Sideshow Theatre Announced As Steppenwolf's Choice for Garage Rep Series

Steppenwolf Theatre has selected Sideshow Theatre Company as one of three innovative Chicagoland storefront theatres to produce a show for Steppenwolf's 2nd Annual GARAGE REP. Sideshow will be producing Elizabeth Meriwether's Heddatron, directed by Jonathan L. Green. Sideshow will be working in repertory with The Strange Tree Group and UrbanTheater Company. Steppenwolf's GARAGE REP allows artists to present their work on a larger scale, with access to the space and resources to help these productions flourish. Heddatron will conclude Sideshow's exciting 2010 - 2011 season.

In Heddatron, a book falls from the sky and suddenly Jane Gordon, a very depressed and very pregnant Michigonian housewife in a loveless marriage, finds herself kidnapped by a clan of renegade sentient robots and whisked away to the jungles of South America where she is forced to perform the title role in a mechanical version of Hedda Gabler. As a documentarian searches for the truth about Jane's abduction and Jane's family mounts a search party, her 10-year-old daughter Nugget discovers a past where a tormented Henrik Ibsen squeezes out each tortured word of his greatest masterpiece. Dark and savagely funny, Heddatron "achieves true, and truly original, theatrical transcendence" (Ben Brantley, NY Times) in a bizarre and strangely familiar world of reality TV and rocket launchers where everyone, metal or otherwise, just wants to feel a little bit human.

"Heddatron is Sideshow's most wildly ambitious project to date because Meriwether's script calls for a cast of ten actors and five life-sized, functioning robots that move and speak," said Artistic Director Jonathan L. Green. "Steppenwolf is known for producing plays that push the boundaries of what we can experience in a theatre. We are thrilled that Steppenwolf will help us produce Heddatron, allowing our company to explore new methods of theatrical storytelling in unconventional ways." Sideshow is partnering with robotics experts from across Chicago, designing the robots to move independently, speak lines, and interact with other performers on stage.

Heddatron will run in repertory for ten weeks February 16 - April 24, 2011 in Steppenwolf's Merle Reskin Garage Theatre, 1624 N. Halsted St. Tickets will go on sale on a later date through the Steppenwolf box office.

About Sideshow

Founded in 2007, Sideshow Theatre Company‘s mission is to mine The Collective Unconscious of the world we live in with limitless curiosity, drawing inspiration from the familiar stories, memories and images we all share to spark new conversation and bring our audiences together as adventurers in a communal experience of exploration. Sideshow's first production, Walt McGough's Dante Dies!! (and then things get weird), was hailed by the Daily Herald as "vivid, intimate, and visually arresting." Other Sideshow productions include Everything Freezes: another winter's tale by Jonathan L. Green and Walt McGough, Ekphrasis: Cave Walls to Soup Cans, by E. Warren Perry Jr, and Janet Burroway's "high-spirited success" (Time Out Chicago) Medea with Child.

Join Sideshow this fall for Kathleen Akerley's "lyrical, melancholy new drama" (Washington Post) Theories of the Sun, opening September 9th, 2010 at the new Theater Wit. Sideshow's first company-devised work, Strangerland, is part of the DCA Incubator Series in development in October, with a special one-night-only workshop performance on Monday, October 25th, 2010.

Sideshow also produces the Chicago League of Lady Arm Wrestlers (CLLAW), a popular interactive fundraising event that benefits Sideshow Theatre Company and local charities. CLLAW VII is Friday, September 24th, 2010 at the Mystic Celt. For more information on CLLAW, visit www.sideshowtheatre.org/cllaw.

Sideshow is proud to have been awarded a $25,000 grant from the first Chase Community Giving program via Facebook in December 2009.

For questions, contact Sideshow's Marketing Manager, Bruce Phillips at (703) 577-0640 or email bruce@sideshowtheatre.org. For additional information on Sideshow, visit www.sideshowtheatre.org, www.facebook.com/SideshowTheatre, or www.twitter.com/SideshowTheatre.

About GARAGE REP

GARAGE REP: three productions presented in rotating repertory in The Garage at Steppenwolf, from some of Chicago's most innovative, young theatre companies.

The Garage is dedicated to new plays, new artists and new audiences. It provides artists the opportunity to present their work with the scale, space and resources it merits. For audiences, it creates another opportunity to build a multigenerational conversation about the new, provocative work emerging from Chicago's diverse and vibrant theatre scene. The Garage offers programming featuring new voices for the American theater - directors, writers, designers and actors.