Barrie Cole and Theresa Sofianos both use the word “obsession” when discussing their relationship with the printed word. “I’ve always checked too many books out of the library,” says Cole, a performance artist and playwright who grew up in Evanston. When she was a child, she says, “whenever we’d go to the city, we’d go to a used bookstore and our parents would let us pick out one book. It was exciting to choose the book and let the book choose you.”
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Sofianos, a second-grade teacher and performance artist who grew up in Palos Park, tells a similar story. “We had hobby fairs at school when I was a kid, and my hobbies were collecting books,” she says. “I had all the Little House books, all the Nancy Drew, and all the Oz books. My favorite thing was ordering books from the Scholastic Book Club. My mom used to let me get a whole stack. It was so exciting when they finally came.”
In her monologues, Cole has investigated topics as varied as gossip, mating rituals, and Appalachian folklore, while also examining the nature of language. She says her new piece, This Book, is about “how you can read a book and it seems to rearrange all your ideas about the way life works, and how sometimes when a book is really powerful you’d rather live in it, rather than in the world.”
