For those unfamiliar with twenty-four hour theater festivals, the idea may seem more than a little crazy: a set number of short new plays are written, directed, memorized, blocked, teched and performed in the space of a single day. For Geopolis Theater, the Just-A-Day Play Fest is the perfect way to kick off their new season and involve local talent in a low-commitment, high-stakes theatrical event.

For each season of shows, Geopolis chooses a particular area of the world to focus on when selecting their plays. Germany, Austria and Switzerland were selected this year, allowing Geopolis to draw on their rich tradition of folk tales. “We wanted to do something that would start the season off with Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” says Kristy Scheuer, Geopolis’ artistic director. Read the rest of this entry »

By Erin Kelsey

Every summer, something unusual happens in the forests of southern Wisconsin. On a hill just outside the tiny town of Spring Green, a classical theater opens its doors each June and begins a summer of Shakespeare (and other favorites) from a stage with the sky for a ceiling. For the intrepid, theater-loving Chicagoan, the three-hour drive to Spring Green is well worth the time. American Players Theatre—or APT, as it is affectionately known—has recently begun its thirty-second year of performances, and promises a season of classical plays performed against a backdrop of all the best that summer has to offer.

Matt Schwader’s is a familiar face in Chicago theater, but every summer he vanishes from our stages in favor of APT. “There’s a huge chunk of my heart that still belongs to Chicago,” he says, but he would have been “crazy” not to join APT’s Core Company, a group of actors committed to returning every season. His first trip up the hill was as an audience member in high school, and he credits that with his continued interest in classical theater. “I’ve always had a fondness for this place in my heart, and it’s because they do such great theater and it’s so rooted in being human,” he says. “They honor the language in a way that few theaters do, at least in this level. Everybody tries, but this place is devoted to doing extraordinary work with language. And I love it.” Read the rest of this entry »

"The Living Canvas: Rain"

For its third annual “Naked July: Art Stripped Down” festival, The National Pastime Theater has lined up three hour-long shows, a lobby full of art, a cinema series (including films like “Fritz the Cat,” “Caligula” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) and several themed parties. Compared to last year’s offerings, 2011’s Naked July feels a lot more like a complete festival, though surprisingly, there’s a little less nudity this time around. After admiring the eclectic artwork (a collection culled from 275 entries) I checked out all three shows, with mixed results.

“Beast Women” features a rotating cast of thirty women, with titles ranging from standup comedian to burlesque performer to songstress, and each of the ten shows included in the Naked July lineup includes a mixture of six or seven of these performers displaying their talents one after the other. It’s a great cabaret-style lineup and there’s definitely talent on show here, but aside from some brief nudity in a performance art piece and partial nudity in a burlesque, the nakedness in the show I saw was much more emotional than physical. Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Somma and Leigh Jones of Lower Links/Photo: Antone

By Monica Westin

Chicago’s longest-running theater and multidisciplinary-arts fringe festival is known both for the compelling risk-taking of its participating artists as well as the age span of its participants. And while it’s been the best place to take in work by artists who have been making innovative work in Chicago for decades, this year’s festival has a particularly strong historical depth as well as serving as a forum for the most nascent of emerging artists.

Beau O’Reilly, who with Curious Theatre Branch has been curating the show for more than twenty years, is teaming up with Prop Thtr to bring back performances to this year’s festival that were seminal in Chicago experimental art, including “Deja Links,” a reunion cabaret show from legendary performance art/music venue Lower Links, which in the eighties and early nineties brought a sense of experimental optimism to the arts scene.

“A lot of the people who have been with the festival for a long time,” O’Reilly says, “played at Links all the time, so Lower Links was a very central place for us pre-Rhino. The list of names at Deja Links is an all-star list from that period.” O’Reilly sees this year’s Rhino Fest as coming full-circle, “a return to the beginning places for us—and also just the whole scene that’s been going on over the past twenty years now.” Read the rest of this entry »

4:48 Psychosis

By Neal Ryan Shaw

More than thirty performances are programmed as part of this year’s Rhinofest. Here are our top twelve picks. All performances take place at Prop Thtr, 3502 North Elston Avenue.

4:48 Psychosis
Curious Theatre Branch remounts their production of Sarah Kane’s highly autobiographical swan song to clinical depression, directed by Beau O’Reilly. The show only ran for two weekends last July, so those who didn’t get to last time now have a second chance to see it.
Fridays, January 14-February 11 and Saturday, February 12, 7pm.

The Aquatic Chronicles
Performance artist Julie Laffin’s career underwent a fundamental transformation a few years ago when she developed multiple chemical sensitivity, a condition that forced her into extreme isolation as well as ironically making much of her later work all the more collaborative. Here a video by Laffin pairs with a performance piece by Judith Harding, each of which echoes the other thematically, if not narratively, around depths explored and ignored.
February 11-February 13, 7pm. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Micilin O'Donaghue

The Anatomy Collective, an experimental performance group, is emerging from the underground to bring its current endeavor, “Unintended Structures,” to Chicago’s first Fringe Festival, which kicks off on September 1 for a five-day run (www.chicagofringe.org).

“We’ve been pretty underground for a long time, performing in warehouses, small galleries, hidden spaces,” Stephanie Acosta, Anatomy Collective’s co-founder says. “We thought, what happens if we bring ourselves up to the surface?” The Fringe Fest “seemed like the right avenue.”

