Our season is officially underway.  We’ve already had a few production meetings for Memory, and we’ve just concluded our very exciting and very crowded Season general auditions last night.  Things are in swing.  And that means it is pretty difficult to hang onto any secrets for much longer.

So here comes another leak:

Throughout the years, BackStage Theatre Company has been known for staging challenging stories in very unique locations.  BSTC’s first production (way back in 2000) was staged in an old mansion on the North Side of Chicago.   Last season, we took over the lower level studio of the Chopin Theatre and transformed it into various intriguing environments, including Lemon’s living room for Aunt Dan & Lemon,  a series of intensely intimate bedrooms for Orange Flower Water, and a strange psychological no-space for Albee’s The Play About The Baby.

And here’s the newest secret:  BSTC’s 11th Season will be produced at the Viaduct Theatre in Roscoe Village!  The Viaduct is a unique urban cultural mecca, presenting theatre,  film, art, dance, and music for Chicago. Nestled secretly beneath the Belmont overpass on Western Ave, the Viaduct’s notorious tiny red door and famous flickering neon sign cleverly disguise the thriving arts scene inside.  The theatre houses two wonderfully unique performances spaces (we will produce one show in each space), as well as a terrific pre-show lobby bar that was named the “Best Theatre Lobby Bar” by the Chicago Reader in 2008.  The Viaduct offers its audiences a hip, intimate theatregoing experience, and we are thrilled to call it our home for the season.

So there you have it!  Only one secret remains.  Soon, our entire season and all its tawdry details will be public knowledge.  If you’d still like to purchase our subscriptions at the discounted “secret” price, you’d better get on that, and soon.  Not only are subscriptions $33 (that’s only $16.50/show), but this is the last chance to purchase the season at the lowest fees possible!  Click here to purchase.

In a little more than a week, all of our secrets will be revealed, and the subscription price will be back to full!

See you at the Viaduct in the fall!!!

The Jeff Committee recently released their list of nominees for 2010.  Among that list were four nominations for BackStage Theatre Company.  What an exciting way to end a 10th Anniversary Season.

Three of the nominations were for our production of John Kolvenbach’s On An Average Day.  BSTC ensemble member Tony Bozzuto was recognized for his heartbreaking and dangerous performance as Robert; a developmentally arrested man who has been waiting in the kitchen for the return of his father and his brother, both of whom abandoned him over a decade earlier.  Ensemble member Heath Hays was recognized for his incredible scenic design, which transformed every inch of the tiny Chemically Imbalanced Theatre space into the junk-riddled abandoned house in which Robert ceaselessly waited.  And guest artist Geoff Coates was recognized for his astonishing fight choreography, which remains (to this day) one of the most unsettling, dangerous and deeply heartbreaking fight scenes I have ever seen in a play.  Refrigerators were dented, baseball bats were swung, trashcans were smashed, beer cans were hurled, and a huge metal table was completely overturned . . . all done within inches of the toes of the audience, and still managed to be perfectly safe.  But at the heart of this remarkable fight was a chapter of the story that simply could not be told otherwise.  Geoff knew from the first rehearsal that his fight needed to continue the story when the characters could no longer communicate with words.

Lastly, BSTC ensemble member Rebekah Ward-Hays was recognized for her tremendously brave work in our production of Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan & Lemon. There are very few actors in this town who could manage the enormous task of sitting in a chair for an hour and a half and articulating horribly disturbing truths directly to an audience with a sweet smile, and then somehow manage to retain even an ounce of empathy.  Ms. Ward-Hays proved to be a storyteller of the most seductive and delicious kind; spellbinding the audience with rich nostalgic imagery, while simultaneously twisting their socio-political sensibilities around the spindle of her dangerous worldview with terrifying ease.

Also nominated for work outside of BackStage was ensemble member Brenda Barrie for her title role in LifeLine Theatre’s Mrs. Caliban. Although personally, we thought she was deadly brilliant as Aunt Dan to Rebekah Ward Hays’ Lemon, in Mrs. Caliban Ms. Barrie brought to vivid life a woman so deeply entangled in the extraordinary losses of her ordinary life, that she engages in a strange but deeply sensual and lifegiving affair with an amphibian monster.  Sound strange?  It was.  But in the skilled hands of Brenda Barrie, it was also deeply moving, cathartic and unexpectedly affirming.

