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The XYZ Festival promises to spread queer voices throughout the city.
To recoup a budget shortfall of $300,000, About Face Theatre postponed its spring production of Ann Marie Healy’s What Once We Felt (rescheduled for February ’10) to focus on an emergency fund-raising campaign. The lesson for artistic director Bonnie Metzgar: Creative starvation has its consequences. “We had to put off doing art we really wanted to make, so now we’re like junkies ready to explode,” Metzgar says. “It was like we didn’t get to eat sugar for four or five months; now we’re about to binge.” Devoted to enhancing the national dialogue on gender and sexual orientation, About Face is about to binge hard-core. With budget woes behind them and Boeing on board as a major sponsor, XYZ Festival, a first-time and hopefully annual smorgasbord of new works in various stages of development, kicks off Tuesday 29.
The XYZ Festival (the name refers to chromosomes) messes with the traditional notion of a theatrical season in which four or five plays run at five- or six-week intervals throughout the school year with a break for summer. “That’s not an imaginative way to think about performance or the way we all consume art in our lives,” Metzgar says; for her part, she wants “to be more adventurous about the way I think about a season.” XYZ’s shows happen simultaneously over eight weeks—no small logistical feat. “From a producing standpoint, it’s a pain in the neck, but there’s something really joyful about getting a lot of artists in close proximity. Yeah, it’s big and crazy, but theater people are crazy. We’re all abuzz here, and that’s the best feeling.”
The festival also manifests About Face’s new Out & About initiative, which seeks to engage audiences by negotiating discounts and freebies from local businesses all over the city, and in turn showing their allegiance with the queer community. “We’ve got to go out into the world and show that our supporters are everywhere,” says Metzgar, who staged The Homo Show, a queer vaudevillian extravaganza, at the Subterranean in Wicker Park in July instead of AFT’s regular home at the Center on Halsted. Similarly, XYZ will take place in neighborhoods like Uptown, Wrigleyville and Logan Square, among others, and will feature artist-driven walking tours of those ’hoods via downloadable podcasts and pdfs to bring audiences into the spaces where performers work and live.
XYZ’s works include the premiere of Flowers by Canadian playwright Adam Bock, a workshop production from Patricia Kane (Pulp) called Float, and another workshop production, an interactive wedding experience by performer-activist Holly Hughes and AFT artistic associate Megan Carney called Let Them Eat Cake. It also boasts the Lesbian Play Reading Series. “I love this question of, at what point does the audience enter the process,” says Metzgar, who will premiere her own work-in-progress, Cougar Blind, at the fest. “Sometimes we protect plays from getting seen too early, and I don’t really believe in that at all,” she says. “I have a play I just wrote this summer, the actors are the only ones who will have read it, and it’s just going to kind of poof, go out in the world, and suddenly it’s going to become theater in that moment. That’s really exciting.”
The XYZ Festival begins Tuesday 29. At press time, a venue was being finalized for the debut event. See aboutfacetheatre.com.
