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On a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, Jackie Harvey stepped out of her home in Woodlawn for a breath of fresh air, only to notice flashing lights from several police vehicles and ambulances filling her street. 

She walked down the block to find out what was going on, seeing several of her neighbors amid the swelling crowd. As they looked on, one police officer attempted to resuscitate a young man using CPR. Another young man was being wheeled on a stretcher by EMTs to the open doors of an ambulance. Harvey saw blood suffusing his clothes. He had been shot. 

Harvey, an administrative assistant at Cook County Hospital with 29 years of experience, says that witnessing the aftermath of a mass shooting that left two men dead and two seriously injured was traumatic, even for her. So she understood when a relative of one of the victims arrived at the scene hysterical with grief. 

What she could not understand was why a police officer handcuffed the man. The officer took the cuffs off only after other community members explained the familial connection to one of the victims and demanded his release. 

“If I would have gotten involved, because I’m emotional and hysterical too, they probably would have handcuffed me,” Harvey said.

Harvey wondered whether the officer had never received sensitivity training, which could have prepared him to deal with a distraught relative. And why, out of the 20-some emergency responders on the scene, was there not a single person on hand who could offer counseling services after such a horrific event? 

One reason such services aren’t yet available has to do with the overall lack of mental health resources available to residents living in neighborhoods such as Woodlawn. Despite the frequent traumatic instances of violence thereabouts, the city has engaged in decades-long divestment from operating mental health centers. 

Back in 2012, Rahm Emanuel closed Woodlawn and Auburn-Gresham’s public mental health clinics as well as four others across Chicago in a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, who had shuttered several before. In all, Emanuel and Daley closed 14 of the city’s 19 mental health clinics.

On November 8, residents of the Sixth, 20th, and 33rd Wards will vote on a nonbinding ballot initiative that asks whether they want to change course on that trajectory and reopen the city-run mental health clinics in support of a new dispatch system to send mental health professionals and EMTs instead of police officers to mental health emergency calls. 

In an impromptu interview at the Whitney Young Library in Chatham, community residents Richard Rosario and Brad Redrick indicated their support of the initiative. They said that reopening the clinics and dispatching care workers, not cops, made intuitive sense. Why send cops to deal with situations they’re not trained for?

“This should have been done so long ago it ain’t even funny,” Redrick said. “I used to work in mental health . . . and [people struggling with mental illness] are a vulnerable population that needs that kind of consideration.”

Tynisha Jointer, a former social worker at Deneen Elementary School who lives in Chatham, said that people in her neighborhood avoid calling the police because of fears that they will harm the very people they are called to assist. “Having an [alternative] outlet could definitely be helpful for families . . . supporting folks who are struggling with mental illness,” she said.

Although the referendum is nonbinding, it is part of a sustained effort by a group of community organizations known as the Collaborative for Community Wellness (CCW) to press the mayor and City Council to include funding for the development of a citywide mental health crisis response system in the city’s 2023 budget. In 2020, 33rd Ward alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez introduced a resolution that would have established such a system. 

Since September 2021, the city of Chicago began piloting a co-responder program, pairing police officers with mental health workers and paramedics in Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) teams. CARE teams operated in a handful of neighborhoods on the southwest side during weekday hours. The teams were dispatched to over a hundred mental health crisis calls in the past year. In none of those cases was an arrest made or a use of force reported, according to Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner.

Although Arwady has insisted police officers’ presence is essential to ensuring the safety of the other responders, in only one case out of 134 did a CARE team member sustain a minor injury. Organizers of the referendum contend that including officers on CARE teams is unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst. 

According to Cheryl Miller, a lifelong Chicagoan and former cabdriver who is now the public health organizer for Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), one of the groups that is a part of CCW, officers’ training teaches them to establish control over a situation, using force whenever a person is noncompliant, even if that person cannot readily comply because of their mental illness. 

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail,” Miller said. 

Debates on the 2023 budget begin soon, as does voting on candidates for all 50 aldermanic seats, so the referendum comes at a time when city officials may be more susceptible to public pressure.

And for Kennedy Bartley, the legislative director at United Working Families and who also worked on the referendum campaign, the organizers’ vision is about more than just providing essential mental health services—it is also about getting back the 125 unionized medical worker jobs, most of which were held by Black and Brown people, that Emanuel cut in 2012. 

“We believe that we don’t need to privatize our care,” Bartley said. “Governments are responsible for providing for safe and healthy communities.”

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Angel Day makes freewheeling underground pop as Yesterdayneverhappened, and their new second album, The Demon at Dusk (Loveshock/Daybreak), zips around with such restless energy you might think they never sleep. The Chicago producer and vocalist has a knack for bricolage and an ear for the cutting edge, evident in the album’s effusive collision of dance music, hip-hop, and R&B; their local Daybreak parties book Black and Black trans artists working to reshape nightlife around the country. Day blends an ocean of sounds with great care, steering their songs into joyful abandon and stopping just short of unrestrained chaos. On “Brimstone Juju,” Day raps with unbothered cool over a craggy landscape built from jackhammer bass, a cyclone of drum ’n’ bass percussion, and reversed synth notes that sound like a haunted organ. It’s an impressive feat to maintain equanimity amid such pandemonium, and throughout The Demon at Dusk, Day provides a demonstration of how liberating it can be to ride out a tornado of your own creation. It’s often a great way to have fun too.

