For those who crave a walk on the theatrical wild side, Max Truax has become the go-to auteur—a sort of off-Loop Peter Greenaway. Since his Chicago debut three years ago, the 36-year-old Rockford native has made his mark by directing fever-dream productions informed by everything from theremins to Brecht heir Heiner Müller.
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Last winter he reimagined Müller’s postmodern Hamletmachine as a chamber opera for Trap Door Theatre, blending the German playwright’s bleak meditations on power and destruction with a hypnotic score by Jonathan Guillen and a shape-shifting cast that worked multiple crossgender variations on Gertrude, Ophelia, and the melancholy Dane. Then, at Oracle Theatre, he turned Georg Büchner’s 1837 Woyzeck into a layered tale, creating a subterranean nightmare world beneath a vertiginous wooden stage. Truax’s earlier work includes a version of August Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, played out in a disorienting world of optical illusions,, and a multimedia, sci-fi treatment of Termen Vox Machina, Matt Deegan’s 2006 script about theremin inventor Lev Termen.
His path to the stage began with undergrad visual arts studies at Oberlin College. Assigned to draw student dancers in motion, he ended up joining them in improvisational exercises. “That led to me taking more dance classes, which led to choreography,” he recalls. “Long story short, my choreography got more and more theatrical as I wanted to tell more stories through a series of images.”
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Previews Thu-Sat 9/29-10/1. Opens Mon 10/3. Through 10/29: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, also Sat 10/22 and 10/29, 2 PM, Red Tape Theatre, 621 W. Belmont, redtapetheatre.org, $15-$25.