The 2010 nominations included some of our favorite guest artists.  Jared Moore (who designed the lights for this years Orange Flower Water) was nominated for his work in New Leaf Theatre Co’s The Man Who Was Thursday. New Leaf Theatre is a wonderful company whose artistry we respect and admire, and so we were thrilled to see that Thursday was also given a second nod by recognizing the work of playwright Bilal Dardai who adapted the tricky novel to the stage in such a wonderfully unique way.  Frances Limoncelli (guest director for 2009′s The Memory of Water) was recognized twice for two separate adaptations for LifeLine; Busman’s Honeymoon and Mrs. Caliban.  And Jason Huysman (who appeared opposite Tony Bozzuto in our nominated production of On an Average Day, as well as this season’s Orange Flower Water) was recognized for his heartfelt performance as Biff in Raven Theatre’s production of Death of a Salesman.

Looking over Jeff’s impressive list of nominated artists, we at BackStage Theatre Company are deeply grateful to have been able to celebrate an Anniversary season in such rich company.  Congratulations to every single artist on that list.  Here’s to an equally enlivening 2010-2011 season!

Our production of Edward Albee’s The Play About The Baby opens tomorrow in the Chopin Studio Theatre.  One word you will not see in any publicity materials surrounding our upcoming production is “absurd.”  Or “absurdism.”  Or “absurdist.”  The Theatre of The Absurd is an academic term that attempts to classify certain plays and playwrights that resist such classification.  The notion of such a classification is counterproductive and is itself . . . well, absurd.  To make things worse, the term seems to organize or even dictate an audience’s reaction to one of these plays far in advance of the actual experience of it.  And truthfully?  Most contemporary, non-academic audiences will avoid “absurdist” plays like the plague, mistakenly believing that “absurdist” means impossible to understand or, even worse, impossible to enjoy which, of course, is unfortunate and simply untrue.

Albee’s plays are indeed challenging:  they challenge an audiences expectation of what happens when you walk into a theatre.  The plays challenge the traditional notions of dramatic narrative, of good and evil, of comedy and drama.  When pressed to answer the question “do you consider your plays to be comedies or dramas?” the playwright simply says “I consider them to be plays.”

A non-industry friend of mine asked me if The Play About the Baby could actually be part of an enjoyable night on the town.   My reaction?  “Hell yes.“  True, The Play About The Baby is a strange play, and like all of Albee’s plays, it has dark rumblings beneath its surface.  But it is also deeply funny, playfully sexy, full of wonder and mystery and high-paced vaudevillian humor that pulses with both the joy of life and the sweet misery of the broken heart.

There is nothing absurd about that.

Matthew Reeder

Artistic Director

When Nick Keenan and I were in the early stages of redesigning BSTC’s website, we both agreed early on in the process that the new website should be blog-based.  There were a number of logistical reasons for this, not the least of which were financial.  Like most small theatre companies, we did not have a fortune to invest in the creation of this new website, and in most cases, blogging is pretty affordable.

But the interest in developing a blog-based site went beyond the need to keep our spending in check.  During our brainstorming sessions (primarily directed by the always inspiring Mr. Keenan) we decided that we wanted to use our site to not only promote our mission and our seasons, but to engage directly with our growing audiences.  We wanted to the new site/blog to be a kind of constant conversation between the artists and the audience that make up our theatre family.

Our seasons are a carefully programmed, thematically linked trio of productions that we hope will spark an open conversation between the artists and the audience.  We want our audiences to take part in the conversation; both positive and critical, in the stories that we are, essentially, programming for them.  Our stories are are both a challenge and a gift to those who come to see them.

So today, we are thrilled to unveil a extraordinarily simple but vital new feature of our website.  We are turning on a new feature that will allow our audiences and our artists to respond to each individual show, right on the show page.

What does this mean?

This means that an audience member will be encouraged go to our website after attending a BSTC production and leave a comment, a question or even a mini-review on the very page that is the central hub for information and news on the show.  That means that anyone who buys a ticket to the show through our website (our primary gateway to tickets) will be able to see the user-generated reviews and comments, and the responses left in turn, by the the producing artists: us.  Potential ticket-buyers will be able to see the conversation that is already happening around the shows before they buy their tickets.  The idea is not without risk: it could surely backfire if we don’t live up to the high artistic standards we set for ourselves.  (And we commit ourselves to leaving the negative responses up with the positive.)  But the risk is worth it.   It is an effort to increase transparency: to localize and popularize the narrative surrounding the experiences that our audiences have when attending our shows.  We want our audiences to learn from us, and we want to learn from them.  That is the point of any meaningful conversation.

So here we go!  From here on out, any show you see at BackStage Theatre Company is open for discussion.  Let’s start with Orange Flower Water.  Seen it yet?

If so, tell us what you thought.  Start the conversation.

Matthew Reeder

Artistic Director.