March 4 - April 3
Storefront Theater

“This is the future” begins this darkly comic fable about urban developers, criminals, law enforcement, and even a witch, all fighting for the soul and vision of a city.  Set in an urban landscape ripe for redevelopment, the parable blends off-kilter characters, fast-paced storytelling, and stinging social satire in a tale of greed, corruption, and civic responsibility. Theatre Mir’s production marks the Chicago professional premiere of this work by George F. Walker, one of Canada’s most prolific and celebrated playwrights.

View photos by John W. Sisson, Jr.

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

On Tuesday, February 9, Dr. H. Peter Steeves presented the “The Mourning Show” in the Claudia Cassidy Theater. Despite that harsh winter conditions, over 150 people turned out to explore the relationship between art and mourning with Prof. Steeves.

“The Mourning Show” incorporated a multi-media slide presentation/lecture with live music, dance and theater to focus on the relationships among language, representation, beauty, memory, and grief. Mourning’s work is confronting the death of the Other, and as such it places us in relation to our mortal world and our finite community. Prof. Steeves investigated what this means from a philosophic, scientific, and artistic standpoint, moving from the work of Edward Hopper to Francis Bacon, from William Shakespeare to Donald Hall, from Aristotle to Jacques Derrida—from painting to poetry to physics to philosophy and beyond.

Click here to view photos by John W. Sisson, Jr.

Part memoir, part editorial, all comedy, this is the totally too-good-to-be-true story of an interracial family in Chicago, 1979. Actor/writer James Anthony Zoccoli gives a retrospective account of his life as little Jimmy: a half-Italian, half-Polish kid who thinks he’s all Black when his White mother remarries an African-American man.

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

The phrase “Black is Beautiful” was coined by the Abolitionists in America & a century later evolved into a full scale Cultural Movement.

The Last Poets wrote a song called “The White Man’s got a God Complex”

From all the empirical evidence that I had seen in all of my history classes & in the world at large, I couldn’t argue.

But my grandparents went from being borderline racists to downright civil rights activists as our family changed color.

So, when people ask the point of show, I’d have to say that the moral of the story is: “People are all the same on the inside, right?”

But that is not very interesting.

I guess I could have called the show: “People are all the same on the inside, right?”

& I guess I could have opened & closed the show with the statement: “People are all the same on the inside, right?”

But that sort of treatment is not convincing; it is certainly not compelling; and, it is difficult to make that sentiment comical.

It just so happens that one of the objectives of The NAACP is “to remove all barriers of racial discrimination through democratic process”.

Theatre might be the most democratic processes in existence.

An Artist produces a show.  The Public sees the poster, or hears word of mouth, or reads reviews & either goes or does not go.

Unlike television or the radio, you cannot accidentally tune into a play.  Which is why I didn’t just write these stories into a blog or put a video up on Youtube.

I could have even written a screenplay or pitched a situation comedy for television, but I opted to stand on stage & tell my stories the way they are meant to be told: personally.

So, I don’t expect to be able to go out & yell my story on the street corner any more than anybody should shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

I just hope the seats are nice & full; I hope to see you there in the crowd.

CAUCASIAN?  EVANSTONIAN??  AFROPOLSKITALIANO???

By the time I was 8 years old I had lived in Oak Lawn, Orland Park, Matteson, Rogers Park & Hyde Park – with my Polish family & my Italian family – BOTH.

We finally ended up in Evanston, but my head was still spinning.

So, when people asked me, “What are you?” I didn’t know what to say. 

This was partially due to this internal conflict of mine & partially due to my apparent amibuity.  I could identify with anybody, I related to everybody & nobody could tell what I was.  My hair was sorta’ wavy.  My nose was sorta’ big.  My complexion was sorta’ olive.  So, almost everyone I befriended assumed that I was whatever they were – or at least their parents did.

“You are Greek, no?” No, but I love mythology.

“Are you Jewish, yes?” No, but I love Jackie Mason.

“Eh…what you are – Armenian, eh?” No, but I love me some shish kabobs.

