YOU FOR ME FOR YOU, TILIKUM and More Slated for Sideshow Theatre Company's 2017-18 Season

Sideshow Theatre Company has announced its 2017-18 Season, launching next spring with the Chicago premiere of Mia Chung's absurdly inventive smash-hit YOU FOR ME FOR YOU, directed by artistic associate Elly Green. The season concludes next summer with the world premiere of Kristiana Rae Colón's spectacular and fearless indictment TILIKUM, directed by Lili-Anne Brown.

Sideshow Theatre's Company's 2017-18 Season will be presented at its resident home, Victory Gardens Richard Christiansen Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago. Tickets will go on sale at a later date. For additional information, visit sideshowtheatre.org.

Comments Sideshow Artistic Director Jonathan L. Green, "We are living in an unprecedented time in the United States and in Chicago - every day feels like a state of emergency. In our eleventh season, Sideshow is focusing on the issues over which we are most divided and amplifying the stories that might allow us to see each other more fully. In You for Me for You and Tilikum, we are telling stories of enemies of the state, displacement, violence, exile and rebellion."

Sideshow's 2017-18 Season will also include "The Freshness Initiative," the company's commissioning and new play development program, now in its fourth year (dates to be announced) and the wildly-popular semi-annual event CLLAW (Chicago League of Lady Arms Wrestlers). The next CLLAW match will be held Saturday, July 29 at Logan Square Auditorium. For more information, visit cllaw.org.

---

Sideshow Theatre Company's 2017-18 Season:

March 4 - April 8, 2018

YOU FOR ME FOR YOU - Chicago Premiere!

By Mia Chung

Directed by artistic associate Elly Green

Press opening: Thursday, March 8, 2018

Two North Korean sisters plan an elaborate escape from the "Best Nation in the World," only to be separated at the border. Now in two strange and separate worlds filled with outrageous characters, they must navigate barriers of language and bureaucracy, reckon with the ways that culture and country can shape us, and discover that survival requires sacrifice. Playwright Mia Chung weaves myth and striking imagery into a deeply affecting and surprisingly funny adventure, portraying the endless lengths to which two sisters will go to find one another again.

June 22 - July 29, 2018

TILIKUM - World Premiere!

By Kristiana Rae Colón

Directed by Lili-Anne Brown

Press opening: Thursday, June 28, 2018

Tilikum was a king, and the oceans of the world were his. Now, he is a captive in a marine amusement park, doomed to live as an opportunity for profit. Alone behind bars he forgets the feel of freedom, but when fellow prisoners ignite the fires of his memory, he starts down a path that threatens to consume everything. Ripped from the headlines, Kristiana Rae Colón's Tilikum explores captivity, savagery and rebellion in a vital and visceral blend of theatre, drumming and dance. Poetic and lyrical, Tilikum calls out the power structures - both corporate and human - that ensure continued oppression, and the complicity of those willing to stand by and do nothing.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS:

Mia Chung's (You For Me For You) plays include You For Me For You, Catch as Catch Can and This Exquisite Corpse. She recently received the Stavis Playwright Award, the Frederick Loewe Award in Music-Theatre, and a Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellowship. You For Me For You had a UK premiere at The Royal Court Theatre, a U.S. premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and multiple productions around the U.S., including Company One (Boston), Crowded Fire Theater (San Francisco), InterAct (Philadelphia), Mu Performing Arts/Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis), Portland Playhouse (Oregon); the play is published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. In 2018, the play will run in Chicago, Michigan, and upstate NY. Mia's work has been supported by awards, commissions, fellowships, residencies and workshops, including BAPF, Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, Blue Mountain Center, Civilians' R&D Group, Hedgebrook, Huntington Theatre, Icicle Creek, Inkwell, JAW, LAByrinth, Ma-Yi Writers Lab, NEA, Playwrights Realm, RISCA, South Coast Rep, Southern Rep, Stella Adler Studio, and TCG. During the coming year, she will develop work with the support of the Orchard Project, P73, NYTW and the Playwrights' Center. She is a New Dramatist.

Kristiana Rae Colón (Tilikum) is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow and executive director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. Her play Octagon, winner of Arizona Theater Company's 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award and Polarity Ensemble Theater's Dionysos Festival of New Work, had its world premiere at the Arcola Theater in London in September 2015. Her work was featured in Victory Gardens' 2014 Ignition Festival. In 2013, she toured the UK with her collection of poems promised instruments published by Northwestern University Press. In autumn 2012, she opened her one-woman show Cry Wolf at Teatro Luna in Chicago while her play but i cd only whisper had its world premiere at the Arcola Theater in London and American premiere in 2016 at The Flea in New York. Kristiana is a part of the Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit, a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the brother/sister hip-hop duo April Fools. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO's "Def Poetry Jam."

ABOUT THE DIRECTORS:

Elly Green (You for Me for You) is a freelance director, whose previous work with Sideshow includes the co-world premiere of Hansol Jung's No More Sad Things and a Freshness Initiative workshop series of Janet Burroway's Boomerang. She recently directed The Distance by Deborah Bruce for Haven Theatre and After Miss Julie by Patrick Marber for Strawdog Theatre. Other Chicago credits include: The Woman Before (Trap Door), Rabbit (Stage Left - Jeff nominated), Happy (Redtwist), Unwilling and Hostile Instruments (Theatre Seven) and The Tomkat Project (Playground Theatre & NY Fringe). Elly was assistant director on Henry V (Chicago Shakespeare Theater) and Proof (Court Theatre). She is an artistic associate with Stage Left theatre and a reader for Steppenwolf Theatre. Elly originally trained in London on the MFA in Theatre Directing from Birkbeck College. Her UK directing credits include: Our Country's Good, My Balloon Beats Your Astronaut, Beyond Therapy, About Tommy, Copenhagen, Skylight, The Beach and The Zoo Story. ellygreendirector.com.

Lili-Anne Brown (Tilikum) is a native Chicagoan who works as a director, actor and educator, and has performed in, directed and produced many award-winning shows, both local and regional. She received the Joseph Jefferson Award in 2014 for her direction of Ahrens & Flaherty's Dessa Rose, and a BTA Award in 2011 for her direction of Passing Strange. She is the former Artistic Director of Bailiwick Chicago, an Artistic Associate of Timber Lake Playhouse and a graduate of Northwestern University and St. Ignatius College Prep. She is a member of Actors' Equity, SAG-AFTRA, and an Associate of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC).

ABOUT SIDESHOW THEATRE COMPANY:

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.

From its first production, 2008's Dante Dies!! (and then things get weird) to its Jeff Award-winning productions of Roland Schimmelpfennig's Idomeneus (named one of the best plays of 2012 by Time Out Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times) and Elizabeth Meriwether's runaway robotic hit Heddatron at Steppenwolf Theatre, to the recent re-mount of its smash hit Stupid F##king Bird, Sideshow has consistently produced engaging, transcendent works across Chicago. Sideshow continues its multi-year residency at Victory Gardens in the historic Biograph Theater in the 2017/18 season.

Sideshow also produces the Chicago League of Lady Arm Wrestlers (CLLAW), a wildly popular interactive fundraising event that benefits Sideshow Theatre Company and other local charities. CLLAW has been featured in local and national press, including The Washington Post, Reuters, Penthouse Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times and on WGN Morning News, ABC 7's Windy City Live and CBS 2. The next CLLAW will be held Saturday, July 29 at Logan Square Auditorium. For more information about CLLAW, visit cllaw.org.

For additional information on Sideshow Theatre Company, visit sideshowtheatre.org.