By Emily Torem

Jesse Weaver’s “The Artist Needs a Wife,” slated for its world premiere at the side project theatre this week, is not a play to see if you’re feeling low. It’s about “trying to imagine what life would be like if you were a complete and utter failure,” says the Virginia-born playwright whose career is anything but—his last production at the side project, where he is an ensemble member, “On My Parents’ One Hundredth Wedding Anniversary,” drew critical raves. The plot of “Artist” centers on “fairly fucking old” washed-up artists: Mott, a DJ and Freud, a painter, along with Freud’s discarded muse, known only as “Whore.” The characters live in a futuristic world of Weaver’s imagination. “When I started writing it, I didn’t know much about DJing. It looked so cool and so hip. I was wondering: this art form seems so new and so uniquely of our time, what is it going to be like in 50 years? Are these guys going to be mixing in old folks homes in 2070?” We chatted with Weaver over the phone and via email from Virginia—he’s currently living in Ireland, where an earlier version of this play appeared at the Dublin Fringe Fest—to get some insight into his work.

What inspired you to write a play about failure?
I was in my mid-twenties [when I started writing it]. Living in my friend’s basement apartment—especially when you’re working in Chicago theater where everyone has to have a day job—there’s this feeling of, “Oh my god, I’m going to be 50 and doing [this] the rest of my life. In your mid-twenties, you’ve been sort of written a blank check. [You’ve been told] you’re very talented and you’re very cool and the world’s going to fall at your feet, and then you [learn] it’s not going to and you start to feel sorry for yourself and are going to end up this crusty old man in the basement—that was a personal feeling that sort of stoked the play. I started sharing these thoughts and found I wasn’t the only one with those feelings. Read the rest of this entry »

By Monica Westin

Links Hall’s new director, Roell Schmidt, is as diverse as the programming at Links; a playwright, producer and successful head of development and marketing at Lookingglass Theatre and the Chicago Chamber Musicians. We spoke with Schmidt, who started at Links in July, to get a sense of her plans.

Given your background in development, it seems that one of your focuses is going to be bringing in audiences?

That’s absolutely one of my most important missions. Performers don’t perform for themselves. I feel strongly that one of my major efforts has to be to ensure that the audience attendance is first at the scene, the way it was for Poonie’s this fall. We’ve been able to hit capacity a few times, and that’s our continued goal…. One method I found effective at other places has been the mighty power of the creative college student. There’s a great granting program that allows us to hire undergraduates to come and work on staff, and they’re tapping into all of their social-networking knowledge and creativity, thinking about who would be the right groups or individuals to know about an event, and how to get them that information. Read the rest of this entry »

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

“There are two things I hate a lot,” says Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble Member Amy Morton, “getting dressed up and talking to people publicly.  I’d rather pull the skin off my face.”

I’m sitting with the seasoned stage performer and director in the third-floor lobby of the Steppenwolf’s Upstairs Theater, and Morton looks confident and stylish in a smart getup that includes black slacks, a charcoal cable cardigan and a crimson scarf that unostentatiously hangs around her neck. There’s a slight chill in the air, and I equate it to the large uninsulated window next to our table where this interview takes place, and not to Morton’s blistering comment, typical of this tell-it-like-it-is gal.

I had first met Morton in 2002, when I was roaming the hallways of the Steppenwolf as an intern, and she had just finished directing David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.”  Now, almost a decade later, on the heels of a Tony Award-nominated turn in playwright (and fellow Steppenwolf ensemble member) Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County” (which she reprised on Broadway earlier this year), on the cusp of appearing on the big screen in a featured role opposite George Clooney in this month’s “Up in the Air” and on the verge of premiering a new revival of Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” Morton has remained Morton:  smart, salty and down to earth, the stalwart of the Steppenwolf set who refuses stardom, but who is finally earning the respect and recognition nationally that she’s had in Chicago for decades. Read the rest of this entry »

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

Sergio Trujillo has a talent for continuing a conversation exactly at the point where he left off, something that serves the choreographer well during an extended interview at the Argo Tea near the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre. It’s where his latest project, the highly anticipated musical version of “The Addams Family,” is in previews for a December 9 world premiere.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and he’s in the middle of relating how Debbie Allen (of “Fame” fame) became his sponsor for his Green Card in the early nineties—Trujillo is Canadian by nationality and Colombian by birth—when he leaves briefly to retrieve a tomato-goat-cheese quiche and nonfat latte. He is describing his collaboration with “Addams Family’”s innovative co-directors/designers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (“amazing but a new way of working for me”) when he answers his iPhone to clarify a note to an assistant. There is the time Trujillo has to excuse himself for twenty minutes in order to run back to the Oriental to give notes to the cast. Later, at the brand-new Puma flagship store across from the theater (“I’ve been dying to check this place out,” he says), he begins telling me how he had been mugged two weeks earlier on State Street following a late-night production meeting, then stops to admire a pair of black Pumas.  “I love these,” he says.

