Rent to hone

Schadenfreude, a veritable Chicago comedy Swiss Army knife, spins out content at such a furious pace that when its five members get together to write, nobody has time to, well, write. So, naturally, they hired an assistant. Now, when Sandy Marshall wants to do a monologue at the group’s next monthly Rent Party at Gallery Cabaret, Rebecca Rine-Stone takes notes. When Justin Kaufmann thinks of a great line for Schadenfreude’s shop-ready feature-length screenplay (he plays the lead, a fictitious longtime alderman), Rine-Stone punches it into her laptop. Or maybe Kate James has an idea for a fitting blog entry for her character Zoe Dunkel, a retainer-wearing tenth-grader. Rine-Stone is ready. Then there’s the book, or the latest online short film, or a sitcom-pilot script, or the website…Did you get all that, Rebecca?

“We’ll have an initial idea, then turn that into a line, then edit the line, then rewrite it. There’s usually a better version, a worse version, a version that’s totally offensive and completely unusable. We end up with a combination,” Marshall says. “When we get Rebecca [Rine-Stone] to stop typing and crack up a little bit, then we feel really good about ourselves.”

Schadenfreude’s transformation into a multimedia powerhouse has been gradual. The group first made its mark with a two-year run at the Heartland Studio Theater in Rogers Park. They performed a new sketch show every week until the group left for Scotland in 2000 to participate in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Their focus turned to bigger local shows, winning a Festival Highlight Award at the Chicago Improv Festival in 2001. In 2003, the group teamed with Chicago Public Radio to produce a self-titled radio program, and made 61 30-minute episodes from 2003 to 2005.

The pace is quickening: Both their screenplay and book are in early stages of development. Alderman, the screenplay, tells the story of Ed Bus’s 53rd Ward, where Gretchen Ross-Stevenson is campaigning against him in the first contested election in decades. Their book See You at the Finish Line: How to Get Rich…Or Stay That Way is more personal—a first-person faux corporate memoir from Dinerbanski & Ross CEO Ted Dinerbanski. To devote more time to these projects, their Rent Party on Friday 15 will be the last for a while. The group is going out in style: The $10 ticket includes a holiday feast of ham, turkey, really all sorts of meats. The bar’s sure to have plenty of booze on hand, too.

These comedic parties aren’t exactly sketch or stand-up; rather, they revolve around a series of monologues and conversations. While the group has produced a ton of sketches in its nine years, it has relatively few characters, all of whom inhabit an alternate Chicago universe. There’s the fictional 53rd Ward; the halls of omnipotent megacorporation Dinerbanski & Ross; the quirky grocery store Phudie Mart. The stories overlap: Ross-Stevenson is a relative of Skip Ross (Ted Dinerbanski’s bumbling sidekick), and Ed Bus occasionally stops by Phudie Mart.

When Schadenfreude comes up with a great idea for a story, it generally plays out in multiple media. There might be an update to character Todd Voorhies’s blog (all five cast members have blogs at www.schadenfreude.net; four of their characters have blogs as well), then a monologue from Todd at a Rent Party, and then, if it’s playing well, it could make it into the book. “One idea serves you differently in different media,” Marshall says. “If we know that Skip Ross has a bowl haircut and doesn’t like to wear pants, in the book we might have Ted chastising him, but in a film we could show him chasing a dog across a field where he’s only wearing his dinner jacket.”

The final Schadenfreude Rent Party, at least for a bit, is Friday 15.