Yesterdayneverhappened This release party for The Demon at Dusk includes an interactive art installation. Ayeeyo, Swami Sound, El Brujo, and Marceline Steel open. Fri 10/28, 5 PM, Congruent Space, 1216 W. Grand, free, all ages

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Women love true-crime stories—so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite “Murder Show.” Fans of the podcast My Favorite Murder (aka “Murderinos”) are overwhelmingly female. When you’re raised from an early age to think that rape and murder are occupational hazards of your gender, maybe morbid laughter and obsessive research are two coping mechanisms—a way of saying to the world, “I’m not afraid, really. They’re just stories.”

Jennifer Rumberger’s The Locusts, now in its world premiere with the Gift Theatre, blends a crime procedural with a family drama to explore generational trauma around violence against women. It has its share of mordant humor, as well as a hopeful insistence on the power of reclaiming one’s own story as a survival mechanism. But it’s also a grim reminder that patriarchy is all about controlling women, instilling terror in their daily lives, and killing them for sport or spite on occasion. Sometimes that happens through “lone wolf” men. Sometimes it’s official state policy. (If you think abortion bans aren’t a form of government-sanctioned serial killing, you haven’t been paying attention.)

The Locusts Through 11/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, thegifttheatre.org, $38-$45 ($35 seniors, $25 students)

Ella (Cyd Blakewell) is an FBI special agent who’s been sent back to her hometown of Vero Beach, Florida, to help the local cops catch a serial killer. Ella left home as soon as she could, in large part because she somehow survived being kidnapped and raped as a teenager. She remembers very little of the attack, but signs of her PTSD are there if you look for them underneath her let’s-get-down-to-business exterior. That standoffish demeanor initially pisses off Layla (Jennifer Glasse), the police chief, who assumes Ella just looks down on the yokels. But young officer Robbie (Patrick Weber) is fascinated—until his first visit to one of the killer’s crime scenes leaves him reeling.

Ella’s pregnant sister, Maisie (Brittany Burch), whose couch she’s crashing on, remembers to string up some Christmas lights in the living room because Ella is still afraid of the dark. By contrast, Maisie’s daughter, Olive (Mariah Sydnei Gordon), writes tales of girls seeking vengeance against their attackers and dreams of being a writer in New York, much to the delight of her senescent grandmother (Renee Lockett), who ends up having quite a story of her own to tell. But then Olive’s friends start disappearing, and just surviving seems like a formidable enough challenge.

Rumberger has noted that part of the inspiration for her play (deftly directed here by John Gawlik) was reading about the early life of Mary Shelley. The author of Frankenstein never knew her mother, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her, and she faced ostracism for her relationship with Percy Shelley, whose first wife killed herself. She turned that personal trauma into exteriorized monsters, much as Olive does with her fiction in the play. (At one point, Robbie refers to the electric chair as a “reverse Frankenstein”—electricity used to end a “monster,” rather than animate one.)

And while the brutal murders happening in town are foregrounded, it’s clear that Ella and Maisie also have unresolved issues around the suicide of their mother and the death by cancer of their father, as well as the existential dread of living in an ever-redder state. Maisie takes it as a personal affront that MAGA people have moved into their old family home in a town that seems to be dying on the vine. (The mall is gone, for one thing.) The decay feels palpable in Chas Mathieu’s set, hung with tattered swathes of cloth and with cartoonish cutouts of orange trees in the background, and in Trey Brazeal’s sickly shadowy lighting.

So there’s a lot heaped on the dramatic plate here, and not everything feels like it gets the development it deserves. The resentments between Ella and Maisie in particular feel like they’re swept away pretty quickly. (Though in fairness, having a killer stalking the streets probably makes old sibling rivalries feel like small potatoes.) What does stick is the way that each of the sisters has chosen a different way of dealing with their early traumas. Maisie, a nurse, cares for others in a hands-on way, while Ella is more comfortable in an office, analyzing crimes from a distance in order to achieve justice. Blakewell and Burch excel as two women who love each other, but have found it easier (at least in Ella’s case) to express that love from afar.

One thread throughout the play is that our insistence on rewarding girls for being “nice” is a form of grooming them for their own abuse. That guy with the crutches you stop to help with his packages may be setting you up. (Hello, Buffalo Bill!) It’s an interesting observation—being raised with awareness of your vulnerability as a woman, yet also being expected to serve others and put their needs ahead of yours, adds up to an unwinnable dynamic for assessing risk, when even just politely turning down a stranger’s advances on the street can get you battered or killed. (That’s not even taking into account the much higher likelihood of women being beaten or murdered by men who claim to “love” them.)