To witness Trujillo squeeze an in-depth interview, lunch, a notes session and window shopping on Black Friday into ninety minutes is to receive a master class in the art of multitasking. But it makes sense given how busy he’s been. “This is probably the best year I’ve had choreographically,” he says modestly. “It started with ‘Guys and Dolls’ [the Broadway revival], then I did ‘West Side Story’ [for Canada’s Stratford Festival], then ‘Next to Normal’ [Off-Broadway, since transferred to Broadway], then I did ‘Tarzan’ [in Germany], then ‘Memphis’ [also on Broadway] and now ‘Addams Family.’” And if you count the blockbuster “Jersey Boys,” which Trujillo also choreographed, you have to include productions in New York, London, Chicago, Australia, Las Vegas, Toronto and on tour.  Should “Jersey Boys,” “Normal” and “Memphis” run through April of next year in New York, by which time “The Addams Family” will open, Trujillo will have four shows running simultaneously on Broadway, a huge achievement.  How does he do it? Read the rest of this entry »

By Damien James

Ricky Jay is a master of deception, and chances are good that you’ve seen his work even if you have no idea who he is. With his company Deceptive Practices (motto: “Arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis”), Jay has consulted and served as technical advisor for stage and screen alike, working on such films as “Forrest Gump” (he designed the wheelchair that made Gary Sinese look legless), David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” (he also acted in the latter two films), among others. Beyond that, Jay may be the world’s foremost sleight-of-hand artist, its greatest historian of magic and the art of the con, and the preeminent archivist and academic of human oddities, as explored in his quarterly, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies. He can also, by the way, throw a playing card so hard and fast as to pierce the rind of a watermelon, “that most prodigious of all household fruits,” as he refers to it.

For five nights at the beginning of December, Jay holds court in the Mamet-directed one-man show “A Rogue’s Gallery,” billed as a more personal and improvisational performance, at the Royal George. Jay was good enough to share some of his time after a long day on the set of the TV show “Flash Forward,” whose cast he recently joined. He plays, in his words, “a menacing character.” I’ve heard stories of how gruff and elusive Jay can be and what subjects he famously avoids; so, expecting gruff, I asked how he was doing. “Honestly, I’m thoroughly and completely exhausted, meaning that I will be like putty in your hands.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

June 16, 1816 remains a legendary night in literary circles. A group of writers and their friends that gathered at Villa Diodati, Switzerland—including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon after to marry Shelley), Claire Clairmont and John William Polidori—were read stories aloud by Lord Byron, after which Byron suggested that each member of the group try to write a ghost story.

Although Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont lost interest in the contest, Byron himself wrote “The Vampyre”—itself a precursor to Bram Stoker’s later “Dracula”—and Polidori wrote a now-forgotten untitled story about a skull-headed lady who was punished for peeping through a keyhole.  Meanwhile, Mary Shelley wrote one of the most famous novels of all time, “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.”

Even with Mary’s famous literary husband pushing for publication of “Frankenstein,” no conventional publisher was willing to take the risk of releasing such a shocking tale of a scientist daring to create an artificial man—only to have it turn on him—to an unsuspecting public. By the time the novel finally appeared, response was immediate and overwhelming, and it quickly became one of the biggest and best-selling books of the nineteenth century.

Nearly two hundred years later, the story continues to tantalize, to fascinate anew since now, as then, it appears that we are on the verge of major medical “advancements” based on generating life out of death or from completely synthetic means. Whether this be in the form of stem cell research that seeks to advance disease treatment from the harvest of human embryos or cloning and the ongoing trajectory that life be more efficiently and conveniently generated by non-organic means, the only shift across two centuries appears to be better technology. It’s that resonance that brings two very different versions of it to two major stages in Chicago this week. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Tim Thomas

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

Writer, performer, artistic director and—given her new show at the Steppenwolf Theatre—adaptor Tanya Saracho would like you to know she’s on “hiatus.” And yet, after spending just a few minutes with this vivacious 33-year-old life force, I wonder just what she’s on hiatus from.

This interview almost doesn’t happen. Everyone seems to want a piece of Saracho this weekend, and I’m lucky to get an hour with her on the day of the premiere of “The House on Mango Street,” the play she has adapted from the book of the same name by novelist Sandra Cisneros. And so it is 2pm on Saturday—an hour before the press performance—and we’re whisked away to a conference room on a lower floor by David Rosenberg, the Steppenwolf’s indefatigable publicist who, travelling down the stairwell, skillfully yet gently asks Tanya if she will condescend to a phone interview with another journalist on Monday. “The day of the Jeffs,” inquires an alarmed Saracho, who will be up for three Jeff Awards that evening and who has just picked up a dress for the occasion (“Nordstrom” she had told me earlier, as if on the red carpet).  When at last we get to talking, and she rattles off her projects in her rapid-fire Span-English-hybrid lingo (something that has become a trademark of the dialogue in her plays), it’s a vertiginous experience:  along with “Mango” she has been revising and restaging “Lunatica(s)” for its November 18 premiere at Chicago Dramatists, where the show is scheduled to run for an ambitious three months (“we’re going to trust that Latinos want to see it for three months”).  She’s workshopping a new piece about queerness, culture and race—in collaboration with About Face Theater—for next year’s Latino Theatre Festival at the Goodman. She’s single-handedly heading Teatro Luna, the ten-year old company she founded with former co-Artistic Director Coya Paz, and working on a strategic plan. She has a draft due in January for an adaptation of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” for Teatro Vista (“I have to go away for a week and finish since everyone knows more about Chekhov than I do”).  And although Saracho could not confirm exactly the circumstances under which she may be working on the book of a new musical, she does tell me it’s about “hookers at the turn of the century.”  I’m subsequently serenaded with a few bars from the opening number to “Pippin,” a show she did in high school when she was a real musical-theater geek.

I’m sorry, but did someone say something about being on hiatus? Read the rest of this entry »

By Whitney Dibo

If the breakup of American Theatre Company is akin to a messy divorce, consider artistic director PJ Paparelli in the post-heartbreak phase. While the memory of being jilted by twenty-three members of his twenty-seven-member ensemble back in the spring still smarts, the Alaska native isn’t crying into a carton of Haagen-Dazs. “None of this has been easy,” he now says of the split, “but I want us to be a company that rolls up its sleeves and gets to work.” This year also marks ATC’s twenty-fifth anniversary and, while Paparelli is free to celebrate without the old ball and chain, he’s also embarking on the landmark season without the company’s founding members. “It’s certainly bittersweet,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »