Kurt Chiang and Melinda Jean Myers (known to friends as Mindy) have wanted to collaborate for years. But it took a pandemic for the former Neo-Futurist artistic director and the Lucky Plush ensemble member to finally develop a full-length piece together.
Unfinished Business, the fruit of that longed-for collaboration (much of it conducted remotely, and not just due to the pandemic; Myers now lives in Iowa City, where she teaches dance at the University of Iowa), gets three public performances this weekend at Links Hall. (There is also a workshop, “Finishing the Business,” conducted by Myers and Chiang on Saturday.) Supported in part by Lucky Plush’s Embodied Research microgrant program, the piece looks at the career trajectories of its creators “while attempting to connect with the audience in ways that are honest and entirely present.”
Unfinished BusinessThu-Sat 10/20-10/22, 7 PM, Links Hall, 3111 N. Western, luckyplush.com, $30 ($15 industry), livestream (Sat only) $20, “Finishing the Business” workshop Sat 11 AM-2:30 PM, $70 (includes one free in-person or livestream ticket).
That last part should sound familiar to longtime fans of both the Neo-Futurists and Lucky Plush. The former has been serving up short plays since 1988 in their late-night show (originally Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, until a dispute with founder and original artistic director Greg Allen led to reinvention as The Infinite Wrench). Those plays, as well as many of the primetime full-length shows presented by the Neos, have been rooted in the idea that the performers aren’t pretending to be anyone other than who they are, and the writing has always been “grounded in their personal experiences and perspectives.”
Lucky Plush, founded by artistic director Julia Rhoads in 2000, is notable for work that blends theater and dance with a focus on what they describe as “provoking and supporting an immediacy of presence—a palpable live-ness—shared by performers in real time with audiences.”
Chiang and Myers had been aware of (and admirers of) each other’s work for years. Myers, who lived in Chicago from 2012-2016, says, “I got to know Kurt’s work by going to see him at the Neo-Futurists, seeing him perform and then also seeing him direct things. And then I invited him to a one-woman show I did with High Concept Laboratories. I think that’s one of the first times that it was like, ‘Oh, we both kind of do this.’ Then I had invited him to do something with me, but then I became pregnant. And so that process was interrupted, and, you know, turned into nothing. And then Kurt invited me to be in The Arrow, which was a show he was directing.” (That storytelling show, created by Chiang and Lily Mooney, “subjects written essays to spontaneous interruptions, complications, absurdity and horseplay.”)
Rhoads too has long been a fan of the Neo-Futurists. She noted in a 2021 interview with Reader contributor Irene Hsiao that part of the idea behind Lucky Plush’s digital festival, The Map of Now, was inspired by the Neos’ use of the Gather.Town platform for a virtual benefit. Rhoads was also featured in the Neo-Futurists’ 2017 publication, The Neo-Futurists: Body.
What was the personal career trajectory guiding Chiang and Myers’s different paths? In a rehearsal video on the Lucky Plush site, Chiang talks about thinking that, after landing in Chicago post-college, he would go around town with “a suitcase full of headshots, and I would give those headshots out to everyone who casts people,” with the aim of then becoming wildly successful in theater and film.
In the same video, Myers recalls interviewing to be a server at a fine-dining restaurant (food-service jobs and performing artists being long joined at the hip), and becoming flummoxed by the interviewer asking her, “How many balloons do you think can fit in this room?” “Needless to say, I didn’t get the job,” she notes.
Chiang tells me, “We wanted [the piece] to center around ‘How did we get into this? How did I get into theater? How did I start acting? How did Mindy get into dance? How did she start dancing?’ So we thought, ‘Let’s give voice to that in the piece and then build choreography or like movement and staging around that idea and try to pace it, piece it all together.’ So it feels like it’s autobiographical in that way.” He adds, “It also matched up with the times of it being instigated by this global plague. ‘What is it that we’re doing? How do we get here? What are we gonna do next?’ It’s not a pandemic show. We don’t address that socially or politically. But it definitely is sprung from that sort of existential crisis.”
Myers notes that she had called upon Chiang for feedback after she moved to Iowa City for a one-woman show she was working on. “I just really needed some support dramaturgically. And so I was sending Kurt all these videos and just being like, ‘Help, help me. Please.’ And so that kind of reignited this relationship. I just wanted to know more about that, but more in a way that we were working side by side, even though we’re far apart. It’s literally not side by side. We have really different lives and really different day-to-days and whatnot. But I think the nugget of it was that when I called Kurt, I had a lot of nervous energy about asking, ‘Can you imagine making a show with me?’ And he said that we have unfinished business.”
The process of working together without being in physical proximity presented challenges, of course. Says Myers, “The hours we’ve spent in person are far less than the times we’ve spent on Zoom. And we did a voice memo practice, so we were leaving just copious amounts of little memos over the last year and a half. Talking about the process and then also fulfilling it with content.” Myers adds, “I don’t know about Kurt, but I’ve never worked like that before. I’m typically an in-studio person and doing it all live and in real time.”
