibo

In another life, Steve Scott might have directed high school musicals. The prolific Chicago director actually got his start in the classroom—teaching high school and then college in his home state of Kansas. “I originally taught at a small religious university,” he says with a laugh. “Let’s just say I didn’t fit in terribly well.”

That life is a far cry from Scott’s current career as a sought-after freelance director and associate producer of The Goodman Theatre (a job he’s held for twenty-two years). But it wasn’t the straight-and-narrow path that led Scott to his current post. “I never had a system,” he says, “I never had a plan for the next ten years.” In fact, the reputable Scott has no formal directing training—whatever that may say about the necessity of pricey MFA training programs. The origin of Scott’s career stems from directing one-acts in grad school (“They asked me to help because everyone else was busy,” he says) and later from running a summer-stock company in Kansas.

After skipping out of Kansas and heading for the big city, Scott landed a job as The Goodman Theatre’s Director of Education, due to his extensive teaching background. Around that same time, he started directing at small theaters around town. “I would do a production that was reasonably good, so another theater would call me up,” Scott says with a shrug. It was a slow burn, but the consistent high quality of Scott’s work eventually earned him the most valuable currency in the theater community: a good reputation. Seven years later, after a stint as a teacher at The Latin School of Chicago, newly crowned Goodman Artistic Director Robert Falls brought on Scott as his right-hand man. “Bob didn’t want to be burdened with administrative work,” the persistently jolly Scott says without a trace of resentment. “He is impatient with details.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

It’s just minutes after the curtain has come down on the final preview performance of “The Crowd You’re In With” and playwright Rebecca Gilman, diminutive in frame and with a quiet murmur of a voice that belies the substantial presence her controversial plays have had in the American theater over the past decade or so, is standing in the lobby of the Goodman Theatre.  “Waiting for the critics to crucify me,” she says with a smile.  The following evening the author is feeling pressure of a different kind.  Safely ensconced in her Edgewater home, Gilman—also an assistant professor in playwriting and screenwriting in the MFA program at Northwestern University—is a little behind on reading and grading two classes’ worth of student final papers.  “But don’t publish that,” she says through a hearty laugh and with a mischievous wit that has characterized much of her writing, “I don’t want anyone to know that I’m not on top of things.” Read the rest of this entry »

On November 22, 1963, George Hearn was set to perform “Camelot” in Columbus, Ohio.  Hearn was playing Sir Dinadan on the first national tour of the beloved Broadway musical but was also understudy to both King Arthur and Merlin the Magician when the news came that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.  “The country froze,” Hearn recalls, “but the decision was made that in this special case, namely that ‘Camelot’ had been Kennedy’s favorite play, we would go on.  There were no laughs that night, that’s for sure, and there was a solemnity to the occasion, and yes, open weeping, especially during the finale.”

The finale of “Camelot” is where a broken King Arthur, about to go to war with his closest friend Sir Lancelot, has a moment of hope where he discovers that a young boy has stowed away to join up with the knights of the Round Table.  How could the boy possibly know anything about the Round Table, Arthur ponders, to which the boy responds, “from the stories people tell.”  The revelation that what Arthur has accomplished will be remembered has him knight the boy and intone the memorable benediction that climaxes, “Don’t let it be forgot / That once there was a spot / For one, brief shining moment / That was known as Camelot.”

When Ravinia CEO Welz Kauffman asked Hearn to finally, at long last, play King Arthur Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

By Whitney Dibo

The old saying, “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity” seems an appropriate adage for Charlie Newell’s directing career. When the D.C. native originally applied for the associate artistic director position at Court Theatre back in 1993, he couldn’t have known the company was actually in search of a replacement for their retiring artistic director. A lucky break to be sure—but Newell was also firmly prepared for the opportunity: his very first directing gig for Court, a production of Marivaux’s “Triumph of Love,” won a Jeff Award for Best Production. “After that, I guess Court felt comfortable handing over the reigns,” Newell says with a modest laugh.

Fast forward to 2008—fourteen years into Newell’s successful tenure at Court Theatre. Tom Stoppard’s new music-infused play, “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” opens on Broadway, and Court tries to nab the production rights for the Chicago premiere. “They got back to us on a Thursday and told us our request had been declined,” Newell says.

Newell was naturally disappointed, and wondered which major Chicago theater had successfully wooed the producers of “Rock ‘n’ Roll” with bigger royalties and larger production capabilities. The answer came the next day, with a phone call from The Goodman Theatre. “On that Friday, the folks at Goodman called me up and asked me to direct the show,” says Newell, obviously still tickled by the serendipity of it all. “Rock ‘n’ Roll” started previews in the Goodman’s Albert Theatre on May 2 and will run through June 7, with a cast comprised almost entirely of Chicago-based actors. Read the rest of this entry »

Fred Wellisch and J Kingsford Goode

By Monica Westin

Lynne McMahon, whose poems have appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Rolling Stone, and who has been the recipient of awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and The American Academy of Arts and Letters, has teamed up with The Side Project Theatre Company for the first full production of her new play “Bird Sanctuary.” Adam Webster of The Side Project describes falling in love with the way that Lynne’s dialogue worked on the page: “I saw the monologues and direct addresses physically dovetailing into each other, and then splintering apart, reassembling in dialogue, and then fraying again. I was fascinated and intrigued as to how she was able to physicalize that, and I wanted to do the same.” I talked with McMahon just before the opening of “Bird Sanctuary” about her foray into dramatic writing.

