Note from the Artistic Director

It’s Thanksgiving day 2020. Four short years ago we started a theatre company in a town full of theatre companies. Chicago is audacious, so why not we?

That fledgling summer began with a workshop production of Elliot Baker’s, The Silence That Follows. We opened to a July rain that literally blocked the entrance to the theatre. But we played on and here we are yet.

In the fall of last year we found a space of our own and set to the slow work of making it a permanent home. Rehearsal began March 6 for Matei Visniec’s Nina under Zeljko Djukic’s direction. Within days things had changed and we elected to continue our pursuit of the piece. The result is an excerpted version of the work recorded remotely with a brilliant cast of Maria Stephens, Brian Shaw, Dano Duran and the Music/Design of Sam Clapp.

Our story is more or less the story of every theatre company minus the details. We’ve had nine months to consider what theatre might be when it finds it’s way forward. The good that comes of it all is already underway.

I’m very thankful for that.

Be safe, be healthy.

Kirk

Writing in snow with an icicle

Matei Visniec’s play Nina, or the Fragility of the Stuffed Seagulls takes place during the catastrophe that Chekhov always anticipated.

It is a harsh winter, 1917. Theaters are shut down. The books are not published. The tzar is considering the abdication. The Bolshevik Revolution is in the full swing. There is no food, no heating.

Nina, Konstantin and Trigorin are at the Treplev’s old country house, snowed in and completely cut off from the rest of the world. They quickly run out of ink, food, vodka and firewood. What they have plenty of is time. At one point, Nina, inspired and desperate to be on stage and act again, asks Treplev to write a monologue for her. "Write me something, Kostya," says Nina.

"Write me something using an icicle."

When we started rehearsing in March 2020, the actors and I approached these circumstances as a fictional situation, where the two writers and an actress, unable to work, are inventing ways to survive a catastrophic and fast shifting times. After a couple of rehearsals, we found ourselves in a strikingly similar situation. And soon, it became clear that there would be no show in 2020.

Throughout this intense year, I keep returning to Nina. I kept thinking about "writing in snow with an icicle". The result is "The Nina Album", a selection of short fragments from the Visniec's play, a collage of ideas and feelings that this unfinished project provoked.

- Željko Đukić