Things are so grim in the news business that last week Northwestern University’s Medill journalism school hosted a lecture titled “HELP! Strategies for Career Survival in a World Where the Only Constant Is Change.” It promised advice from former Newsweek and LA Times reporter David Friendly, who’s survived by switching careers, from journalism to showbiz.
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This hybrid creature—the performing wordsmith—has been spotted recently in a couple of local experiments. The Chicago Tribune teamed up with Second City to produce Chicago Live!, a weekly talk and variety show where for $25 a head live audiences watched reporters and critics chat up the folks they cover. (It was recorded for late-night broadcast on WGN radio.) One recent performance—held downstairs at the Chicago Theatre and attended, as far as I could tell, largely by friends, family, and coworkers of the performers—featured Trib books section digital news editor Amy Guth singing Del Shannon’s “Runaway” with novelist Scott Turow and Red Eye writer Kyra Kyles accepting a bouquet and a kiss from interview guest Joe Russo for the “fabulous piece” she wrote about his South Loop nightclub, the Shrine.
Meanwhile, on the north side, former Time Out Chicago theater editor Christopher Piatt continues to enlist former colleagues and others to stage The Paper Machete, the weekly variety show he launched in January at Ricochet’s Tavern in Lincoln Square. It’s fast-paced, quirky, sometimes blue, and free. A “salon in a saloon,” it starts at 3 PM every Saturday in the open back room, running about 90 minutes. It resembles a 1940s radio broadcast, with performers taking their turns in front of an old-fashioned microphone; the pieces are recorded for podcast.
But Piatt and his collaborators, producer Ali Weiss and business manager Maggie Boyaris, are still working mostly for free. The show’s only funding so far is a $10,000 grant from the Driehaus Foundation and about $1,000 in individual donations that have come in through Fractured Atlas, an artist-support group. There’s no money component to the WBEZ deal, and the cash the audience drops into a pitcher on the bar after the show is split among the performers.
A fan of vaudeville, old-time radio, after-dinner speaking, and the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspaper, which used free plays to engage the public in current events, Piatt started writing and performing short solo pieces. “I wanted to talk about what was happening with the gay rights movement and was trying to figure out if there was a way to use comedy to do it,” he says. “I’d read monologues for ten or 15 minutes. But you can’t invite your friends to come out and hear you just do that, so I started adding other artists to the bill.”
“Journalists and improvisers have a lot in common,” he says. “They’re both first responders.”