Rumberger, who has previously written pieces for Chicago’s horror-centered WildClaw Theatre (her Night in Alachua County from 2017 has some narrative similarities to what she’s doing here) doesn’t sugarcoat much. Blakewell’s monologues as Ella, particularly an absolutely searing cri de coeur near the end, sometimes feel as much like the playwright’s own anguished observations as they do the character’s. But Rumberger remains refreshingly unsentimental and steely-eyed in her vision of a world where women have to save themselves and their stories from everyone who reduces them to objects. 

At one point, Ella tells Robbie about the women whose murders she’s investigated, and how she mourns for all the things they could have done. Their killers get famous. The women stay dead. So we laugh to scare away the shadows, knowing that the monsters are real. And we wonder if watching one more true-crime documentary will give us the key to survival, or numb us to the point of apathy.

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The Chicago Blackhawks already made a trade on Wednesday. The first one was a bit annoying for fans as it reminded them that Stan Bowman was actually a terrible GM during his tenure with the team as another first-round pick was wasted.

They sent Nicolas Beaudin to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for Cameron Hillis. Beaudin is a former first-round pick that never panned out and changed the way the Blackhawks did business for a few years after. It’s a bad look. Hillis will report to the Rockford Ice Hogs upon his arrival.

A few hours later, another trade was made as the Hawks sent Evan Barratt to the Philadelphia Flyers in exchange for Cooper Zech. This is an interesting trade that will be a little bit tougher to dissect.

Barratt is currently in his third season of AHL hockey but hasn’t earned his way up to the NHL yet. This all comes after some very successful seasons with Penn State University. He was a third-round pick in the 2017 NHL Draft by Chicago.

The Chicago Blackhawks made a second AHL trade on Wednesday morning.

Barratt has also had tremendous success playing for Team USA in various tournaments. He has big game experience but now he is taking it to Philly. It will be interesting to see if he can become an NHL player at any point.

Cooper Zech has played with the Providence Bruins and Lehigh Valley Phantoms of the AHL over the past handful of years but has also not ever been called up to the NHL. Like Hillis, Zech is going to report to the Rockford Ice Hogs.

It seems as if the Blackhawks have something in mind here. They are trying to load up their AHL squad with what they think it needs. They believe that they can make a playoff run this season but they aren’t off to the best start (1-3-0-0). Hopefully, Hillis and Zech help them in different areas.

At one point, it was thought that Barratt was going to be an NHL player. He hasn’t earned a call-up yet and clearly, he has been passed by in this organization.

With Philly, he might get his chance at some point which is all you can hope for. At the end of the day, the Hawks are hoping that this move helps their organization move forward.

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According to head writer David Andrew Greener Laws, who goes by the acronym DAGL, The Twenty-Sided Tavern, opening October 27 at the Broadway Playhouse, is “a game and an experience, and set in a sword and sorcery fantasy world that casts the audience as the fourth player.”

Inspired by role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), audience members are invited to join the actors on various quests, each of which differs from evening to evening.

“It’s completely unique and different every night, based on how the audience wants to show up,” adds head game designer Sarah Davis Reynolds. “It all depends—do they want to name the bartender ‘Steve’ or ‘Bartender MacRuff?’ That really sets the tone for the night.”

The Twenty-Sided TavernThrough 1/15: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; also Fri 11/25, 2 PM, Wed 12/21 and 12/28 2 and 7:30 PM, Sat 12/24 2 PM only, no show Thu 11/24 or Sun 12/25; Broadway Playhouse, 175 E. Chestnut, 800-775-2000, broadwayinchicago.com, $40-$65

She and DAGL are both fans of role-playing games who met during the pandemic. They still play tabletop and video games together in their free time. 

“I have been playing video games my whole life,” Reynolds recalls. “I always did the ones where there were open worlds. I would literally spend hundreds of hours organizing the books that I found [in the games] in alphabetical order by genre. That fed into learning to play D&D and other tabletop role-playing games in college. I sunk my passion into that.”

In 2019, DAGL began thinking about the possibility of a hyper-interactive D&D-based theatrical show. While he had experienced podcasts and live shows incorporating a certain level of interactivity, it had never been to the extent he wanted. The pandemic forced him to put his own plans on the back burner, however. 

DAGL eventually began working for an online company employing the technology Gamiotics, which now powers The Twenty-Sided Tavern, that brought theatrical experiences to Zoom conferences. Reynolds worked for that company as well.

“Sarah went, ‘I want to make a D&D show,’ and I went, ‘I want to make a D&D show,’ so we put our resources together. We tested it out online and in person at the Philadelphia Fringe a little over a year ago,” he explains. “It just took off. We thought this was the basket that we should put all our eggs in.”

The Twenty-Sided Tavern by its very nature utilizes principles its creators garnered from improv. 

