The Curious Theatre Branch’s ambitious yearly showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Over the years it’s mushroomed from a neighborhood happening to an event of citywide significance–especially now that it’s been taken under the wing of the Department of Cultural Affairs as part of a laudable effort to bring an off-off-Loop sensibility to Chicago’s downtown theater district.
Love Pollution: A Tekno-Popera
Sidewalk Etiquette
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Idris Goodwin’s “humorous ensemble drama,” set in a blue-collar neighborhood in a midwestern city, is performed by the Hermit theater group. “Sidewalk Etiquette…strives toward a gritty sort of reality with its population of street people, small-time merchants, rappers, and drifters. Although it affects one or two mildly surreal contrivances, this tale of yuppie gentrification run amok is sincere urban portraiture with a social point to make. Trouble is, that social point is undercut by Goodwin’s timid narrative,” says Reader critic Tony Adler. Curious Theatre Branch, 7 PM.
Barrie Cole, whose writing is known for its experimental approach to language, penned this “play about jazz, loss, yoga, and the delusions of creativity.” Joe Huppert directs. “Where all too many [artists] pummel their audiences with alienating stylistic innovations,…Cole plays with her medium to draw her audience closer…. Her latest play…is…at once serious and playful, formally challenging and emotionally persuasive. Three wounded urbanites–a woman who has an emotional breakdown in yoga class, her emotionally distant jazz-fanatic significant other, and an unemployed, burned-out anthropologist–come together when the anthropologist and the S.O. become obsessed with making the jazz mix tape of all time, their ‘jazzterpiece.’ But what makes Cole’s script remarkable is not the narrative; it’s how well she utilizes her usual performance strategies: long, digressive monologues; quirky songs; and outrageous stage pictures,” says Reader critic Jack Helbig. No Exit Cafe, 7:30 PM.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11
My Name Is Mudd