In Evanston, there were people from countries I had never even heard of before - & some that sounded downright fictitious.

“Estonia?” You made that up.

“Belize?” Puh-leeze.

“Latvia?” That’s an imaginary comic book place, right?

Plus, there were combinations that I would never have imagined.

Afro-slovakian, for example.

One my best friends in grade school was half-Japanese & half-Irish.

My parents best friends were a Black Man with a Jewish Wife whose children were Blewish.

There was even a kid in who had a father from Israel & a mother from Palestine who was Hebrewstinian.

So, I could have been anything in the world, from anywhere in the world & it wouldn’t have mattered, but all I wanted to be was anything but me.

Identity crisis.

LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, TOGETHER

“Now I am Jimmy Z & I’d like to say Hello
To the black & the white, the red & the brown, the purple & yellow.
But first…”

If shoes make the man, then mine are Boogie Shoes.

I was hardly born with two left feet, but, even still, it takes patience, pratice & diligence to Get on the Good Foot, like James Brown.

I always loved to dance & sing, but I remember the first time the funk hit my backbone & went straight to my head.

First there was the cowbell, then the bassline, then the synthesized strings & next thing you know…

It was like that moment in The Jerk when Steve Martin’s character Navin R. Johnson is laying in bed - dejected from learning that he was adopted by his Black family & realizing that he’s going to be White forever - & as he starts to eat his Birthday Twinkie while listening to “Music in a Mellow Mood” on the Radio.

“It’s unbelievable. I’ve never heard music like this before. It speaks to me.  Now, watch…”

His toes start to tap, his fingers start to snap, & the beat of the Mantovani Orchestra sweeps him away.

“Well, if this is out there, just think how much more is out there! This is the kind of music that makes me want to go out there & be somebody!!”

The same phenomena occurred with me at the Rainbo Roller Rink in 1979 when I heard Rapper’s Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang.

As soon as I heard it, I threw my hands in the air & started waving them around like I just didn’t care!

For the rest of the year, I walked around goin’, “I said a-hip-hop, the hippie, the-hippie, to the hip-hip-hop, a-ya’ don’t stop, the rock it, to the bang-bang boogie, say up jumped the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie the beat…”

& ever since, I have dug rappin’.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m no rapper.  In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a whack MC.

But, I do love Hip-Hop music in all its forms - because Hip-Hop IS music in all its forms.

[Rhythm + Blues + Rock + Soul + Disco + Jazz + X + Y + Z = HIP-HOP]

& on top of all that, Hip-Hop was the gateway into a lot of other musical styles for me, personally.  It was an education, even.  My mom listened to Steely Dan, but I didn’t think those guys were that cool until I heard their music sampled by De La Soul.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked Carol King & Kansas just as much I liked Rakim & Boogie Down Productions.

I listened to Electric Light Orchestra & Vicious Beat Posse.  Both.

I liked both XTC AND XClan.

The Doobie Brothers AND The Jungle Brothers.

I did ’The Safety Dance‘ AND ‘The Smerphies Dance’.

I had Kool & the Gang on 8 Track; then, Heavy D & the Boyz on 45 and Bruce Hornsby & the Range on Cassingle.

My eclectic interests made it difficult for me to pick a style, which made it difficult for kids at school to label me & sometimes it even made it difficult for my friends to understand me, too.

Until years later, when Tupac sampled That’s Just the Way It Is for his song Changes.

Then, I was finally able to say: “See y’all?  It told you that song was fresh.”

Play that Funky Music, White Boy.  Let’s Dance.

BOTH.  That is my favorite word.

“Why,” you may ask?  “Is it because of the sound or the meaning?”

& I will tell you, “Both.”

First of all, look at the spelling – B – O – T – H.  Both.

Now say it: “Both.”

Try saying it again, but this time, really slowly: “BUH – OHHH - THHHHH.”

Now, say it ten times fast: “Bothbothbothbothbothbothbothbothbothboth.”

Weird, right?  After a while you start to wonder if it is even a real word.

But, besides the way it looks & sounds, whenever I am confronted with any set of options, it is usually my answer.