“The reason that we are so drawn to role-playing is that it is about storytelling—it gives you this sandbox where you get to say who your character is and what your motivations are,” Reynolds says. “Theater is also about telling stories and it was the core, concrete foundation that we built this on.”

But DAGL and Reynolds were adamant that The Twenty-Sided Tavern harness the chaotic energy that can frequently be found in role-playing games. Actors in the show are each familiar with three roles, and don’t know who they’ll be playing until the audience tells them. The company has about 13 actors, five of whom are onstage at a time.  

Reynolds notes, “It’s a lot about prepping different characters, knowing different improv skills, [and] asking, ‘How can we get to this moment, knowing a particular character arc, when we don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen?’”

DAGL and Reynolds both appear onstage, always tweaking lines and audience choices to keep the script flowing naturally. 

“We learn so much from every night’s audience,” DAGL says. “Between my writing the script and Sarah coding the story, we’re basically doing rewrites each and every night. Our roles behind the scenes are very present.”

Onstage, DAGL acts as Game Master, laying out the figurative map of the adventure the audience embarks on. Reynolds plays the Tavern Keeper, who she describes as “the rules arbitrator. I also run the technology.”

Gamiotics employs a web-based interface so audience members don’t have to download single-use apps to their phones.

“It allows the audience to vote and compete from their phones, and I am actively running that from the stage,” Reynolds explains. “I’m responding to the audience. If they’re solving a riddle, I’m seeing if enough of them got it right for it to count as a success or not. DAGL guides the story and I guide the game.”

The Twenty-Sided Tavern was designed so that audience members have numerous access points during which to engage, according to their own comfort level.

“I always say—in a positive way—that one of the great things about the show is that we always focus on everyone maintaining the capacity to surprise everyone,” Reynolds says. “That means the audience surprising us, us surprising the players, etc. It also means that sometimes the technology surprises us. There are so many interesting elements—huge projections and sound effects. One of the challenges is making sure that everything is telling the story together and recognizing that this is not a linear thing.” 

DAGL said that the show appeals to both role-playing enthusiasts and “other parts of nerdom. We have people who come to the show dressed in chain mail, Star Trek uniforms, and Pokémon onesies. There are also people who have never played these games before.”  

He considers managing “scope and scale” to be his biggest challenge: “It’s a two-hour production; the audience comes in expecting that. There are audience members who want to follow that expectation—it’s two hours and we’re done. But there’s just so much in the show. Do we want to explore another room? Do we want to play this game longer? Do we want to follow this comedic bit for longer?”

He calls storytelling an innate part of the human experience, adding, “At the end of the day, that’s what role-playing is, whether you’re playing a single-player video game or you’re telling a story communally with a tabletop role-playing game.”

Role-playing also affords participants opportunities to learn much about themselves and their communities, Reynolds adds. “It allows you to say, ‘I want to be this character who is brave, and bold, and goes on daring quests, when in real life I’m an accountant. It allows you to find that part of you that you haven’t talked to since you were a kid.” 

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Aaron Gyrion lives a comfortable life on the southwest side. The 32-year-old Garfield Ridge homeowner makes enough as a heavy equipment operator at the Department of Water Management to support a family of four on his income alone. He changes out sewer pipes and fixes issues with the municipal plumbing.

“Local 150. Every day, show up, get an assignment, go to the job, do the job, go back to the yard at the end of the day,” he said. “I do what every four-year-old kid dreams of doing: I play with trucks and heavy equipment.”

Gyrion is a steward with the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 150.

“I’ve been on both sides of the fence—I’ve had union jobs and I’ve had nonunion jobs—and head-and-shoulders above it is the union job.” 

He pointed to pensions and health insurance. When he got laid off after finishing a job for private contractors, he could call the union hall to get put on a list and get a call back when another job opened. That gave him peace of mind. 

And he said the wages speak for themselves. Gyrion makes $53.60 an hour. He’s a college graduate who went into trades after earning his degree. He bought his house when he was 25 years old.

Gyrion has been following the only statewide referendum on the November 8 ballot religiously. Illinoisans are being asked whether they want to amend the state constitution to establish a right to labor unionization and collective bargaining. That would prevent Illinois from enacting a so-called right-to-work law, which allows private sector workers to avoid paying dues if they refuse to join a union at their workplace, even if they enjoy benefits secured by the union. 

Gyrion supports the amendment. “I think workers should be free to unionize and the path to unionization should be clear and unobstructed,” he said. 

The state’s powerful Democrats also support it. There is a political committee, Vote Yes for Workers’ Rights, advocating for the amendment but not one organized in opposition to it. The state’s unions support it. 

At the 1970 state constitutional convention, lawmakers considered enshrining labor provisions in the constitution, said Ann M. Lousin, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law who authored “The Illinois State Constitution: A Reference Guide.” She was a research assistant at the convention, and recalled a ten-minute debate about putting either a right-to-work or workers’ rights amendment in the constitution; delegates ultimately left both out.

