Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Next gave two reasons for postponing the premiere of the Loewith/Palmer play–an adaptation of the 1936 sci-fi satire by Czech writer Karel Capek, who also wrote R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The first, of course, was money: Capek’s tale of humans fighting a race of salamanders for world domination is “highly theatrical” and “incredibly ambitious,” says Loewith, Next’s outgoing artistic director, in a statement; with puppets by the marvelous Michael Montenegro, “it deserves more financial support than we can provide in this fiscal year.” The second reason was a trip Loewith, Montenegro, and dramaturg Celise Kalke took to Prague in October that convinced them to reshape the work, which was to have been broadly political, focusing it instead on Captain van Toch, who discovers the newts. The piece is expected to premiere, under another title, during the 2009-10 season.
