Dark side of the Moon

The opening is three feet by eight and a half inches, and yet Lindsay Whiting, a petite, blond actress with joints like the hinges on a swinging door, has somehow pushed herself through it, head and all. She's making her entrance in Redmoon Theater's The Cabinet, a new puppet-powered adaptation of the classic, silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Arranging herself inside the titular furnishing, she looks almost as pliable as a cloth puppet. Appropriately so, given the company she's keeping.

"Talent and size," Redmoon director Frank Maugeri says when asked how he cast actors for the show. "I was looking for people with stamina who could work well with others in a creative dialogue. But, basically, you have to be able to fit through the hole."

Fitting through the hole is Redmoon's specialty. The Cabinet, which begins previews Thursday 3 at The Viaduct Theater, finds the inventively off-center, puppet-centric theater group continuing its enviable balancing act of maintaining its offbeat creative vision and grassroots spirit despite the influx of tons of money, mayoral approval and growing mainstream success.

Caligari, the 1919 German film credited with mainstreaming expressionism and opening the door for iconic sci-fi/horror nightmares like Nosferatu and Metropolis, is the story of a murderous director of a mental asylum and his sleepwalking slave Cesare. In Redmoon's adaptation, written by Mickle Maher, the subjugated Cesare becomes the central character.

As realized by scenic designer Maggie Goddard, the story takes place in a bizarre, jagged-edged mental asylum that invokes the skewed, expressionistic sets of the original film. The Redmoon set is a massive ten-by-14-foot cupboard with multiple doors, nooks and shelves in which the cast manipulates a host of hand puppets, stick puppets and shadow puppets, all rendered in the chalky blacks and whites reminiscent of silent cinema. Behind the cabinet, an agile troupe of actors hangs from scaffolding, pulling the strings and manipulating the rods. Dressed completely in black and armed with grotesque masks and marionettes, they look like an all-goth production of the Von Trapp children performing "The Lonely Goatherd."

Billed as "a spectacle in miniature," The Cabinet is both small and low-maintenance compared to the whimsical and ambitious outdoor public spectacles that put Redmoon on the map. Over its 15-year history, these grandiose public performances, like last summer's SINK. SANK. SUNK... at Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown, have served the troupe's primary mission: bringing theater to people who otherwise might never experience it. Redmoon spectacles cut across generational, cultural and ethnic boundaries–in Chinatown, actors delivered their lines in a universally indecipherable gibberish.

In nuts-and-bolts terms, the recipe for a typical Redmoon spectacle consists of an array of puppets (hand puppets, shadow puppets, life-size marionettes); larger-than-life masks; discordant music played by trickster musicians (usually on outsize musical instruments that look like Dr. Seuss creations and sound like bodily functions); Lewis Carroll-inspired costumes; stilt-walkers and acrobats; and purposefully low-tech, hand-cranked Rube Goldberg contraptions. It's a hybrid of strange, dark beauty and ticklish dalliances that make it feel as if P.T. Barnum is hocking Salvador Dali. The Cabinet incorporates many of these elements, shoehorning them into The Viaduct, a former warehouse that has played host to many of Chicago's most prominent storefront companies. To accomplish this, a veritable army is needed.

In the very beginning, it was volunteers who made it happen. "Nobody was getting paid," Redmoon artistic director Jim Lasko says of his earliest days with the company. "We would all come together after waiting tables. Nobody was on staff."

There are now 16 full-time staff members, plus countless designers and technicians employed on an as-needed basis in Redmoon's "build shop," scores of performers wrangled for their myriad productions and, still to this day, lots and lots of volunteers.

They all converge at "Redmoon Central," the company's West Town HQ that the proudly peripatetic company moved into two years ago. For a nonprofit theater company, the digs are pretty swanky: 18,000 square feet of converted warehouse space that accommodates both the administrative staff and the cavernous build shop, where all the props and sets are constructed. It's an in-house dream factory on par with 1930s-era movie studios in its industrial production of fantastical entertainments. Hand props, puppets and set pieces move along an assembly line as they're sculpted, painted and dressed by designers. Most nonprofit artists would kill for the facilities.

Redmoon owes much of its success to its populist approach—something of which Lasko is immensely proud. He feels that conventional theater is often "elitist in its ticket prices, and it's elitist in its choices."

