This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch; in addition to the Curious folks, participating artists include Theater Oobleck, Jennifer Biddle LaFleur, Michael Meyers, Nomenil, Barrie Cole, Blair Thomas, and many other ensembles and soloists. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 12th annual Rhinofest runs through October 7. The following lists this week’s shows. Most performances take place at the Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln; the Free Street space at Pulaski Park, 1419 W. Blackhawk; and Link’s Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield. Additional venues employed for special events are listed below. Admission is $10 or “pay what you can”; for information and reservations, call 773-327-6666.
Chicago’s experimental, directorless Theater Oobleck presents a double bill. The first depicts a panel discussion on sound between the deaf bell ringer of Notre Dame cathedral, Quasimodo, and the hearing-impaired composer Beethoven. “[The] piece begins as a postmodern parody of academic conferences and ends as a moving meditation on collaboration and the creative process,” says Reader critic Jack Helbig. The second is a puppet play, created by playwright Mickle Maher and puppet designer Shoshanna Utchenik, about a small theater company whose terrible show turns into a surprise hit. Lunar Cabaret, 7 PM.
Drowning of Thirst
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Matthew Wilson directs his own script about a young psychic’s impact on a group of dysfunctional friends. The play “brandishes emptiness and disconnection at every turn, but in such a sketchily ponderous fashion that the void it maps seems to correspond solely to another in Wilson’s imagination….I’d wager that this collection of tissue-paper silhouettes is meant to represent a generation’s alienation and emotional underdevelopment….Then again, it may just be about an insufferable bunch of losers. In any case Drowning of Thirst is underwritten, unconvincing, overlong, and trite. And…the slight staging merely emphasizes the play’s flimsiness,” says Reader critic Brian Nemtusak. Pulaski Park, 7 PM.
The Nomenil collective, which specializes in humor with a gay perspective, presents an encore production of this comedy by Courtney Evans and Allen Conkle. “Evans and Conkle create believable–if excessive–characters, developing a focused and intense idiocy that camps up [their] melodramatic stereotypes….Nomenil’s dark, uneven, and entertaining aesthetic uses camp in the same way Antonin Artaud used abusive confrontation in his theater of cruelty….The story…is nonsensical, the characters are almost universally unappealing, and the dialogue and situations are smart-assed and disorienting. But the show’s precise, high-energy farce and Saturday-morning-cartoon cheeriness coat the subversive, almost surreal bleakness with sugar, and the result is irresistible,” said Reader critic Carol Burbank when she reviewed the show’s original run. Pulaski Park, 9 PM.
This program of “theater riffs and bass narratives” features David Schein performing Adrenalin, a monologue about a man in a doctor’s waiting room, as well as “Off the Deep End,” a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela by bassist-composer Mitch Covic. Pulaski Park, 7 PM.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30