Union membership over the past decade is higher in Illinois (14.6 percent) and in Chicagoland (13.6 percent) than it is nationally (10.8 percent), according to a recent study by the pro-union Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that nonunion public sector workers cannot be compelled to pay union dues because of the benefits they receive through collective bargaining. 

While the ruling has impacted dues-paying in public sector unions nationwide, membership has not been hugely impacted; in Illinois, that rate has only declined 2.2 percent since 2018.

Meanwhile, Gallup has found that 71 percent of Americans approve of unions—the highest since 1965. There were 58 successful union organizing drives last year, a 60 percent success rate—higher than any other in a decade. Illinois workers under 35 have seen the highest increase in unionization since 2018. 

Todd Maisch, the president and CEO of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, opposes the amendment. Maisch disapproves of the foreclosure of Illinois ever becoming a right-to-work state, and he worries that the amendment would expand workers’ right to strike.

Maisch also worries about “working conditions” being ill-defined. Over decades, “enterprising unions and their attorneys are going to try to expand the heck out of [working conditions],” he said. 

Lousin said that working conditions “have been interpreted pretty broadly in labor laws over the years,” and include things like pensions, health-care benefits, hours, and job duties. 

At the right-leaning Illinois Policy Institute, a libertarian think tank that has received funding from former governor Bruce Rauner and the Koch brothers, Director of Labor Policy Mailee Smith said the amendment “will drive up taxes and cement Illinois’s reputation as one of the worst places in the nation to do business.” 

Smith said “economic welfare” is a legally undefined term. She is also opposed to the state government being unable to consider right-to-work laws, but acknowledged Illinois becoming a right-to-work state is incredibly unlikely.

Lousin said she is unaware of the term “economic welfare” being included in any existing legislation. She said that people should be thinking about whether they want “something this broad” in the constitution, but is herself voting in favor of it, calling right-to-work laws “an anathema, a relic of the 1890s Gilded Age.” She dismissed concerns about taxes rising because of the amendment.

Illinois AFL-CIO President Tim Drea said “economic welfare” refers to minimum wage protections and unemployment insurance. He acknowledged that the courts could define it, pointing to the centuries-long judicial and legislative debates over what the U.S. Constitution means. He recalled the yearslong state budget impasse, largely because of Rauner’s demands for labor law reform, and said the disastrous standoff was “a very, very legitimate threat against labor rights.” 

“These rights that have been obtained through the years through the hard work and sweat of many, many people—we don’t want to just leave them to the whims of shifting political winds,” Drea said. 

The amendment takes codified labor rights “enacted over lax safety standards in factories, schools, and hospitals,” and puts them “in a lockbox and secures them for future generations,” Drea said. “You just never know what a politician will do to the rights that we’ve gained.”

Gyrion said the solidarity that comes with being in a union is unparalleled.

“You’re part of a team,” Gyrion said. “It’s people in your local, in your same union, looking out for you the way that people looked out for them. The expectation is we have to take care of ourselves. We have to make sure that everybody is taken care of and nobody’s being taken advantage of. And that’s not something you get everywhere, and it’s refreshing.”

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I met DJ Intel in 2010 at Bad Meaning Good, a monthly trashy movie night at the Burlington that he hosted with fellow DJ Jarrett Spiegel. In the years since, I’ve frequently run into Intel (real name Jason Deuchler) at hip-hop shows and horror movie screenings, and I’ve ended up at plenty of concerts and festivals where he performed. He seemed so ubiquitous that I sometimes wondered if I’d hallucinated him! Since March, there’s been another way to see Deuchler on the regular: he and Bric-a-Brac Records owners Jen Lemasters and Nick Mayor opened the Brewed, a horror-themed coffee shop in Avondale.

As told to Leor Galil

I guess I’ve always been a B-movie, Godzilla, Universal monsters fan since I was a kid, through my dad, who used to show those to me. My dad is also a music fan, but it’s weird, it’s more on the musical-theater side of things—I grew up listening to musicals and that kind of stuff. And then my brother got turntables when he was in junior high, and I gravitated from my interest in movies and music into DJing.

My brother got turntables, and I used to get home from school before him—it was one of those, like, “Hey, don’t touch my turntables. Stay out of my room.” I would go into his room and DJ until I heard the back door open at the house; I would quickly shut everything down and go back into my room and pretend I wasn’t in his room DJing. Eventually, I started buying my own records, and he was like, “Oh, you can use them, it’s fine.” Then I found a pair of turntables—which I still have to this day—at a pawn shop, and the rest is kind of history. 

A couple of my friends and I formed a crew called Chicago Tribe—we used to throw parties for 17-and-over kids, and the first one was in Forest Park at this place called the Playhouse, which is no longer there. 

We would have a date, we’d make a bunch of flyers, and then we’d bring our own sound equipment and DJ equipment. They’d unlock a door. We’d charge money at the door and throw a hip-hop party. We did that successfully for many, many years. That’s how I know a lot of people in the Chicago hip-hop scene.

