August 26 - September 26
Storefront Theater

It was a dark and stormy night in a house by the lake, when Mary Shelley famously took up her host Lord Byron’s challenge to write a terrifying story and created Frankenstein, one of the most famous novels in the Western canon. Witty, salacious, and often melodramatic, Emily Dendinger’s world premiere play directed by Jessica Hutchinson depicts the larger than life Romantic figures as the normal teenagers they were – overeducated, egotistical, and ready to change the world.

View photos by John W. Sisson, Jr.

What did you think about the show? Share your comments here.

XIII Pocket entertained a crowd of about 40 people last night in the DCA Studio Theater with three excerpts from plays as part of Lack Thereof: Development Series.  See below for some photos from the evening’s performance showcase.

The event was presented as a part of INCUBATOR, a series designed to support the creation of new work by emerging Chicago theater companies. Utilizing Chicago DCA Theater space and resources, participants explore new projects, develop and refine styles, and share their process with the public during a special showcase event.

Don’t miss the next INCUBATOR series showcase for Strange Tree Group on Monday, September 27 at 7:30pm.

Judith Cross/Carin Silkaitis and Huxley Cross/Chip Davis reading from The (method) Displaced

Director of New Works for XIII Pocket, Caitlin McGlone

Playwright Jeff Phillips and Logan/Chip Davis, Barry/Mark Minton and Melbourne/Heath Cordts reading from Bosto

Orin Bates/Heath Cordts and Homeless Woman/Caitlin McGlone read from The (method) Displaced

Sarah/Allie Long and Aaron/Anthony Nikolchev reading from Cash

Man/Chip Davis reading from Cash

XIII Pocket Artistic Director, Stephen Louis Grush and cast members answer audience questions post show

Playwright Anthony Nikolchev discusses his play, The (method) Displaced

The growth in each piece that has taken place over the course of our new play workshop Lack Thereof has been quite exciting.  And each entered into the workshop at a different stage in development.  Cash had been first put down on paper by Stephen Louis Grush in 2003.  The Displaced was first conceived in 2005 by Anthony Nikolchev.  My play, Bosto, is the baby of the group, it was only last February that I first typed it out.  Bosto in its raw form came out fairly quickly for me.  Some stored up feelings and ideas for characters kind of spewed forth one afternoon, in one sitting, I had the first draft of Bosto completed at 42 pages.  From that point I let it sit in drawer while I focused on wrapping up other writing projects and began to tinker with it as we rolled into July, mostly cleaning up thoughts, making it a little less “raw” for further examination.  I entered August with the initial intention of reworking dialogue and fleshing out the ending. 

Based on great observations and strong questions by members of the ensemble, my brain was stimulated, and I left each session of Bosto work a little overwhelmed, with new ideas for expanding the story, building the characters intentions and stakes further.  Bosto grew from each session and lengthened in-between each session. Currently Bosto is at 79 pages.  We may be at the end of the August workshop month, but I plan to continue to play with Bosto.  The world and the characters are continuing to unfold for me. Whereas I am very proud of where it is at now, I am not ready to close the writing doors on it just yet.

In developing Bosto the offstage sounds are becoming huge to the script, at points serving as some of the major events to drive the story.  Which is certainly challenging.  The way the offstage voices, the eavesdropped conflict from the floors below are taken on a misshapen texture in the latest re-write.  Originally they came through clear as day, but I have since worked them to come through diluted, creating more confusion in the character, and more mystery to the spectator.  So the art of the sound design has become pivotal, as the way it is contorted as though it is really resounding through intricate ductwork, is almost an extension of the set design.  As well I have developed a television show within the staging, as another background noise which parallels some of the themes of the on stage action.  Certainly there will be a lot of technical cues in the execution of the play.  In some ways, I feel a bit of a cop out relying so much on the external forces to move the piece a long, like a warped little deus ex machina, but at the same time, given the perspective of the characters Melbourne and Barry, and the world they are trying to understand on a “micro” level as well as “macro” it is highly important to me to keep it and develop it to the most effective specificity. It’s easy as a playwright to jump ahead and think about staging, but as I pondered in a previous post, at what point to stop worrying about how to pull the script off, and just focus on the story. 

