Sideshow Theatre Company is proud to announce its 2011-2012 season, featuring three productions that examine the role of personal identity in society. "For our fifth season," says Artistic Director Jonathan L. Green, "we've chosen to showcase stories of how people, individually and as a group, reform their public face to serve the public eye."
Following a tremendous 2010 season including a record-breaking run of Heddatron at the Steppenwolf Garage, Sideshow is excited to be partnering with Jeff Award winner
Seth Bockley on the Chicago premiere of Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One. Hailed as a "visionary director" by the Huffington Post, Bockley will bring his singular visual style to this powerful Chicago premiere. Sideshow is committed to the creation of new work for the Chicago theatre community, and its 2011-2012 season culminates with The Gacy Play by Chicago playwright Calamity West. Sideshow is also proud to have been selected to perform in the 2011 Chicago Fringe Festival, offering a production of the company's first devised work project Strangerland, workshopped last year at the DCA. Strangerland was created in part by interviews and input from Sideshow's large network of artistic associates from around the world.
The 2011-2012 Sideshow Theatre Company Season Is:
The World Premiere of
Strangerland
By Matt Fletcher, Karie Miller, Mike Steele and Nate Whelden
Directed by Karie Miller
September 1-11, 2011
Part of the 2011 Chicago Fringe Festival
The Machine has run forever, and all the cogs know where they fit. But when a body washes up with strange papers in his pockets, the daily clockwork starts breaking down, and unspoken questions bubble to the surface. Can a perfect society survive the confusion of pleasure and pain? Or will it shatter completely, and leave everyone picking up the pieces? Created over a year of collaborative rehearsals and workshops, Strangerland represents the first devised work from Sideshow Theatre Company: a tender, nuanced and ominous look at the bonds that communities build, and the fear that comes of facing a new world all alone.
The Chicago Premiere of
The Ugly One
By Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade
Directed by
Seth BockleyOctober 8 - November 20, 2011
At Oracle Theater, 3809 N Broadway
Lette has a loving wife, the respect of his peers, and a promising career in the world of industrial plug development. There's only one problem: he's just found out he's the ugliest man in the world. He seeks out the help of a most unusual surgeon in a desperate bid for beauty, but when the procedure works a little too well, Lette starts noticing that the faces he sees on the street are looking more and more familiar each day...
This fall, Sideshow partners with lauded director
Seth Bockley in an exploration of appearance, identity and celebrity in the Chicago premiere of international smash-hit The Ugly One, Marius von Mayenburg's incisive, hilarious and streamlined assault on image culture, hailed by the Evening Star as "fiendishly clever, deeply unnerving and scalpel sharp."
Seth Bockley won a 2009 Equity Jeff Award for Best New Adaptation for Jon, from a story by
George Saunders. He has created design-driven theater with several notable Chicago companies including Dog & Pony (The Twins Would Like To Say), Collaboraction (1001, Jon), and Redmoon (Winter Pageant 2010, Boneyard Prayer, Laika's Coffin). He is a member of the Goodman Playwrights' Unit, and was commissioned by the Goodman to adapt CommComm , also by
George Saunders.
The World Premiere of
The Gacy Play
By Calamity West
Directed by Artistic Director Jonathan L. Green
Spring 2012
It's Christmas, 1975, and the crawlspace is open in suburban Chicago.
John Wayne Gacy, Jr. is a man with secrets beneath his floor, but when his wife and friends start asking questions, he withdraws into his own world, and his late-night conversations with the smoking, swaggering Duke who shares his name. As ghosts begin crowding the household, the divide between dream and reality vanishes, and the smell just keeps on getting worse. Sideshow Theatre Company and playwright Calamity West delve deep into the mind of one of America's most notorious killers in this World Premiere production and unearth an otherworldly meditation on masculinity and violence that hits all too close to home, even now.
Calamity West is a Chicago based playwright. Her works have been seen with The Anatomy Collective, American Theatre Company,
Chicago Dramatists and Crowded Fire Theatre Company. She received her MFA in playwriting from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Upcoming performances of her work can be seen with Sideshow, EP and Jackalope Theatre Company.
Ticket Information
Tickets and group sale information can be found by visiting www.sideshowtheatre.org or by calling the Sideshow box office at (773)-809-4782. Tickets for The Ugly One are available July 1. Strangerland ticket information can be found by visiting http://www.chicagofringe.org/.
About Sideshow Theatre Company
Sideshow Theatre Company was founded in 2007. It is the mission of Sideshow Theatre Company 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 work has been hailed as "hugely entertaining" (
Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune); "shrewdly perfect and wonderfully quirky" (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times); and "weird and wonderful" (Jonathan Abarbanel, WBEZ).
Sideshow also produces CLLAW, the Chicago League of Lady Arm Wrestlers, a wildly popular interactive fundraising event that benefits Sideshow Theatre Company and several other local charities. Past events have benefited Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, New Leash on Life, Rock for Kids, Gilda's Club Chicago, Season of Concern, Howard Brown Health Center, and Artreach. For more information on CLLAW, visit www.cllaw.org.
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