Here’s the press release from the Neo-Futurists:

THE NEO-FUTURISTS ANNOUNCE THEIR 23rd SEASON
OF ORIGINAL WORK

CHICAGO – The Neo-Futurists announce their 23rd season to include Chalk and Saltwater: The Ladder Project by John Pierson, Burning Bluebeard by Jay Torrence, and The Strange and Terrible True Story of Pinocchio (the wooden boy) as Told by Frankenstein’s Monster (the wretched creature) by Greg Allen. Also on the books is another great year of the smash hit, Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. Read the rest of this entry »

By Erin Kelsey

The first time Jay Torrence ever heard a man say he was gay was during a performance of The Neo-Futurists’ “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” (TML) when he was in college. “It was really affirming for me to hear personal stories from their lives about how it felt to be gay in the eighties.” he says. Torrence joined the Neo-Futurists ensemble in 2002, and has since contributed his own personal stories on LGBTQ issues. This year, Torrence and fellow ensemble member Megan Mercier were responsible for curating the yearly Pride themed TML, called “30 Queer Plays in 60 Straight Minutes,” which performs this weekend.

While to the audience member the Pride show may seem very similar to TML, creating the show is a very different experience for the Neo-Futurists. Typically, TML performances change from week to week as ensemble members add new two-minute pieces to the “menu” of those to be performed. For the Pride show, the curators tailor the menu to the audience. “We balance our topics and tones,” Torrence says. “We go through our archives and see what we have from that year, and sometimes go back even further.” While many pieces selected originally featured homosexual themes, the curators are willing to experiment. “Sometimes,” Torrence says, “we approach the menu and look for heterosexual topics and then gender-bend them.” This process—similar to how they create their touring shows—results in a menu of their strongest material. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Andrew Collings

This summer, the Neo-Futurists will once again produce their annual staged-reading series of terrible films. This year, “Film Fest IX: The Perils of the Neo-Futurarium,” was put together by Bilal Dardai and Megan Mercier.

“We try not to engage in any overt mockery but really just to show the script for what it is,” Dardai says, explaining that he doesn’t want the performance to be trying too hard but rather just to expose the humor that already exists within the script.

“The fact that it’s the ninth year is a testament to the festival’s success,” he says. “We never just perform the movie verbatim; the point is what we can do with it on stage.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremy Sher and Caitlin Stainken/Photo: Greg Allen

Susan Sontag, in her seminal essays published in the early seventies in “On Photography,” observed that “ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it…”. And this was long before digital cameras, camera phones, photos on Facebook, sharing photos with Flickr—before photos everywhere, all the time. If life, now more than ever, is merely a series of photo ops, the promise of The Neo-Futurists’ “I Am A Camera,” especially given its populist title, seemed especially timely. (As far as  I can tell, this production has nothing to do with the John van Druten play of the same name, which was made into a film and later was the basis for “Cabaret.”)

Vintage family photos flash on slides projected on a screen while patrons take seats in the theater, conveying a simple but powerful promise. I have no idea who these people are, but somehow they evoke my life, my family, a “Family of Man” reminder of all our basic similarities. This opening montage also clues us in that we’re not going to be exploring the meanings and ramifications of today’s pervasive photo-culture, alas. In fact, almost nothing in this show could not have been done at the time of Sontag’s book. Read the rest of this entry »

Tara DeFrancisco, No. 36

In this town of performers—theater makers, dancers, comedy creators—you’d think it’d be pretty easy to assemble a list of artistic influencers and innovators. And it is. The challenge is paring that list down to a mere fifty. It’s a testament to the wonders of the performing-arts culture in Chicago that we easily came up with about 200 names when we set out to create this year’s version of The Players. Unfortunately, we’re only listing a fraction of those worthy of your attention, but that’s the problem with an abundance of riches. Hopefully you’ll see a handful of recognizable names and a whole lot more you’ll start noticing from this point on. We’ve retooled the criteria for this year, focusing on onstage artistic achievement, rather than the backstage influence of artistic directors, executive directors and the like—who will get their day again next year. Let the arguments begin. Read the rest of this entry »

The Addams Family at The Oriental/Photo: Samuel Adams

By Brian Hieggelke

As the wind blows the snow sideways this December evening, the weatherman is telling Chicagoans to stay bunkered; the deserted downtown streets reflect their obedience. All save the sidewalk near the intersection of State and Randolph, as TV crews jockey for faces on the red carpet in front of the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre, where more than 2,000 patrons, including a who’s who of backstage Broadway, are gathering for the world premiere of a new musical featuring a AAA list of talent, onstage and off. “The Addams Family,” with multiple Tony winners Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in its leads, a book from the librettists of “Jersey Boys” and so on, is certainly Broadway bound, but tonight—tonight—Chicago is the center of theater in the world.