I’d say this has been a particular challenge to me working on Bosto, being my first full length play.  Coming from writing novellas (Turban Tan & Whiskey Pike) where it really is about the story and the text, playwrighting is very much its own craft, being a medium for the live presentation of story and behavior.  Earlier drafts of Bosto are very much stuck in ideology and big part of its development and continuing development is heighten what’s at steak between the characters in each scene, so that it does translate into interesting, live behavior. 

Cash reading L-R Chip Davis, Jeff Philips, Stephen Louis Grush, Caitlin McGlone, Mark Minton, Heath Cordts

The (Method) Displaced reading from L-R Jacob Lorenz, Carin Silkaitis, Jeff Philips

Director of New Works Caitlin McGlone

The (Method) Displaced reading L-R Carin Silkaitis, Jeff Philips, Chip Davis, Heath Cordts

Artistic Director, Writer “Cash” Stephen Louis Grush

“Bosto” writer Jeff Philips

Company member Chip Davis

“The (Method) Displaced” writer Anthony Nikolchev

Cash reading L-R Chip Davis, Jeff Philips, Stephen Louis Grush, Caitlin McGlone, Mark Minton, Allie Long, Heath Cordts

Emily Dendinger’s Hideous Progeny is part of a small but fruitful subgenre of historical/biographical fictional works that focus on the true-to-life confluence of interesting people in a specific moment.  Unlike a typical biographical work that takes a long view of a person’s life and times, these “Moment plays” take advantage of the clutter of historical and personal forces in a discrete period of time that’s easily playable – an evening, a summer, etc. Here are some examples from literature, theater, and film:

The Symposium, Plato – 4th Cent. B.C – Socrates, Aristophanes, a famous tragic playwright, a doctor, a lawyer, a student, and the Navy Admiral that would doom Athens in the Peloponnesian War, all get together to get drunk and give speeches about Love.

La cisma de Inglaterra, Pedro Calderón de la Barca – 1627 – This play treats the divorce of Henry VIII and his first wife Katherine, and his excommunication from the Catholic church.

Travesties, Tom Stoppard – 1974 – Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and a English consular general Henry Carr converge around an production of The Importance of Being Ernest in Zurich during World War I.

Gothic, dir. Ken Russell – 1986 – A horror movie that’s also about Byron and the Shelleys’ summer in Geneva. Gabriel Byrne plays Byron and Natasha Richardson plays Mary Shelley.

Shakespeare In Love, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard – 1998 – Inasmuch as Richard Burbage, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, William Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth are all running around getting into scrapes, while Shakespeare is composing Romeo and Juliet. This one’s a stretch because it’s a total work of fiction, but, hey, it’s fun.

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn – 1998 – This play dramatizes a meeting between the quantum physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941, touching on the ethics and science of atomic weapons.

Million Dollar Quartet, Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott – 2006 – A musical about a recording session at Sun Studio in Memphis where Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash were all present.

Little Ashes, dir. Paul Morrison - This movie was released in 2009 and depicts the young lives of Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Federico Garcia Lorca who were friends at the University of Madrid in the early 1920s.

Can anyone think of any others? Frost/Nixon perhaps? I don’t think I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! should count, but…

Some things we’ve been considering as we read and discuss each piece is how other groups may approach the text. I know most everything that I have written for the stage or screen has been something that I’ve been directly involved in bringing to life. A strong question lingers as to how much you set in stone with the text, and what elements shall be left up to the director. Of course the set, sound, music, lighting will be altered, as well as character textures will changed from show to show. But there are certain ambiguities that of course provoke questions, but at what point do let each production take unique liberties with choices to fill in the life between the lines? At what point do you run with detail to really paint the picture of locale? It’s a curious boundary as a playwright, between setting a blue print for production and a piece of literature.