Jesse de la Peña was still doing that kind of stuff. DJ PNS from the Molemen—the Molemen in general were throwing parties. Kanye and those guys from the south side, all the Nacrobats and all those dudes. I know them all from doing underground hip-hop parties. 

Abbey Pub was a big home for a lot of shows, over on the northwest side. Threw a lot of shows there. SubT was definitely a good spot. We did the original Lava Lounge on Damen and then also the second home of Lava Lounge on Milwaukee. We did Rodan for a long time. Just wherever we could find spots that would let us do it, we would do it.

Horror was always in the background. Fangoria magazine used to have a thing called Weekend of Horrors, so I was going to those conventions. Svengoolie has always been a part of my life since I was a kid. People always tend to think horror is a rock ’n’ roll, heavy-metal kind of scene, but there’s also the Gravediggaz, Flatlinerz, and some of that—I guess, for lack of a better term, “horrorcore rap.” I’ve always been a fan. Dr. Octagon, that sort of stuff.

It’s been about six months, and I enjoy every day I go in there. I hadn’t worked a person-to-person retail sort of job in a really long time, so I really enjoy having regular customers and talking to random strangers on a daily basis. I still love coffee, and I love making coffee drinks. Somehow it’s magically worked out.

It gets a little hectic sometimes. That 7 AM opening shift can be real difficult when you’ve DJed till three, but you make the best of it. I’m doing what I love, so you do what you gotta do.

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According to head writer David Andrew Greener Laws, who goes by the acronym DAGL, The Twenty-Sided Tavern, opening October 27 at the Broadway Playhouse, is “a game and an experience, and set in a sword and sorcery fantasy world that casts the audience as the fourth player.”

Inspired by role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), audience members are invited to join the actors on various quests, each of which differs from evening to evening.

“It’s completely unique and different every night, based on how the audience wants to show up,” adds head game designer Sarah Davis Reynolds. “It all depends—do they want to name the bartender ‘Steve’ or ‘Bartender MacRuff?’ That really sets the tone for the night.”

The Twenty-Sided TavernThrough 1/15: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; also Fri 11/25, 2 PM, Wed 12/21 and 12/28 2 and 7:30 PM, Sat 12/24 2 PM only, no show Thu 11/24 or Sun 12/25; Broadway Playhouse, 175 E. Chestnut, 800-775-2000, broadwayinchicago.com, $40-$65

She and DAGL are both fans of role-playing games who met during the pandemic. They still play tabletop and video games together in their free time. 

“I have been playing video games my whole life,” Reynolds recalls. “I always did the ones where there were open worlds. I would literally spend hundreds of hours organizing the books that I found [in the games] in alphabetical order by genre. That fed into learning to play D&D and other tabletop role-playing games in college. I sunk my passion into that.”

In 2019, DAGL began thinking about the possibility of a hyper-interactive D&D-based theatrical show. While he had experienced podcasts and live shows incorporating a certain level of interactivity, it had never been to the extent he wanted. The pandemic forced him to put his own plans on the back burner, however. 

DAGL eventually began working for an online company employing the technology Gamiotics, which now powers The Twenty-Sided Tavern, that brought theatrical experiences to Zoom conferences. Reynolds worked for that company as well.

“Sarah went, ‘I want to make a D&D show,’ and I went, ‘I want to make a D&D show,’ so we put our resources together. We tested it out online and in person at the Philadelphia Fringe a little over a year ago,” he explains. “It just took off. We thought this was the basket that we should put all our eggs in.”

The Twenty-Sided Tavern by its very nature utilizes principles its creators garnered from improv. 

“The reason that we are so drawn to role-playing is that it is about storytelling—it gives you this sandbox where you get to say who your character is and what your motivations are,” Reynolds says. “Theater is also about telling stories and it was the core, concrete foundation that we built this on.”

But DAGL and Reynolds were adamant that The Twenty-Sided Tavern harness the chaotic energy that can frequently be found in role-playing games. Actors in the show are each familiar with three roles, and don’t know who they’ll be playing until the audience tells them. The company has about 13 actors, five of whom are onstage at a time.  

Reynolds notes, “It’s a lot about prepping different characters, knowing different improv skills, [and] asking, ‘How can we get to this moment, knowing a particular character arc, when we don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen?’”

DAGL and Reynolds both appear onstage, always tweaking lines and audience choices to keep the script flowing naturally. 

“We learn so much from every night’s audience,” DAGL says. “Between my writing the script and Sarah coding the story, we’re basically doing rewrites each and every night. Our roles behind the scenes are very present.”

Onstage, DAGL acts as Game Master, laying out the figurative map of the adventure the audience embarks on. Reynolds plays the Tavern Keeper, who she describes as “the rules arbitrator. I also run the technology.”

Gamiotics employs a web-based interface so audience members don’t have to download single-use apps to their phones.

“It allows the audience to vote and compete from their phones, and I am actively running that from the stage,” Reynolds explains. “I’m responding to the audience. If they’re solving a riddle, I’m seeing if enough of them got it right for it to count as a success or not. DAGL guides the story and I guide the game.”

