Last December director Steve Walker was looking for actors who could break-dance for Factory Chicago’s production of Poppin’ and Lockdown, a viciously plastic tribute to early-80s rapsploitation flicks, when he saw Derrick Nelson and Danny Belrose bust a few moves in Defiant Theatre’s Sci-Fi Action Movie in Space Prison. He grabbed them to play rival dance captains; 33-year-old Nelson, cast as head villain, was psyched at first to make a full-on break-dancing comeback. But his starch lasted only as long as his back and knees. “After the first rehearsal, I was regretting it,” he says. “The mind is like, oh, you can still bust that move–and the body is like, ohhhhh, no I can’t! I pulled my groin!”
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Adam Joyce, who plays Turbo’s sidekick, Mr. Freeze, took up break dancing as a nine-year-old in Rogers Park. His moves look sharp and easy, but three days before opening night he was hiding Ace elastics under his sweatbands and bandannas. “I fucked up my ankle for this show, for sure. I fucked up my back, fucked up my neck, my wrists are starting to go tonight–that’s just ’cause I’m 27. I was over the hill when I was 10.”
Factory Chicago is beginning its eleventh year of squeezing productions of original scripts from tiny budgets. Last spring Matt O’Neill’s Captain Raspberry became a minor cult classic, and the company’s July remount of the 1995 hit White Trash Wedding and a Funeral (written by Mike Beyer and Bill Havle) consistently sold out; Walker says people were still trying to make reservations after the show was closed. They sent two shows to New York in 2001: The Vinyl Shop played the Fringe Festival, and The Death and Life of Barb Budonovich went up at PSNBC, an NBC-owned theater that produces original scripts.
“No, real break-dancers break every day,” says Brian Jackson, a nonactor who plays his own alter ego, DJ Boogie Down Bronx, in the show. But he concedes they don’t go all out every time. “[The play’s] supposed to be fake. It’s a joke. But it would be nice to get some real breakers in here–they’d make fun of these guys.”