I wrote The Displaced - starting writing it - in 2005. Since then, the play has taken many turns, developed with new characters and new ideas, while, simultaneously, I have changed as well. I just returned to Chicago and its exciting theatre scene after 14 months of doing my own searching for theatrical growth abroad, mainly in Wroclaw, Poland.  During that time, I was inundated with many different forms of theatre. Sure, there is still the ever present get-audiences-in-seats more standard idea of productions, but Poland stands out in its willingness and enthusiasm to explore the unknown in theatrical expression.

This exploration manifests in a form encouraged by a master of experimental, laboratory theatre - Jerzy Grotowski. His is not a method, nor a style that can be emulated, but rather a way to approach the work for the theatre creators. That being a rigorously disciplined focus on what the actor is capable of. It is asking that question, “What IS the actor capable of?” How does one find that out? Thus the naming of his and his followers’ theatre as “experimental.” Like scientists experimenting in a lab. Also: Laboratory theatre. It can take years to find the way that a certain text must be read, or a movement be performed that makes the creator and the audience understand what truth is. So for me to be getting more and more addicted to this line of questioning over the last 14 months makes it a challenge for me to enter a play that I starting writing 5 years ago. How to go back?

I wish I had a nice, insightful and illuminating answer. I don’t. All I can say now is that I want the physical exploration of The Displaced to be an equally important - if not more important - aspect of how the play grows into a production. So for now, as we are tearing apart the text, finding where it is too dense or without action, I am constantly trying to find ways to write the script leaving inspirational notes that will trigger exploration. Leaving questions that must be answered later in the process. I am not trying to be ambiguous, only suggestive. A successful outcome of this workshop would be to leave with a play that encourages revelations at every step of its development, from first reading to closing night.

But how do we do that when the script can be so binding? How do we unite the linguistic arguments present in the science fiction world present in my text with physical expressions that enable us to realize that language is only a fraction of the way we can understand each other and the world in which we live?

Anthony Nikolchev is back from Poland, and this week we’ve begun work-shopping his play The Displaced, which he started several years ago and has since gone through several drafts. It’s been exciting to play with, as there’s not that many science fiction plays out there, at least that I’m aware of. Set in 2063 it follows the development of “the method” and examines complexities in class struggle and ethics in scientific solutions to over population. Monday marked the first day of jumping into The Displaced and Anthony was able to come back Tuesday with another draft to examine. One of Anthony’s big focuses on the outset was using text as a place to start work rather than set work.  And it’s clear ensemble is a huge component to him in creating a work, in creating a world on the stage. In the piece technology is such a part of the world, that it becomes not a bridge to a communal disconnect but is the pulse of human living, attempt to usurp all human variable. In an age of iPads and BlackBerrys, constant electrical distractions, its refreshing to reflect on that and put on its feet a commentary, a satire, that can be communicated through a medium which I’d like to think is the best medium for such a theme...the gathering of a cast and audience, a community, in a dark theatre, with perhaps minimal technology needed for the presentation.

Bosto update - the script has continued to grow. Various questions and ideas posed during the first week of work-shopping have “sprouted” into new pockets of story and stakes for each character in the Bosto environment. I’m excited to bring it back to the table.

Fun Facts from the Hideous Progeny creative team:

From Danielle O’Farrell (Claire) referencing Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation - We’ll be opening our show 194 Years TO THE DAY that Shelley, Mary, and Claire left Lake Geneva. (Well, planned, Dendinger… You sneaky minx.)

From Emily Dendinger (Playwright) in regards to bears - When Byron found out that Cambridge had rules against bringing dogs to the school, he brought a pet bear with him instead.

Danielle re: Frankenstein-lore - A pleading letter from Claire to Byron said, “A Creator ought not destroy his Creature.”

From Emily - There’s some pretty entertaining podcasts about these guys on “Stuff You Missed in History Class” (11/9/09 - “How Lord Byron Worked”, 10/26/09 - “The Birth of Frankenstein and the Vampyre”, 11/11/09 - “Who was the Enchantress of Numbers?” (about Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter)

From Jessica Hutchinson (Director) - Here’s an interesting passage I came across in Year without Summer.  Due to a huge volcanic eruption and unusually low solar activity global temperatures dropped a full degree causing widespread crop loss and food riots.  It also lead to the founding of the Mormon Church and the invention of the Velocipede.

