Allen Conkle has carved a small clearing in the thicket of bric-a-brac that is his Edgewater living room, creating just enough space for him and two actresses to stand uncomfortably close together.
He sends her off to his bedroom with the CD to screech in private while he works with actress Andrea Cornett. She pulls out her copy of “The Truth May Be Deceiving,” the anthem her character, Hallelujia Blythe Bliss, sings at two pivotal points in the show. “This is the song,” Conkle tells her. “The song people will walk out singing. Well, maybe. But I don’t want it to sound so right.”
Not many other people have seen Nomenil shows either. The high-spirited, libidinal musicals–part Hanna-Barbera, part Russ Meyer–won a small but enthusiastic following during their heyday in the mid-90s. In their eight plays Conkle and Evans melded a punk sensibility with radical queer politics to create self-consciously cheesy fables with fangs.
A few weeks after Conkle and Evans met, they drove across the country together. It was 1993 and both were enrolled at Columbia College. “I was trying to learn playwriting at a place that didn’t really have a playwriting program,” Conkle says with a laugh. Evans was hoping to become an actress, and she was attracted by Conkle’s zeal for theatrical experimentation.
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Back in Chicago, Conkle and Evans had their first official creative meeting, in a Lakeview coffee shop. What came together during that discussion was their first play, Pushin’ Up Roses, a hokey, licentious musical about two kids named Rose and Billy–best friends who, like their creators, both turn out to be gay. It took only a few days to finish. “All we did was get together and play,” Evans says. “Writing Pushin’ Up Roses was like playing on the playground.”
Over the next several years they created an impressive series of ridiculous but heartfelt shows, each more ingeniously unruly than the last. Their strongest pieces–Eat Your Art Out, That’s the Way It Is, by Golly, and Like Our Parents Smoking Corn Silk–felt as though they were always on the verge of implosion. Anything might happen: products jumped off supermarket shelves and broke into song, out-of-work gay actors congregated in Laundromats to rehearse Fifth of July, wood sprites encouraged little girls to get their genitals replaced at the local Church of Eunuchology. The chaos was more than facile quirkiness–it was meant to signal a utopian destruction of social boundaries.