“Would you like Soup or salad?” Both.

“Toast or Bagel?” Both, please.

“Chocolate or Vanilla?” Both, thank you.

When my grandparents asked me: “What do you want for Christmas, Jimmy, the Star Wars Action Figures or the Guns of Navaronne Playset.” I, of course, said: “Both.”

When the judge asked: “Do you want to live with your mother or your father?” I answered: “Both.”

When people ask me, “Is your last name pronounced, ‘ZAH-kah-lee’ or ‘TSOH-koh-lee’?” Actually, both.

I’m from Chicago, so people wonder, “South Side or North Side?” The answer: both.

“City or Suburbs?” Truly, both.

“House or Hip-Hop?  Ska or Reggae?” Both of both of those.

“Cubs or White Sox?” Whaddayouthink?

WHAT ARE YOU?

“Half-Italian, half-Polish, all Black.” That’s my joke.

It’s funny ‘cuz it’s true…& truth is stranger than fiction.

As a kid, I was pretty darn funny & pretty darn smart: smart enough to know better than to feel responsible for the fact that my mother & father were divorced when I was three years old; funny enough to be able to keep a sense of humor when times got tough.

If humor is a defense mechanism, I was Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and the television was my Shaolin Temple.  His style was Tiger.  Mine was Python.  Monty Python.  My special move would have been the Banana Split.  My impossible mission was to make my family laugh.  I was James Bond in a Tennessee Tuxedo; my drink was a Tom & Jerry.

Though I didn’t know why, I knew at a young age that Chicago was called “The Second City” & I was proud that our town was the birthplace of SCTV.

After the divorce, my mom & I moved from Orland Park to Rogers Park.

We zigged & zagged; South Side to North Side & back again…

Then, my mom married my dad & we moved to Hyde Park.

It was summertime, so with all of the packing & moving & unpacking, there was hardly anything for me to do during the week & few opportunities for me to meet other kids.  So, I spent a lot of time organizing my action figure, comic book & baseball card collections, listening to my portable turntable and watching TV.

ONTV.  Remember ONTV?  It was cable television before cable television had cables.  Every month they premiered a new movie & they would show that movie four times a day.  Every day.  Seriously: 7am; Noon; 7pm; Midnight.  The movie that was ONTV when we first moved in; the movie that I have seen the most ever; the movie that I can pretty confidently say that I have watched more often than any other person in the world (& I wish I had documented it for Guinness Book of World Records eligibility): was The Jerk.

During our first few weeks there, that was all I did: watch The Jerk.  Over and over and over again. Navin R. Johnson was my hero.  He had replaced Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Spiderman and my own grandfather as the person with whom I identified most.  The first line of the film is “It was never easy for me.  I was born a poor black child…”

& I thought, “Rap on, brother.  Rap on.”

DCA Theater’s INCUBATOR process was a wonderful opportunity for Wishbone.  I’ve learned to never underestimate the potential power of a vacant room, in this case DCA’s beautiful Studio Theater. Add an inspiration, a few energetic actors, someone to lead, and you’ve got yourself a play waiting to write itself, so to speak.  But is that really all it takes?  Even with an abundance of ideas to fulfill concept, what happens if the play doesn’t write itself?

It’s an intriguing decision to make before commencing an ensemble-developed piece whether to include a dedicated playwright.  On one hand, you are entrusting just one person to capture the essence of all the ensemble’s research, discussions and improvisational efforts and convert it into a play that ideally the entire group believes in.  On the other hand, without a playwright to absorb and filter what is created in rehearsal, whose responsibility then is it to write?  The director’s?

We faced a similar quandary during Spandex.  While we had very fruitful creative process, ultimately and somewhat unexpectedly, the playwriting role came to me (the director) and Laurie Jones (a member of the acting ensemble).  It became necessary for us to consolidate seven different superhero stories and draft the first three scenes.  With feedback from the acting ensemble, we tweaked and refined the scenes until we had a script we felt happy to present to an audience.  However, looking to the future with Spandex, I would prefer not moving forward without a dedicated playwright.  If anything, to give more clarity to a very free and open-ended process. 