The Twenty-Sided Tavern was designed so that audience members have numerous access points during which to engage, according to their own comfort level.

“I always say—in a positive way—that one of the great things about the show is that we always focus on everyone maintaining the capacity to surprise everyone,” Reynolds says. “That means the audience surprising us, us surprising the players, etc. It also means that sometimes the technology surprises us. There are so many interesting elements—huge projections and sound effects. One of the challenges is making sure that everything is telling the story together and recognizing that this is not a linear thing.” 

DAGL said that the show appeals to both role-playing enthusiasts and “other parts of nerdom. We have people who come to the show dressed in chain mail, Star Trek uniforms, and Pokémon onesies. There are also people who have never played these games before.”  

He considers managing “scope and scale” to be his biggest challenge: “It’s a two-hour production; the audience comes in expecting that. There are audience members who want to follow that expectation—it’s two hours and we’re done. But there’s just so much in the show. Do we want to explore another room? Do we want to play this game longer? Do we want to follow this comedic bit for longer?”

He calls storytelling an innate part of the human experience, adding, “At the end of the day, that’s what role-playing is, whether you’re playing a single-player video game or you’re telling a story communally with a tabletop role-playing game.”

Role-playing also affords participants opportunities to learn much about themselves and their communities, Reynolds adds. “It allows you to say, ‘I want to be this character who is brave, and bold, and goes on daring quests, when in real life I’m an accountant. It allows you to find that part of you that you haven’t talked to since you were a kid.” 

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Aaron Gyrion lives a comfortable life on the southwest side. The 32-year-old Garfield Ridge homeowner makes enough as a heavy equipment operator at the Department of Water Management to support a family of four on his income alone. He changes out sewer pipes and fixes issues with the municipal plumbing.

“Local 150. Every day, show up, get an assignment, go to the job, do the job, go back to the yard at the end of the day,” he said. “I do what every four-year-old kid dreams of doing: I play with trucks and heavy equipment.”

Gyrion is a steward with the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 150.

“I’ve been on both sides of the fence—I’ve had union jobs and I’ve had nonunion jobs—and head-and-shoulders above it is the union job.” 

He pointed to pensions and health insurance. When he got laid off after finishing a job for private contractors, he could call the union hall to get put on a list and get a call back when another job opened. That gave him peace of mind. 

And he said the wages speak for themselves. Gyrion makes $53.60 an hour. He’s a college graduate who went into trades after earning his degree. He bought his house when he was 25 years old.

Gyrion has been following the only statewide referendum on the November 8 ballot religiously. Illinoisans are being asked whether they want to amend the state constitution to establish a right to labor unionization and collective bargaining. That would prevent Illinois from enacting a so-called right-to-work law, which allows private sector workers to avoid paying dues if they refuse to join a union at their workplace, even if they enjoy benefits secured by the union. 

Gyrion supports the amendment. “I think workers should be free to unionize and the path to unionization should be clear and unobstructed,” he said. 

The state’s powerful Democrats also support it. There is a political committee, Vote Yes for Workers’ Rights, advocating for the amendment but not one organized in opposition to it. The state’s unions support it. 

At the 1970 state constitutional convention, lawmakers considered enshrining labor provisions in the constitution, said Ann M. Lousin, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law who authored “The Illinois State Constitution: A Reference Guide.” She was a research assistant at the convention, and recalled a ten-minute debate about putting either a right-to-work or workers’ rights amendment in the constitution; delegates ultimately left both out.

Union membership over the past decade is higher in Illinois (14.6 percent) and in Chicagoland (13.6 percent) than it is nationally (10.8 percent), according to a recent study by the pro-union Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that nonunion public sector workers cannot be compelled to pay union dues because of the benefits they receive through collective bargaining. 

While the ruling has impacted dues-paying in public sector unions nationwide, membership has not been hugely impacted; in Illinois, that rate has only declined 2.2 percent since 2018.

Meanwhile, Gallup has found that 71 percent of Americans approve of unions—the highest since 1965. There were 58 successful union organizing drives last year, a 60 percent success rate—higher than any other in a decade. Illinois workers under 35 have seen the highest increase in unionization since 2018. 

Todd Maisch, the president and CEO of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, opposes the amendment. Maisch disapproves of the foreclosure of Illinois ever becoming a right-to-work state, and he worries that the amendment would expand workers’ right to strike.

Maisch also worries about “working conditions” being ill-defined. Over decades, “enterprising unions and their attorneys are going to try to expand the heck out of [working conditions],” he said. 

Lousin said that working conditions “have been interpreted pretty broadly in labor laws over the years,” and include things like pensions, health-care benefits, hours, and job duties. 

At the right-leaning Illinois Policy Institute, a libertarian think tank that has received funding from former governor Bruce Rauner and the Koch brothers, Director of Labor Policy Mailee Smith said the amendment “will drive up taxes and cement Illinois’s reputation as one of the worst places in the nation to do business.” 