That’s the story of Chicago theater in the zeroes: the decade in which it grew up and got big. Whether it’s the launch and monumental success of Broadway In Chicago, the maturation and astonishing quality of a remarkable number of small and mid-sized companies or the increasing demand for Chicago product and Chicago talent on Broadway, Chicago theater has fully come into its own. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter DeFaria and Randy Steinmeyer in "A Steady Rain" at Chicago Dramatists

Annoyance Theatre
Coed Prison Sluts: $64,000, 5,380 people

The Artistic Home
Peer Gynt: $19,044 box office, 1,200 people

Chicago Dramatists
A Steady Rain: $21,000 box office,1,500 people at CD, 10,000 at Royal George Theatre
Cadillac: $23,000 box office,1,600 people at CD, 1,500 at Theatre on the Lake

Collaboraction
The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, $150,000 box office, 6,500 people Read the rest of this entry »

The 2006/07 season brought the grand opening of the new Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, following more than $11 million in renovations

Annoyance Theatre (founded 1987)
“We don’t really have a regular operating budget—just plan as we go along.”
—Jennifer Estlin, President, Annoyance Theatre

The Artistic Home (founded 1998)
End of nineties: $62,000
End of zeroes: $164,500

Bailiwick Chicago (founded 2009)
End of nineties: N/A (Bailiwick Repertory is now defunct)
End of zeroes: $120,000 projected 2010

Chicago Dramatists (founded 1979)
End of nineties: $171,000
End of zeroes: $550,000

Collaboraction (founded 1996)
End of nineties: $50,000
End of zeroes: $500,000

Court Theatre (founded 1955)
End of nineties: $2.6 million
End of zeroes: $3.2 million Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our decade retrospective, we surveyed more than forty theater companies for their observations to a couple of questions. What follows are their formatted but unedited responses.

Deb Clapp
Executive Director, League of Chicago Theatres (founded 1979)

Any observations or thoughts about Chicago theater in the last decade?
Over the last decade, Chicago has seen the downtown theater district grow and thrive, Goodman moved downtown and several theaters were re-furbished. Lookingglass moved into their new digs on Michigan Avenue and theater has flourished. Several exciting new companies have been established including The House Theatre of Chicago, Silk Road Theatre Project, New Leaf Theatre and Rasaka, among many others.

Is there a “Chicago style” anymore (if there ever was) and has it changed? What, today, distinguishes Chicago theater from anywhere else?
A number of unique characteristics distinguish Chicago theater. We have a unique ecology encompassing a wide range of theater artistry, from spectacle to culturally specific, horror to improv, houses with thousands of seats to houses with 18 seats. Our community is very collegial and collaborative, sharing ideas and resources. When one theater has a hit show, its not just a hit for that show, it’s a hit for Chicago. Our directors, authors, actors, stagehands, producers, all are Chicagoans and all create for a Chicago audience.

Outside of your own company, who or what excites you most about local theater right now?
Chicago is the best place to see and to make theater in the world. A lot of attention from other parts of the country and the world is being paid to Chicago theater right now and while that is wonderful and will inevitably lead us to greater things, what continues to happen every night in Chicago theater brings me joy. Telling our stories and the stories of others, bringing the world on stage every night, that’s what excites me most. Read the rest of this entry »

John Pierson, Luke Holladay, Vanessa S. Valliere/Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

There are those who find the Neo-Futurists scary any time of the year, so the thought of the avant-garde ensemble actually setting out to be scary for the Halloween season sounded intriguing, to say the least.  As you wait for your Edgar Allan Poe-themed tour to begin, you notice, ever so subtlely, the presence of a beautiful-but-hushed-and-pale young woman sitting in a corner copiously planting herself in dirt, an upside-down take on Poe’s fear of premature burial. Old photographs surround her, some which she buries along with her, and at least one audience member has her program spirited away and buried along with the photos. A personable and playful but mysterious guide clad in a black robe and hood with a half glow-in-the-dark facemask greets our group in silence and throws a glowing red bouncing ball to see who will go first.  Entering a long, scary hallway full of Andy Warhol-like portraits of well-known dead people, we make our way to a room based on Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” where a game audience member is given a palette of real paints and a brush and invited to paint a slowly deteriorating model on a video screen. Our aesthetic host, meanwhile, judges the quality of each, crumbling up ones that the rest of us decide do not represent honest artistic efforts.  A room devoted to “The Tell-Tale Heart” has audience members reading free riffs on the tale from a deck of cards (two of us had to chime in with punctuated “thump-thump” sound effects) but to careful and heartfelt direction from our silent guide. Read the rest of this entry »