From Jess - Mary & Shelley’s shared journal in 1814—Thursday, July 28: Shelley writes about their escape together: “The night preceding this morning, all being decided, I ordered a chaise to be ready by 4 o’clock.  I watched until lightning and the stars became pale.  At length it was 4.  I believed it not possible that we should succeed; still there appeared to lurk some danger even in certainty. I went; I saw her; she came to me.”

Hideous Progeny opens August 26th! Purchase tickets now by clicking HERE

Stephen’s piece has continued to flesh out over the course of this week.  And it’s exciting to see that layered atop a work in progress dating back to 2003.  On of the night’s he had noticed, tucked away inside the sleeve of a tattered paperback novel he had picked up to read on the way in, a faded flyer promoting one of the very first read through’s of Cash back at Roosevelt University.  The common thread and overall picture has been the major focus of the week thus far.  New concepts of how the music plays within the space have emerged, as well as exploring the music’s relationship with time.  Being of vignette nature, there are a handful of characters that could be linked, perhaps not in a concrete fashion, but in fine subtlety.  Grush-town we all joked when it was alluded that the world of these characters could all perhaps exist in one small town, like a darkened Johnny Cash infused homage to an Our Town.  Perhaps several new scenes may emerge in the world of Cash over the course of the workshop.  Began several years in reaction to Johnny Cash’s death, the original draft banged out in a short amount of time, as Heath Cordts pointed out “like a eulogy.” Naturally, like any reflection on a person’s life and work, Cash continues to evolve and take on new layers.

I am unable to attend the workshop tonight as once a month I co-host a reading series at Matilda Baby-Atlas, centering on the theme of dystopia and apocalypse. For this month, since my mind is personal wrapped up in Bosto and I have no new shorter works ready, I will be reading a section of Bosto to continue to explore some of it’s dystopian themes.

I think that there’s something very callous about a play’s development that’s a bit hard to describe.  In order for a play to be good, and in order for it to stand on it’s own, there has to be so much cutting and killing… at least for me there is.  Some people may be lucky enough to get it right the first time, but I’m not one of those people, and when I go in to really work out the kinks, not much survives the process.

Draft after draft trying to find out what it is exactly that you’re trying to say through these people, you realize that nothing is sacred, and your attachment to a certain line, or even an entire character or scene could be tested at any second.  I really do believe that it’s just as healthy for an artist to be deleting almost as much of his work, as he’s creating.

When you demand more work from yourself the value of the piece thrives.  And plays are a lot of work.  But when a good team has your back it can make the process just a little less hectic… hopefully some of you can come out for our reading at the end of the month and see for yourselves.

We’re entering into our second week at the DCA.  We’ve put a wrap for now on discussing Bosto.  I’ve spent a good chunk of the day re-working the Bosto text, starting with the ending to tighten that up and earn my way to stronger twist, something more effective.  I feel by starting with a more compelling end, and establishing that clarity in my mind I can back track and re-build the progression of the events and pace the whole of it more effectively, stringing information to truly drive the economic themes forward.  Today we began looking at Stephen Louis Grush’s Cash. This has been Stephen’s baby for several years, and it shows.  On its 17th draft it is already highly textured.  Similar to our initial approach to Bosto we spent the day reading the text aloud and discussing.  Being an experiment in the re-defining of the American musical, we also listened to bits of Johnny Cash to paint the inspiration behind each vignette.

Being that it is a play made of vignettes, Stephen’s biggest question for himself was how best to tie the pieces together into a powerful through line.  It seems so far the work-shopping our new original work has been invaluable to see the piece as whole, stepping back to gauge what the audience experience may be like, and use that to step back and reshape the piece.  I know for myself, it is allowing to step back into Bosto and gut rehab the structure of it.  I supposed it’s like a carpenter looking back at a house, realizing the foundation is crooked, and tearing it down to rebuild it with more precision.  Luckily for the carpenter, he can avoid this by learning his geometry. 

