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
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The Nomenil theater group performs Allen Conkle, Courtney Evans, and Christopher Powers’s musical spoof. “The whole world is ugly in [this] campy, confusing Rocky Horror-meets-Pinocchio musical, where everyone wears rainbow-colored wigs. Scientists have taken over the growing of lawns and the shining of the sun while Mother Nature…has decided to destroy humanity using a supervirus, presented in charming red boxes. A gang of punk rockers tries to keep humans alive by spreading ‘love pollution’–simple kindness and consideration. And [a] scientist…has created the perfect plastic couple to repopulate the world once Mother Nature has done her dirty work….Powers’s techno-pop music is passable, but the uncredited lyrics fall flat, and the singing is usually wince inducing. Overall… Conkle and…Evans’s story, directed by Conkle, is crass and cruel, so confusing its good-versus-evil theme that we’re unsure whose side we’re on,” says Reader critic Jennifer Vanasco. Chicago Cultural Center, studio theater, 7 PM.
The Dogs of Love
This Curious Theatre Branch production, written and directed by Shawn Prakash Reddy, takes aim at Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth’s murder of Abraham Lincoln. “Questions about historiography undergird…Reddy’s formulation of the events surrounding…Lincoln’s assassination. And for many playwrights, the postmodern hall of mirrors created by asking slippery questions about authority and knowledge would be enough. But Reddy, who also directs, clearly wants to tease, entertain, and provoke….Toward that end he’s fabricated a two-hour work, played by himself and five other actors, that’s both a lecture and a sketch-comedy revue, a historical reenactment and a send-up of reenactments. The resulting show should have been daring and hilarious and intellectually breathtaking. But the night I caught My Name Is Mudd, the comedy often seemed forced, the insights sophomoric, and the writing sloppy and in need of a good edit. These problems might have been the result of uneven performances,” says Reader critic Jack Helbig. Curious Theatre Branch, 9 PM.
Paula Gilovich’s dark comedy concerns a young woman who returns to California to visit her family. Curious Theatre Branch, 2 PM.
Julie Laffin performs “another piece about excess and loss.” Chicago Cultural Center, courtyard, 6:30 PM.