I’ve read your poetry for a long time and think of you primarily as a poet, and I was going to ask whether this was your first play, but then I read that you’ve actually written four plays in the last few years, both one-act and full-length.

Yes, and I’ve done staged readings, but “Bird Sanctuary” is the first full production that I’ve actually seen.

Have you been writing plays along with your collections of poetry, then, for some time, or has this been a recent development in your career?

It’s been fairly recent, actually. Just after I put out my last book of poems (in 2004), I started exploring playwriting, and since then I’ve actually been most engaged in writing plays. (Laughs) It’s the compulsion of the moment.

How did your interest in dramatic writing come about? Has it been an evolutionary progression, or can you pinpoint a moment that you felt drawn toward it?

Well, I think that poetry and plays are actually quite close as genres, now that I think about it. Poets are extremely good at verbal compression, and that economy turns out to translate well to the stage. And with plays you get the exciting chance to have more than one point of view, and of course if you’re interested in voice, which poets always are, it’s very gratifying… I get to have, for example, the most bitchy, the most depressing, the strangest voices operating on the same stage. That chance to expand is thrilling… So it feels like a natural development.

I was reading a synopsis of the play and saw that it concerns, among other issues, coming to terms with cancer, which made me think about the poems of yours that express a concern about reading bodies as texts, and in particular, your poem in which the speaker argues with a doctor about how to interpret the symptoms of disease. Is that kind of anxiety, arguments about the semiotics of failing bodies, present in “Bird Sanctuary”?

I’m delighted you made that connection! I’d say the play shares the—not jauntiness—but similar way of deflecting terror about bodies with forms of acerbic wit.

I’m also wondering about how hard it is to work with a theater company collaboratively, as compared to the relatively autonomous process of submitting a poem to an editor.

Yes, there’s absolutely no collaboration in poetry, and so I thought working with a theater company would be difficult. In fact it was just the opposite—I felt such a sense of relief to have other minds working on the same object, and making the piece feel like it was taking on its own life.

How did you end up working with The Side Project in particular?

Pure good luck. I sent in the play to be read sight unseen, but it wasn’t until my husband and I moved to Chicago and started seeing dozens of plays that I realized how much I loved the intimacy of the black-box theater, which can’t be duplicated in my experience.

I know what you mean. I love the intensity of intimacy in those spaces, and the way that you’re not allowed to distance yourself as you can with the tendency towards spectacle of larger theaters.

Exactly, it actually reminds me of reading a poem in that it mimics the space of the page and the pure intimacy of reading, with nothing placed between the audience and the experience.

You’ve become something of what others might call a “formalist” recently, and you’ve talked about that tendency yourself vis a vis your interest in rhyme. Does that concern with form and poetics come out in the play? Or to put it in a somewhat stupider way, does the play rhyme, for example?

Oh no. I’m more interested in getting to a natural vernacular, lifted up a notch of course…. As far as “Bird Sanctuary,” there’s no rhyme in the dialogue itself, but there might be a different kind of “rhyming” at a structural level. For example, a couple in the play have a tradition of walking a loop in the bird sanctuary together, and that kind of circularity comes up again in the narrative. So structurally, I think there is maybe a gesture toward rhyme in a different way.

“Bird Sanctuary” will be performed in tandem with “The Rocks,” a new play by Mark Young, April 12 to May 17, at The Side Project Theatre, 1439 W Jarvis, (773)973-2150.

By Whitney Dibo

Before Michael Patrick Thornton became the artistic director of The Gift Theatre, he worked at the airport. “Drum roll please,” he says with a sardonic smile, “I actually pushed people in wheelchairs from security to their gates.”

The irony of this revelation can only be appreciated if you’ve met Thornton, seen him in a show, or happened to catch a full-body photo of him taken within the last six years. At the age of 23, Thornton suffered what doctors now call a “spinal stroke” that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Well, at least that’s the technical medical term, but in reality no doctor is really sure what happened. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Friday night, and comedian Tony Sam stands outside the Lincoln Restaurant in a turkey suit. He’s got a mic in his hand and a guy with a camera is filming him for a “Man on the Street” bit. The cord from the camera runs back to a screen in front of a live audience inside the restaurant’s back room. Sam yells at taxis as they go by, trying to get someone—anyone—to talk to him. Read the rest of this entry »