Today marked Wishbone’s last rehearsal for the Incubator Project.  To think that we started the month of January with little more than an idea in our heads and now have a definitive focus, characters, and written scenes (as well as a whole lot more information in our heads about the ins and outs of the superhero uni-oh wait, MULTI-verse) is pretty exciting.

When the idea for this show first came up, it stemmed from a desire to know more about the word of superheroes and their connection to society today.  When developing new work, sometimes it’s hard to narrow down the topic enough. Initially we were interested in every single aspect of the superhero world.  How, for example have politics influenced the creation of superheroes and villains?  Should we explore the religious connotations, the idea of a chosen ‘one’ that exist in so many superhero stories?  What parallels can we draw between American comic book superheroes and the superheroes of other countries?  The amount of information we were able to find was staggering and it was a bit overwhelming to think that we would have to narrow down all these bits and bobs of research and find a common theme.  Our story was in that information pile somewhere, we just had to dig it out.

Now, two weeks later we have found the story we want to explore.  As we delved into the process of creating a play, the relevant pieces of our story began to unearth themselves.  We went from just pages and pages of facts to several ideas to a few themes, to one theme to a question which we asked ourselves over and over again: what superhero do we need today?  Answering that question gave us the fuel we needed to piece together what you will see on Monday the 25th!

With one rehearsal standing between us and the showcase on Monday, it was time to put the shoe leather to the road (or noses to the grindstone or whatever the metaphor is).  On Friday, we spent the better part of the rehearsal just writing, trying to fill in the gaps that our improv explorations had left us with.  For two hours, everyone in the ensemble went to their own little corners (like that Cinderella song, the people version, not the cartoon) and wrote furiously.  For the last hour, everyone shared their pieces and the main throughline of the show started to take place.  From this exercise, we discovered our superhero’s name, the relationship of the characters to the environment and the purpose of the villain.

After this exercise, several ensemble members (fueled by massive amounts of caffeine and sleep depravation) sat down to make sense of this wide assortment of people, places and things that all of our exercises had left us with.  On Saturday, we sat down as a group to work through our first three scenes.  It is pretty amazing that within the course of a few days, we were able to go from a pile of odds and ends of information with no idea how to string them together to having a defined storyline, named characters with backstories and our conflict.  We worked two of the three scenes vigorously and wrote and rewrote many lines until we were satisfied.  Never having been blessed with patience, this part of ensemble developed work is always difficult for me but the end product is always worth it.

The last scene of the day provided a bit of a challenge.  As we worked through it, some of the dialogue didn’t feel right, so the two of us acting in the scene asked Jeff if we could use the existing script as a guideline for an improv scene.  Through the improv, we were able to fill in some of the conversational gaps and flesh out the characters.  I have learned that improv is an excellent tool to use if some parts of a script feel like they could use more detail.

Stay tuned for our last blog post of this project!

Hello from the land of Spandex!  The past few rehearsals, we have been using improv to help us explore themes that were discovered during our research.  During these explorations, we’ve stumbled across a number of superheroes whose powers are...shall we say, less than awe-inspiring. One of our ensemble members is particularly adept at inventing totally whacked out and bizarre characters.  I’ve been keeping a list of some of my favorites:

1. Fondant Fred: has the ability to shoot fondant from his fingers and comes into children’s rooms and brings them sweets (yes, it is as creepy as it sounds).

2. The Slippery Dwarf: A dwarf whose bottom half is actually a fish, making him half dwarf, half mermaid (merman?). He has slime come out his pores, thus accounting for the ‘slippery’ part of the ‘slippery dwarf’. We are not exactly sure what he does other than being...slippery.

3. Groaning Willard: A corn farmer who...groans, and doesn’t wear a shirt. I don’t actually remember what his power was...but it was equally outrageous as the corn farming part.

