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 »

Zack Buell, Chip Davis and Cyd Blakewell

Full disclosure: I booked playwright Laura Eason’s band, Tart, back in the nineties for a gig. We had a good time. And that’s what’s missing from her account of a nineties rock band: the joy and fun that keeps musicians coming back. Eason’s chosen to dramatize the most tedious parts of a music career:  business decisions, political backstabbing and creative disappointment.

The performers succeed in playing the intention and nuance the piece’s construction requires: Chip Davis captures the disappointment of Jim, the band’s tortured genius; Zack Buell’s passive-aggressive machinations as drummer Noah are painful to watch; Cyd Blakewell’s Elisha is alt rock’s Lady Macbeth. Director Anna Bahow’s staging is well paced and makes the most of limited space. Annette Vargas’ Smart Bar /Lounge Ax set is a study in nostalgia; 90s-era concert posters cover graffiti-sprayed walls. It’s an accurate, interesting picture; we just don’t know why everyone’s there in the first place. (Lisa Buscani)

“Rewind” plays at the side project theatre company, 1439 W. Jarvis, (773)973-2150, through December 20.

Here’s the press release from the side project:

Three new works – and a new mission – premiere at the side project in 2009-10

The side project, founded in 2001 in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood by
Artistic Director Adam Webster, will present three world-premiere plays in
its 2009-2010 season – its first under a new mission which will take the
company into its second decade. All three productions – beginning with the
November world premiere of Laura Eason’s REWIND – bring into sharp focus
the company’s refined mission statement and vision. Read the rest of this entry »

The Ruckus Theater's world-premiere production of "Heist Play" by Mitch Vermeersch, directed by Allison Shoemaker. Left to right: Byron Melton, Melissa Pryor and Joshua Davis/Photo: Irma Hapsari-Ahadiah

By Ilana Kowarski

For the Ruckus Theater Company, the move to Chicago from Kalamazoo was a long time in coming but, according to Artistic Director Allison Shoemaker, it was “always the plan.” When brushing her teeth three years ago, Shoemaker had a revelation, and realized that she wanted to form a new-work theater company in Chicago. A Midwesterner, Shoemaker felt that she had “uniquely Midwestern stories to tell,” and that Chicago would be a place that would be receptive to those kinds of stories. Shoemaker also thought Chicago was unique because of its “community of supportive artists that challenge each other to be better.”

But she didn’t want to leave her friends at Western Michigan University behind. Shoemaker had enjoyed her student experience at the play-development lab, and thought that she and her fellow students “worked really well together.” “For the first time the theater I was making was the kind I wanted to make,” Shoemaker emphasizes. Because she wanted to continue that positive experience and thought that her friends shared her commitment to new-play development she recruited them to join her company in Kalamazoo, planning to move the theater to Chicago when everyone was ready to go. Logistically, arranging the move proved difficult, and took longer than expected. As Managing Director and Resident Playwright Ryan Dolley explains, “For a long time, we were scattered, but eventually we all settled down here.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Ruckus Theater:

“DO YOU THINK YOUR WU-TANG SWORD CAN DEFEAT ME?”
THE RUCKUS THEATER—FORMERLY OF KALAMAZOO MICHIGAN—JOINS THE RANKS OF CHICAGO’S STOREFRONT THEATER COMMUNITY

***THE RUCKUS ANNOUNCES 2009-10 SEASON OF WORLD PREMIERES
PRESENTED AT THE SIDE PROJECT THEATRE***

(Chicago, IL) Chicago is officially one theater company richer after The Ruckus Theater recently karate-chopped and high-fived its way into the Central Time Zone. Made up of an industrious group of Michigan ex-pats, The Ruckus is composed of actors, directors, playwrights, musicians, casting directors, publicity managers, grant writers, baristas, grad students, poets, computer fixers, appointment-makers and census-takers who aim to create a new kind of company—a casteless theater that blends the lines between playwright and actor, audience and company member. The Ruckus Theater is led by Artistic Director Allison Shoemaker and Managing Director Ryan Dolley. The company’s inaugural Chicago season is produced as part of the side project’s Visiting Artist Series and is comprised of three world-premiere productions: Heist Play by Mitch Vermeersch, Tell It & Speak It & Think It & Breathe It devised by members of the company and contributing artists, and Linear A by Ryan Dolley. In addition, The Ruckus presents two workshop productions: Joshua’s Play by Ryan Dolley in collaboration with Filament Theatre Ensemble and 11-Detroit devised by members of the company. Further details regarding the 2009-10 season will be released at a later date. Prior to The Ruckus’ recent move to Chicago the company was based in Kalamazoo MI, where it produced such popularly acclaimed productions as Apple Frog Baseball, The Retreating World and Fore Play, in addition to a developmental reading of Linear A by Ryan Dolley at Barrow Street Theatre in New York. Read the rest of this entry »

The superficial public image of the ugly American, with stereotypes firmly anchored temporally in the Bush era, slowly gives way to the inner agony of the private American at home through a series of almost a dozen ten-minute plays. The first half focus on America’s sense of itself in the world, with a few very clever plays at the beginning confronting our baffling image of other cultures (“Ten Minute” and “Plain in the Land of Shinar”) that lead to more heavy-handed and less interesting explorations of America’s relationship to war. The second group of shorts considers the American individual’s repressed rage, paralysis and idealism, mostly through lots and lots of soliloquy. As usual with the side project’s year-long festival of short work, there’s a strong sense of how a group of pieces can engage in conversation, but perhaps ironically, the most stereotypical American characteristic of “Atom Smashers” is its generally unwavering belief in an audience that cares deeply about others’ inner angst. One of the plays, “Maraschino Red,” does undermine this sense, with playful jabs at a successful American family man who whines about the lack of excitement in his life, but more often characters release their inner grief and anger with little self-consciousness, and sitting through the second half is a lot like being a fly on the wall during someone else’s therapy session. (Monica Westin)

At the side project theatre, 1439 W Jarvis, (773) 973-2150. Through May 17.

The Rocks

RECOMMENDED

Two short plays, presented back-to-back, about the power games inherent in relationships, with characters who know each other far too well to pull any punches in pointing out one another’s failings. Both shows perfectly catch the ways we parody, mimic and appropriate the voices of those we love best, and the way we tear them to shreds behind their backs—but here in a way that feels sometimes uncomfortably voyeuristic but immediately familiar. 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.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

One of the most cohesive groups of ten-minute plays I’ve seen, with a thoughtful transition from exploration of romance to war so nuanced that the change of themes is almost imperceptible. The strongest of the plays are stunning, especially the first, “78,” in which a couple lives a lifetime together in a single, repeated day; “Yes to Everything,” a vague but compelling monologue about being stuck in love, unable to move on, that cleverly appropriates stand-up conventions, camera phones and Dictaphones as instruments of paralysis; and Brett Neveau’s chilling and subtle “Ethnic Cleansing Day” that stages a creepy rhetoric of silence about hate crimes in a very recognizable family. The plays aren’t all consistently effective, of course, but the range of quality is less dramatic than in most groupings of short plays, and there’s a well-chosen variety of formats as well as ideas so that visually and theatrically the series remains dynamic and creative. (Monica Westin)

At the side project, 1439 West Jarvis, (773)973-2150, Fr-Sat/7:30pm, Sun/2pm, through December 21. $20.