Interference
500 Clown
Want a peek at avant-garde heaven? The inaugural monthlong PAC/edge festival features some 15 full-scale productions, a healthy smattering of workshops, lectures, and installations, and even an open mike at which you might win the grand prize of $8. Of course, the fest would offer more than a glimpse of paradise if the artists were getting paid, or if Performing Arts Chicago had rented spaces less dreary than the Athenaeum’s sepulchral studios (then again, the bleak surroundings may be suitable to this fringe work). The Curious Theatre Branch’s Rhinoceros Theater Festival–an incubator for untried work–may be more important to the life of the avant-garde scene, but PAC/edge gives many of last year’s greatest hits–Plasticene’s The Palmer Raids, Lucky Pierre’s How to Manage Fear, David Kodeski’s I Can’t Explain the Beauty–well-deserved new leases on life. And fully half the festival’s anchor productions are world premieres, including Curious Theatre Branch’s Chumpstrap: A Madras Parable and Refracting Rainbows and 500 Clown’s 500 Clown Frankenstein. But the biggest gamble is the new DOG in its first piece ever, Interference. This playful, demanding, thrillingly hip conundrum–the most exciting debut since Lucky Pierre burst on the scene seven years ago–offers irrefutable proof of the fringe’s continued fertility.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
To some extent DOG rose from the ashes of the late, great Cook County Theatre Department. Three of its members–actress Vicki Walden, set designer Jason Greenberg, and composer Dave Pavkovic–were part of that brain trust, and DOG’s extraordinarily talented director, Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, saw Cook County’s work in its waning days. Like that troupe, DOG eschews most theatrical conventions–character, scene, plot, and, some might argue, content–in favor of lyrically quotidian actions: corralling an errant office chair, speaking in awards-ceremony style into a vacuum nozzle, eating birdseed while perched on a clothesline. And the actors perform with Cook County’s trademark deadpan nonchalance, as though acting were a way to kill time until something interesting happens.
After the bewildering demands of Interference and the audacious assault of 500 Clown Frankenstein, Curious Theatre Branch’s tender, straightforward Chumpstrap: A Madras Parable is a tonic. The fourth in a series of “parables” created since 1987 by Curious cofounders Jenny Magnus and Beau O’Reilly, it juxtaposes his relatively unadorned storytelling with her sly musical accompaniment. Poised amid the clutter of furniture wrapped Christo-style in canvas and rope, O’Reilly tells of his struggles to fit into two male enclaves: first as a kid alongside his older, more athletic, more “boylike” brothers Suds and Elbow, and second as an adult with a pair of fearless, hard-drinking professional movers, Johnny Moe and the Wheelman. Always the odd man out, O’Reilly can only approximate the coarse combativeness and rough-and-tumble grace of these worlds, which provide a male intimacy for which he longs.