Smith said “economic welfare” is a legally undefined term. She is also opposed to the state government being unable to consider right-to-work laws, but acknowledged Illinois becoming a right-to-work state is incredibly unlikely.

Lousin said she is unaware of the term “economic welfare” being included in any existing legislation. She said that people should be thinking about whether they want “something this broad” in the constitution, but is herself voting in favor of it, calling right-to-work laws “an anathema, a relic of the 1890s Gilded Age.” She dismissed concerns about taxes rising because of the amendment.

Illinois AFL-CIO President Tim Drea said “economic welfare” refers to minimum wage protections and unemployment insurance. He acknowledged that the courts could define it, pointing to the centuries-long judicial and legislative debates over what the U.S. Constitution means. He recalled the yearslong state budget impasse, largely because of Rauner’s demands for labor law reform, and said the disastrous standoff was “a very, very legitimate threat against labor rights.” 

“These rights that have been obtained through the years through the hard work and sweat of many, many people—we don’t want to just leave them to the whims of shifting political winds,” Drea said. 

The amendment takes codified labor rights “enacted over lax safety standards in factories, schools, and hospitals,” and puts them “in a lockbox and secures them for future generations,” Drea said. “You just never know what a politician will do to the rights that we’ve gained.”

Gyrion said the solidarity that comes with being in a union is unparalleled.

“You’re part of a team,” Gyrion said. “It’s people in your local, in your same union, looking out for you the way that people looked out for them. The expectation is we have to take care of ourselves. We have to make sure that everybody is taken care of and nobody’s being taken advantage of. And that’s not something you get everywhere, and it’s refreshing.”

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I met DJ Intel in 2010 at Bad Meaning Good, a monthly trashy movie night at the Burlington that he hosted with fellow DJ Jarrett Spiegel. In the years since, I’ve frequently run into Intel (real name Jason Deuchler) at hip-hop shows and horror movie screenings, and I’ve ended up at plenty of concerts and festivals where he performed. He seemed so ubiquitous that I sometimes wondered if I’d hallucinated him! Since March, there’s been another way to see Deuchler on the regular: he and Bric-a-Brac Records owners Jen Lemasters and Nick Mayor opened the Brewed, a horror-themed coffee shop in Avondale.

As told to Leor Galil

I guess I’ve always been a B-movie, Godzilla, Universal monsters fan since I was a kid, through my dad, who used to show those to me. My dad is also a music fan, but it’s weird, it’s more on the musical-theater side of things—I grew up listening to musicals and that kind of stuff. And then my brother got turntables when he was in junior high, and I gravitated from my interest in movies and music into DJing.

My brother got turntables, and I used to get home from school before him—it was one of those, like, “Hey, don’t touch my turntables. Stay out of my room.” I would go into his room and DJ until I heard the back door open at the house; I would quickly shut everything down and go back into my room and pretend I wasn’t in his room DJing. Eventually, I started buying my own records, and he was like, “Oh, you can use them, it’s fine.” Then I found a pair of turntables—which I still have to this day—at a pawn shop, and the rest is kind of history. 

A couple of my friends and I formed a crew called Chicago Tribe—we used to throw parties for 17-and-over kids, and the first one was in Forest Park at this place called the Playhouse, which is no longer there. 

We would have a date, we’d make a bunch of flyers, and then we’d bring our own sound equipment and DJ equipment. They’d unlock a door. We’d charge money at the door and throw a hip-hop party. We did that successfully for many, many years. That’s how I know a lot of people in the Chicago hip-hop scene.

Jesse de la Peña was still doing that kind of stuff. DJ PNS from the Molemen—the Molemen in general were throwing parties. Kanye and those guys from the south side, all the Nacrobats and all those dudes. I know them all from doing underground hip-hop parties. 

Abbey Pub was a big home for a lot of shows, over on the northwest side. Threw a lot of shows there. SubT was definitely a good spot. We did the original Lava Lounge on Damen and then also the second home of Lava Lounge on Milwaukee. We did Rodan for a long time. Just wherever we could find spots that would let us do it, we would do it.

Horror was always in the background. Fangoria magazine used to have a thing called Weekend of Horrors, so I was going to those conventions. Svengoolie has always been a part of my life since I was a kid. People always tend to think horror is a rock ’n’ roll, heavy-metal kind of scene, but there’s also the Gravediggaz, Flatlinerz, and some of that—I guess, for lack of a better term, “horrorcore rap.” I’ve always been a fan. Dr. Octagon, that sort of stuff.

It’s been about six months, and I enjoy every day I go in there. I hadn’t worked a person-to-person retail sort of job in a really long time, so I really enjoy having regular customers and talking to random strangers on a daily basis. I still love coffee, and I love making coffee drinks. Somehow it’s magically worked out.

It gets a little hectic sometimes. That 7 AM opening shift can be real difficult when you’ve DJed till three, but you make the best of it. I’m doing what I love, so you do what you gotta do.

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