The latest Chicago stage production to head for New York hasn’t exactly been high profile at home. Though it’s had three runs here over the last two years, Theater Oobleck’s The Strangerer apparently flew under the radar of the lead critics at the local mainstream papers. Playwright Mickle Maher says the dailies’ big guns never made it to the show, which leaves it nicely positioned as an “underground” hit. That’s always sexy.
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Maher, who plays Kerry, thinks word of mouth will correct that impression. “Bush is still president,” he says. “Everything he’s done, including the war, is all still there.” Besides, the play is “about how we acclimate ourselves to violence and senseless murder.” Maher expects Bush, like Nixon, to be relevant as a character long after he’s out of office, and notes that politics owes a lot to the art of theater. “If you’re going to wage a successful war you have to have the audience behind you,” he says. The real-life Kerry was like a “poorly written,” inconsistent character, whereas Bush was better defined. From a dramatic perspective, Maher says, the election’s outcome wasn’t surprising.
The ensemble’s origins go back to the University of Michigan in the early 1980s, where a core group of students including Jeff Dorchen, Danny Thompson, David Isaacson, Terri Kapsalis, and Maher founded the Streetlight Theater. They moved to Chicago in 1987 and launched Oobleck in ’88, with performances at Cafe Voltaire. Staging just two or three shows a year, the company’s made it to a 20th anniversary with no staff, no facility of its own—and no directors, who are regarded by Ooblecks as useless interlopers. A headless body of ten ensemble members and miscellaneous associates, operating on an annual budget that will hit $70,000 this year (including a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation), they write and perform their own work, subjecting it to heavy actor input in readings and rehearsals. In Chicago, admission is by donation of about $10—”free if you’re broke, more if you’ve got it.”
The very public fiasco the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies has on its hands after closing its controversial Imaginary Coordinates exhibit on June 20, two months early, will make an interesting thesis subject someday—perhaps for a student in Spertus College’s nonprofit management program.
A Museum of One’s Own
