Bookends

Perhaps the strangest thing to be said about Goat Island Performance Group's new book is that it can teach you how to fix a toilet.

It's an accidental bonus to be sure, and not something you'd expect to find in an avant-garde theater group's reading companion. Yet there it is in company member Lin Hixson's chapter about the exercises she put the rest of the group through as they prepared their new show, When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy. This lesson in bathroom repair illustrates how Goat Island members will get their ideas from nearly anywhere.

The book, Frakcija (self-published, $10), also works as an instruction manual on how to put on a Goat Island show: Read a lot of mid-20th-century German poetry, think a lot about math, and then put it all together in a carefully crafted stage show that incorporates dance, spoken word and theater. The group will read from the book Saturday 26 as part of the PAC/edge Festival before returning the next week to perform the piece. After the show, there are plans to compile a part II to Frakcija, discussing the show.

Frakcija is such an eclectic mix of writing that to call it a book is a bit like calling a homemade mix-tape an album. It's a loose compilation of booklets containing interviews, thoughts on the rehearsal and development process and reproduced notebook pages, all beautifully packaged in stark pinks and blacks. Think of it as DVD extras for Chicago's fringe pioneers.

Thanks to a little cross-pollination, Goat Island shares a family tree with the Neo-Futurists. Fans of the Neo-Futurists' signature show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind are partially attracted to the show because of its ever-changing nature. The cast does its best to run through 30 plays in 60 minutes, and thanks to a dice roll at the end of the show, as many as 12 plays can change from week to week.

Such shape-shifting has given the Neo-Futurists enough material to publish a third book, following the 2002 release of Neo-Solo:131 Neo-Futurist Solo Plays. With 200 More Neo-Futurist Plays (Hope and Nonthings, $16), the group drops the solo act and reprints ensemble plays from 1993 to 2002. It's easy to forget during the show—while watching the ensemble dash around the stage—just how well-crafted the plays really are. It's no insult to the company's acting chops to say its members are writers first, actors second.

Thankfully, none of the Neo-Futurists' humor or ingenuity is lost on the page. Take, for example, Ayun Halliday's Play to Terrify You. It's five people on stage, describing various nightmarish scenarios: a man under your bed, a killer with a bloody hook, and a clown who comes through drains and toilets to kill you. It's a funny and quirky run-through of all the typical summer-camp ghost stories. Yet somehow, because it's a Neo-Futurist play, the group is able to make it personal to adults. The last actor tells the audience, "This play will terrify you later tonight when you're in bed alone and if you don't go to bed alone, don't be so smug. The toilet man will get you later."—Jonathan Messinger

Goat Island reads from Frakcija Sunday 26 at 6pm at the Athenaeum Theatre. The Neo-Futurists perform TMLMBGB every weekend.