"You can see at most theater that a good half of the audience is there out of a sense of obligation," Lasko says. At most theater, the audience is expected to watch; at Redmoon shows, it's invited to play.

"My first memory of [Redmoon] is that they invited the audience onstage after the show to inspect the [puppets and props]," says Richard Christiansen, the former chief theater critic for the Chicago Tribune. Christiansen, whose just-published book A Theater of Our Own chronicles the history of Chicago theater, recalls that the visually striking imagery of Redmoon's ramshackle productions was what first caught his eye.

"They were splendid," he says. "I remember being tremendously struck by the variety of the puppets."

From the very beginning, puppets were Redmoon's stock-in-trade. In 1989, long before he could have envisioned what the company would become, Blair Thomas, an avant-garde puppeteer, was invited by Lookingglass Theatre Company to perform a one-night-only, after-hours show. You Hold My Heart Between Your Teeth chronicled a breakup and featured a life-size female puppet with a hole where her heart should have been.

After the show the parents of one of the cast members made an offer to Thomas and his collaborator, choreographer Laurie Macklin.

"They said, 'Come to Logan Square. There's no community-based theater here, and we need one,'" Thomas remembers. And they offered to be on the board—as soon as the inchoate company got around to establishing one. Thomas and Macklin, who had been looking to put down stakes in a neighborhood, took them up on their offer.

Lasko joined Redmoon in 1991 at age 26. Later, he would join Thomas as co-artistic director.

The first half decade of the company was hugely formative. In 1992, Redmoon staged its first Winter Pageant, a Chicago holiday tradition that ranks alongside the Goodman's A Christmas Carol and the Marshall Field's window dressings.

By the summer of 1993, Lasko, Thomas and other company members were staging the "Blitzkrieg Commandos," performing impromptu puppet shows at a different Chicago park every Saturday.

"We'd show up in three vans and stage puppet shows for however many kids the city could round up," Thomas says. "We were working hard to bring it directly to people. The city supported us because there was a lot of goodwill behind what we were doing." That year, their altruistic efforts led to their first grant. One year after that, they'd earned the coveted backing of The MacArthur Foundation.

Like many of Redmoon's major players, Maugeri first got involved with the company as a volunteer. Attending his first Redmoon show in 1995, he discovered a hybrid of artistic expression and social activism he'd always craved. Maugeri held degrees in sculpture and animation, but at the time he was working as a counselor in a home for the mentally ill. He joined the staff in 2000, eventually becoming the troupe's associate artistic director, a title he shares with Kristin Randall Burrello, another volunteer who showed up the same year as Maugeri and became an indispensable member of the team. These days Maugeri directs about half the shows, while Burrello has served as production manager, event planner and managing director. No one, including Lasko, has seen the organization from more angles than she has.

In 1995, Redmoon mounted its first production in a legit space, Moby Dick at Pegasus Players on the Truman College campus.

According to Thomas, they set up shop at Pegasus because, "No one considered us a real theater. We decided that to get taken seriously, we had to do a play in a real theater and charge people money."

It worked. Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey saw the performance and offered them a slot at the famed company's Halsted Street theater. The following year, Redmoon's adaptation of Frankenstein opened in Steppenwolf's upstairs studio.

"We budgeted $40,000. We spent $100,000. And we didn't even know it until we opened," Thomas says. Had the show been poorly received, Redmoon would have been finished.

It was a smash. After finishing in the black by nearly $100,000, Redmoon was able to take both the box office receipts and the momentum of the Frankenstein experience and pour them into its subsequent spectacles, which have grown exponentially larger and more lavish.

Thomas departed Redmoon amicably in 1998 to pursue other pro-jects, leaving Lasko at the helm.

Today, Redmoon has an annual operating budget of $1.5 million, 70 percent of which comes from grants and donations. They see themselves not just as artists but as urban-renewal missionaries, and their many supporters agree.

Despite having performed for bigwigs at Chicago's most prestigious venues and events (including Millennium Park's opening ceremonies), Redmoon isn't too big to cram itself into The Viaduct, a dusty storefront theater not unlike some of the spaces in which it first performed.

With The Cabinet, Redmoon continues to throw curves, continues to surprise. Even with its thriving finances and generous community support, the company still makes props and sets out of "found" objects, and still depends on volunteer spirit.

As Maugeri says, "Even if we had all the resources we needed, we'd still be resourceful."