4. A horse....that can turn into...wait for it....a PLANT!

As with all improv, for every nugget we find that we can use, there are ten nuggets that are just good for a laugh and then are filed quietly away.  Now that we have an idea of where we want this story to take us, we have to keep soldiering on to flesh out our characters, conflict and resolution!  Stay tuned as we take you through the final few rehearsals before our presentation on Monday 1/25!

WNEP Theater brings to life a mosaic of characters inspired by the paintings of American realist artist Edward Hopper. In a series of vignettes and short moments written by WNEP company members, a dozen actors follow Hopper’s New York from dawn to dark and thrust the audience into the quiet desperation and dark comedy of the city.

View photos by John W. Sisson, Jr.

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

Tuesday marked our third meeting for Spandex wherein we continued Mondays discussion about the life and times of superheroes.

(Some tidbits from Monday’s discussion that were not included in the previous post: Sam’s truly epic cataloguing of the 35 most memorable comic book villains of which we all thought the Scarlet Witch was pretty awesome, an acapella rendition of the ‘Muppet Babies’ theme song, and me getting all up in arms about the apparent need for all female superheroes to have the BMI of toothpicks until Brandon explained that as crime fighters, they probably should be in relatively good shape.)

We started off the meeting with a little historical recap from Laurie about one of the earliest superheroes, Mandrake the Magician who, as you may be surprised to find out, was NOT shaped like one of those crying baby root things in Harry Potter but rather like a magician who took his mustache styling advice from Rhett Butler. Mandrake the Magician’s power was to ‘gesture hypnotically’ and cause his subjects to see illusions.

(Fancy, but I think controlling metal is still my favorite power so far...)

We also discussed the book Seduction of the Innocent which was written in 1954 by Fredric Wertham as a cry for censorship in the comic book industry. His book lead to the development of the Comics Code Authority which was responsible for censoring the content in comic books. They did away with conflicted superheroes, opting instead for black and white characters that were either all good or all evil and decided that all villains must receive punishment for evil doings.

I will leave you with this thought from Sam, who posed the question to us, “If you had Tupac, Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z, who would be Superman, who would be Batman and who would be Spiderman and why?” Here is his answer:

“So, take Tupac, Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z and try to match them up with Superman Spider-man and Batman. Biggie is the tightest rhymer of the group and if you consider rap as a genre that highlights bitches, gats and guns, then no one does it better than Biggie - which by my reasoning would make him Superman. Tupac is the least likely to shoot anyone of the three, the most interested in ridding the streets of crime and generally the most socially conscious - making him Batman. And Spiderman has the least skill of the three heroes, but has made the most out of it - leaving him as Jay-Z.”

Tonight we delve into improvisation!

Monday kicked off Wishbone Theatre Collective’s second rehearsal for Spandex.  Since our last meeting had left us all with questions about the who’s, where’s and why’s of the superhero world, we had each chosen topics to research.  During Monday’s meeting, we all spent time sharing what we had learned (kind of like book reports, but without the homemade diagrams). 

Laurie’s topic, The History of Superheroes, was particularly fascinating.  Did you know that there were different ‘ages’ of superheroes?  Laurie explained to us that the four ages (there might be more...we’re fascinated by this so the research continues!) are the Golden Age (which lasted from late 1930 to late 1940 and is responsible for bringing Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Captain America to the public), the Silver Age (approximately 1956 to about 1970 and brought about such characters as the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, Daredevil and The Fantastic Four among others), the Bronze Age (about 1970-1980 in which many comics began taking on a darker tone and current issues such as drug use were introduced.  The Bronze Age supposedly ended with the publication of Watchmen, a comic book that introduced a new way of writing about superheroes), and finally The Modern Age (lasting from the mid 80s until present day and is also known by other names such as ‘The Iron Age,’ ‘The Crossover Age,’ and the ever optimistic ‘Dark Age.’ Present day comics have more psychologically complex characters and many smaller and independent comics have risen to the forefront).

We’re finding that each round of research brings up new questions about the incredibly complex world of superheroes.  For example, today I will be researching the Crisis on Infinite Earths and the book that caused comic sales to plummet for awhile, Seduction of the Innocent.

Oh, and did you know that there are people with real-life superhero powers? Check it out!