The festival is not a juried event; rather each performer or company is put through a controlled lottery. “It’s sort of a wonderfully democratic way of choosing things,” Acosta says. “Particularly for the first Fringe, I liked the potential for madness.” Read the rest of this entry »

Members of 2nd Story (John Wilson, Kim Morris, and Doug Whippo)

RECOMMENDED

Lifeline Theatre and Live Bait Theater offer a smorgasbord of storytelling experiences by presenting the fourteenth-annual Fillet of Solo Festival. Fans of the solo performance medium should have no problem finding something to enjoy at the festival, which performs at a variety of locations in Chicago over the next few weeks.

Last weekend’s offerings included performances by three members of 2nd Story recited stories that, though otherwise disconnected, were told in an interwoven fashion that echoed one another in parts. Following 2nd Story, the storytelling collective Sweat Girls delivered five monologues, under the title “The Sweat Girls are A-Gaga!,” that touched on late motherhood, first-time home-buying and seeing your child off to college, among other topics.

If these performances were any indication, the Fillet of Solo Festival shouldn’t disappoint. The festival has programmed such a wide variety of performers, the only caveat is that even a little research into who is playing on a given night will go a long way. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

The Fillet of Solo Festival (Lifeline Theatre and Live Bait Theater) at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 North Glenwood and The Artistic Home, 3914 North Clark, (773)761-4477. Through August 21.

Malaya Rivera Drew and Dion Mucciacito/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

It speaks volumes about the sad state of human affairs when we can describe the story of the repression and destruction of a great, brilliant woman as fairly predictable fare. Predictable perhaps, but still poignant, especially in light of the continuing unabashed cruelty toward women in parts of the Islamic world even today. Perhaps we tsk-tsk these “uncivilized” cultures a bit too much, for it wasn’t long ago that it was Western culture, with the royal court and the Catholic Church at its core, that destroyed many a great woman (and man, for that matter), in the name of God or king.

So even if there is a familiar Joan-like arc to “The Sins of Sor Juana,” now playing at the Goodman, the particulars of the story of this great poet of Mexico are not as widely known. Brilliant, dynamic and beautiful from a young age, Juana Inés de la Cruz was pre-destined for trouble, and in playwright Karen Zacarías’ fairly straightforward imagining of the circumstances of her life, she finds it. Set at the moment when Juana starts to “lose her voice” thanks to the Church’s inability to abide by its promise to let her write, “The Sins” unfolds in a conventional overlapping story line, with an interwoven flashback that explains how Juana came to the Church and, more importantly perhaps, how she found the raw romantic emotions, both conventional and mildly Sapphic, that would manifest so powerfully in her poems. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The world of experimental performance can feel quite elusive and tough to navigate in Chicago—lucky for us, accomplished local artists Mark Jeffrey (SAIC faculty) and Sara Schnadt (Department of Cultural Affairs) are working hard to make it a little easier, by curating the bi-annual IN>TIME Performance Series. An eclectic mix of local, national and international artists, this latest installation of IN>TIME includes a much anticipated work-in-progress showing from new local company Every House Has a Door, which is the latest project of Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish, co-founders of the renowned Goat Island performance group (of which Jeffrey was a member), which disbanded in 2008. Other artists include Angela Ellsworth, presenting “Another Women’s Movement,” a “roaming durational tableau of well-armed frontier women;” SAIC students and emerging local artists Justin Cabrillos and Jessica Hannah, performing work developed through the IN>TIME Incubation series; and, featured international performance group OOUR, from Zagreb, Croatia. So clear your calendar for Saturday night—this is a one-night-only event, not to be missed.

In conversation with the performance series, there will be an artists’ symposium on Friday afternoon, examining professional sustainability for artists. The panel will feature an array of prominent artists and scholars, including Sara Jane Bailes, Roberto Sifuentes, and Tricia Van Eck. (Valerie Jean Johnson)

IN>TIME Performance Series: Saturday, March 27. 6pm-9pm, Chicago Cultural Center. Free. Symposium: Friday, March 26, 1pm-5pm. Chicago Cultural Center, 5th floor, Millennium Park Room. Free (reservations required).

Great Small Works' "Marcovaldo Planets"

By Monica Westin

It’s a big weekend for Seth Bockley. In addition to his highly-anticipated performance promenade “The Twins Would Like to Say” with Dog & Pony opening at Steppenwolf Garage on Sunday, Bockley has curated the impressive lineup of artists at Links Hall’s Toy Theater Festival this weekend.

Bockley champions toy theater for its populist roots in nineteenth-century paper theater, which could be made in anyone’s living room as a precursor to television. The form has morphed from living-room entertainment to a cheap, DIY way of making performance that Bockley loves because it’s “not rarefied art.” We spoke to Bockley about this form he wants to be reclaimed as an everyday act.

Toy theater seems to be an exciting and increasingly popular form lately—I’m thinking of companies like Great Small Works, who I know are going to be part of this show. Why do you think there is such a strong interest in toy theater today? When did you personally become interested in the medium?

I became interested in toy theater, and puppetry more generally, through work with Redmoon back in 2004 during my mentorship with Frank Maugeri, now the artistic director there. I originally was more interested in writing and had no intention, really, of getting involved with puppetry, but through seeing what Frank was able to do with the medium, I became extremely excited and interested in this form of storytelling. So oddly, I had become involved as a writer for puppet theater, which was a strange thing to be, and our collaboration allowed me to see the potential of this form. I see it as a form that can both be in dialogue with and in competition with cinema—working with puppetry is closer to the work of a filmmaker rather than a theater director. One of the many cool things it allows is a way of performing animation—performing film really—by other means. Read the rest of this entry »