The Pine at The Catastrophic Theatre

This one’s been a long time in the making and we’ve been talking it up since The MAP Fund awarded Catastrophic a grant to commission a new play by Chicago playwright Mickle Maher, a favorite to Catastrophic artists and audiences.

Maher has become familiar to Catastrophic fans through the production of three of his plays: The Strangerer, Spirits to Enforce, and There Is A Happiness That Morning Is.

Set in the ghost of an old hotel, The Pine is a sort of fairy tale that deals in matters of love and death and grief. This hotel, a way-station between alive and dead, is inhabited by such characters as a nine-foot tall green bell hop who likes to cut off his head to emphasize a point; a group of pilgrims that hold a book club to discuss “The Unread Book,” a book that no one in the world has actually read; a fellow whose only friend is a housefly; and his neighbor Steve, who happens to be Death himself.

An extraordinary comic and genuine heartbreaker, Maher is drawing from a number of unlikely sources to create something much more than the sum of its parts. Think “Desolation Row,” but better. And did we mention it’s all in verse? This one’s going to be a doozy.