Rhoads notes that becoming more comfortable with this mode of collaboration has been a natural evolution for Lucky Plush, which created the Virtual Dance Lab in response to the pandemic. The Embodied Research program itself was also born out of the COVID-19 shutdown and continuing concerns about working together in person as subsequent variants emerged. It’s not just about providing some financial support for artists in unprecedented times, but also seeding the ground for different approaches to creating work.
“We were doing tours that were postponed from the pandemic, so we had those on the schedule. But in terms of going back in a studio, a lot of our ensemble members have babies, so there is concern about that [in the pandemic],” says Rhoads. “Lucky Plush has always had long-term ensemble members. They move on, different things happen, sometimes they come back. So much about the ensemble and so much about what the artists bring that’s always been part of the ethos of our work is that it’s collaborative. We draw from each other, we learn from each other. So rather than kind of forcing a new process that I wasn’t ready to undertake in a studio . . . I was like, ‘You know, why not put money toward their own independent research with really no expectation that it would evolve into a show?’ So there’s all kinds of research projects that we’ve supported. One of our ensemble members [Meghann Wilkinson], who has had scoliosis for many years, started working with pilates practitioners and somatic practitioners on how to really shift thinking about working with the body in different ways.”
What both Chiang and Myers hope audiences for Unfinished Business will take away is an appreciation for their own journeys, inside or outside of the arts, where the “busyness” of life so often gets in the way of what we think we should be doing, or our self-image of what success means. As numerous essays about the Great Resignation have made clear, a lot of people are reexamining their relationship with work right now.
“I think that what I bring forward in the show the most is this very real and lived experience that I have, which I think a lot of folks have, of reaching toward something to be attained or seeing it from like the beginning space and then taking your time to do the things you need to do to get there,” says Myers. “My sort of take is just proclaiming that anytime I’ve gotten there, it isn’t what I think it’s gonna be. There’s like this really big tension of ‘I really want that thing. I really wanna be in a dance company. I really wanna be touring the world internationally.’ And it doesn’t end up that way . . . it’s not an arrival point per se. There’s always the next thing. And I’ve had a lot of conversations about this—that morning when the show’s done, we did it, people came and then there’s that feeling afterward of like, ‘It’s over.’ And it’s not satiated, it’s still hungry. There’s still an itch to scratch. So for me, I think at this point in my life, I think that I’m really reckoning with many interests.”
Braden Abraham Brounwen Houck Photography
Writers names new artistic director
Fifteen months after founding artistic director Michael Halberstam’s resignation in the wake of sexual harassment allegations, Writers Theatre in Glencoe has finally named a permanent successor. Braden Abraham comes to the 30-year-old company from Seattle, where he’s been associated with Seattle Rep for 20 years (the past eight as artistic director). During his tenure, Seattle Rep greatly expanded its commitment to new work through three different programs that, collectively, will support the development of 20 new pieces over the next decade. He will assume the reins at Writers in February. Kate Lipuma continues in her role as executive director. Bobby Kennedy, the director of new work and dramaturgy for the company, had been serving as interim artistic director and will continue with Writers in a role still to be determined.
And the Jeff Awards go to . . .
Monday night at Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace, the Joseph Jefferson (Jeff) Awards for Equity theater were handed out live for the first time since the pandemic began, in a ceremony hosted by Chicago powerhouse E. Faye Butler. The biggest winners were Aurora’s Paramount Theatre, which bagged six awards for its production of Kinky Boots (the show was one of the first to open last fall, and the theater took some heat for its masking and proof-of-vax policies) and the Goodman, which took five Jeffs for the Broadway-bound Good Night, Oscarand one for their revival of Gem of the Ocean.
The latter’s director, Chuck Smith, received a lifetime achievement award. The former show has been the source of controversy in recent weeks. Playwright David Adjmi went public with his account of an abortive attempt to work with star Sean Hayes on an Oscar Levant play in 2012. Doug Wright ended up writing Good Night, Oscar (and shared the Jeff Award for new work with Tyla Abercrumbie’s Relentlessat TimeLine Theatre). According to Adjmi, producer Beth Williams, who originally optioned Adjmi’s Levant play, told his agent in 2015 that they wouldn’t be moving forward with his script and that he would be sued if he didn’t “scrub all mention” of that script from the Internet. The Broadway production begins performances on April 7, 2023.
Several years ago, the Equity Jeff Awards (there is a separate awards program for non-Equity companies) divided productions into “large” and “midsize” categories to help level the playing field, though the acting awards put everyone head-to-head, regardless of gender identification or production size. So Cassidy Slaughter-Mason shared the award for principal performance in a play (for her stellar turn in Raven’s The Luckiest) with Hayes.
This year the Jeffs also added categories for shorter runs (nine to 17 performances), in recognition of the fact that several companies weren’t doing the usual longer runs coming out of the shutdown. Winners in those categories included About Face Theatre’s The Magnolia Ballet, which won in the categories for best production and best performer for Terry Guest (who also wrote the play); Congo Square Theatre’s ensemble for last spring’s production of What to Send Up When It Goes Down (which just finished an encore run at Lookingglass); and Natalie Y. Moore for her script of The Billboard, presented by 16th Street Theater. The entire list of winners is online at jeffawards.org.
