It is with great sadness that my trip to Chicago has come to a close. On Sunday I saw my last show and it was pretty cool. At first I did not enjoy it and I wondered why I had sprinted around 1/2 a mile in the rain after hopping off the red line to Berwyn. This was the furthest north I had been during my entire trip in Chicago and the theatre was located a long way from the red line stop. I had about 13 or 14 minutes to make it before the show started at 7 PM. A thunderstorm was rolling in. The show was called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and was performed by a group of artists called the Neo-Futurists. This play has been running for years and over the course of all their shows they have produced over 8500 short plays.
When you walk into the space, you roll a dice to see how much you pay. I believe the format was $10 + the roll of a 6 sided dice. So the price is between $11-$16. However, I bought my ticket ahead of time and so I was given the dice to roll and they gave me some money back. I had paid $22 online and I got $4 back. When you go through a passageway to the theatre, someone yells at you REALLY LOUD asking you what your name is. I told them 'Clint' and then they wrote a name tag for me that said 'Spaghetti Legs'. The girl who yelled at me had headphones on and she said this is what I heard you say, when I began to spell it. I threw on my name tag and went to my seat.
The goal of the show is to perform 30 short plays within an hour. They put the clock on at the start of the show and rush from show to show trying to complete their objective. Strung over the stage is a thin rope with 30 sheets of paper on clothespins, each with the numbers 1-30, facing the audience. On the back of the number (facing upstage towards the actors) there is a title of the play. Audience members are given a 'menu' with the 30 show titles. We are given some practice on how the show works before it gets going. Every time a show ends, someone in the cast will call 'CURTAIN' and at that point you will refer to your 'menu' and call out the number of the show that you want to see. They pull down that number, scream out the title and shift immediately into the next short play. Once they are set up, an offstage actor will say _______________(the name of the show) and GO! The actors also talk about how they will be interacting with the audience, moving through the space, etc.
The first few scenes (or plays if you want to call them that) were not very interesting to me. I was disengaged and a little annoyed. I felt they were thrown together and not too interesting, funny or dramatic. However, after a while, I started to settle into what was happening and I started to enjoy it. Before the show the leader also spoke about how all of the scenes were about things that had happened to the cast, or were inspired by their actual lives. That is what made me eventually start understanding and enjoying the piece. There was a piece about a young man (it was all played with a voiceover of the actor performing) and he unraveled a lot of little objects and spread them out on a table. I still don't know the point of the story/play, but it was about his relationship and memories of his grandmother and a specific moment in time that he recalled with great detail. Another story was about an actress (her play number was #27 and I kept hollering it out) entitled Where Iwas and WhereIam now and it was the story of her brother who apparently committed suicide about a year ago and how when she found out the news she was sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan with salt in her skin and her eyes and the powerful realization that she was a part of something greater than herself. She went on to say something along the lines of 'the next time you are there, look for my footprints, there are hundreds of them' and soon thereafter the stage went to black.
There was another actor onstage and he had short hair, but some female-like features and I wasn't sure if they were male or female. My wonder would be directly addressed during Malik/Molly's scene. Malik stood down center with two actors just upstage of him, both with a hand on each of his shoulders. The story of Malik/Molly was told. He grew up with some internal physical characteristics that point to the fact that he is female. He had a battery of tests performed on him which proved to be inconclusive and he was deemed 'abnormal'. Though he had some of these characteristics, his body did not produce estrogen, so for a period of time he was given estrogen. Eventually he was classified as 'intersex' and that was explained as someone who is not necessarily female or male but someone 'in between'. A few years ago he shed the name Molly, stopped taking estrogen and took on the name Malik because he identified more as a man.
Another actor read from cards that had different stories from his past. Before reading from a card, an actor upstage would flip a coin to decide if he was pulling from the right stack or the left stack of cards. He talked about living in Cincinnati with his girlfriend and their apartment being infested with bed bugs. He also talked about the way they had to get rid of bed bugs from his girlfriend's beloved stuffed animals (putting them in the freezer for a few days). He also talked about a medical issue that his girlfriend had that endangered her life and how that took a toll on them. In the end he stated that many of the biggest decisions in his life had been decided through a coin flip (just like they were doing throughout the scene) and that when he and his girlfriend decided to return to Chicago it was from a coin flip.
The type of theatre the Neo-Futurists explore is called meta-theatre. It is not conventional in an manner but proved to be thought provoking. They did get through the 30 plays and it was pretty neat. One scene was where all the actors (males included) put on thick lipstick and crawled through the audience kissing audience members on the cheek, forehead, arm, etc. By the end of it everyone in the audience had big kiss marks on their neck, face, head, etc. It was pretty funny to see. Another seen lead to a weird build-up, all of the actors sported swimming goggles and were holding water guns, until finally they turned their water guns on us and sprayed us for about 10-15 seconds. One was about a talking ostrich that railed on about politics while talking into a microphoned-megaphone. They were truly across the board.
Although some of the shows were not entertaining to me, overall I enjoyed it conceptually and I really enjoyed the true stories from the actors. It built a bridge between the performers and I and it made me care.
Now I journey to Nebraska. From the big city and the mass transit and the floods of people every single day, to the open country that is Nebraska. Instead of professional theatres and professional actors I will be surrounded with thousands of high school actors and witnessing their shows. It will be quite a shift, but I am excited about all the workshops and learning I'll experience during this part of my fellowship.
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