From left to right: Heath Cordts, Chip Davis and Mark Minton during a reading of Bosto

An inspired stab at a foreseen taste, tossing ingredients at hand together until the smells and the bronzing of the edibles signify its readiness, and it is delightful to the tongue…then the feast sets in and puts you to sleep, makes you feel heavy, and there’s a slight acidity in the belly in the dark of night that awakes you and keeps you stirring.

Sometimes a piece of writing comes out like an impromptu experiment in cooking.  It comes together quickly, and sits with you in compelling fashion after a first read.  But the deeper you digest, like the aforementioned meal, it keeps you stirring.

We’ve completed our first week of the DCA incubator, and have taken a look at Bosto line by line.  My copy of the script is littered with notes in the margin and so are several pages of a separate notebook.  Part of what happens when you put a handful of sharp people in a room and dig into a brand new play is that a plethora of questions are posed on top of fresh observations.  I certainly have my homework cut out for me to process each note and sift through the script to incorporate and reshape.  Luckily I have a full stretch of time this weekend to do such. I have always enjoyed puzzles, and the task in a sense of balancing out new ideas on character, time, setting, and theme is one wild and intense puzzle.  Within the setting of Bosto is a deep network of the ventilation ducts, offstage.  Such a thing can make for a high stakes scenario, yet at this point the themes and desires of each character are not yet anchored into such an imaginary presence, that could really drive the action forward. Bosto is on the verge of becoming an economic horror story. 

It’s an interesting process diving into the workshopping of play.  There is no formula.  The key is come in humbled, understand that your new work is far from perfect.  It reminds me of something an acting teacher once said to me, “take advantage of the fact that now is the time where you can fuck up.” Not to say that there is a time in creating art where risks must no longer be taken, but it’s very important that they are taken in the early stages of a work of art.

This week we at XIII Pocket kicked off this month of August with the workshopping of 3 new original plays as part of the DCA Incubator series.  The three of these are written by members of XIII Pocket; Bosto by myself (Jeff Phillips), Cash by Stephen Louis Grush, and The Method (Displaced) by Anthony Nikolchev.  We’re dedicating the first three weeks one to each play, and then re-capping and following up on re-writes in the last week to lead into a live reading open to the public.  This week we began jumping into Bosto.  Much of my writing in the past has been of the nature of short stories, novellas, all very prose like, or they have been screenplays.  Bosto is, in a sense, the first play I’ve written aside from short 10 minute plays from my high school days. It’s thrilling I must say to hear it aloud, read by very talented actors all approaching their roles seriously.  At the same time, it is overwhelming to dive into a theatrical work that is still in its infancy.  Bosto was roughly in its fourth draft entering into this week. It has been somewhat fine tuned from where it was, but still many layers need to be explored, and connected appropriately.  Brain’s are quite drained at the end of each session, but the food for thought is quite substantial.

I wrote the first draft of Bosto this past February in one sitting. I was between jobs, attempting to find work with a temp agency but each day hearing of no assignments, I felt like somewhat of a deadbeat. Those feelings started to transpire as I sat down one morning to write, looking to explore a character named Beer Battered Barry that popped into my head a few evenings prior, while cooking up some beer battered chicken.  I’ve had a weird time so far trying to create a synopsis of the piece.  It’s a mystery of sorts, not in the who-dunnit sort of why, but a mystery of the economic dynamics of one building, a sort of “micro-economic” tale.  The building mentioned exists in an overcrowded fishing town.  It is three stories tall.  The first floor is home to a fine seafood establishment, run by the building’s owner, Brian Griss, seen as a tyrant by many.  The top floor is home to three fishermen, two of whom are out of work and frustrated.  As they learn of their new neighbors on the second floor, a shelter for battered women, strange wailing is heard throughout the building, through the intricate network of old vents.  The wailing not only disrupts the peace but the cash flow on floor one.

The play is focused on the top floor, from the perspective of the three gentlemen, but one the big things I’m ready to chew is to flesh out the story of the floors below, which should in the end tighten the perspective up top.