Heart and solo

"Yesterday’s truth is today’s bullshit,” actor and writer Lusia Strus says in her famously throaty, noir-perfect voice. She’s referring to her monologue It Ain’t No Fairy Tale, which she first performed in the Steppenwolf Garage in 2002. A swooningly romantic preamble to her then-upcoming wedding, the piece has since received a postnuptial update in which Strus reflects ironically on her special day after the fact. Of course, given her constantly shifting emotional tide, there’s no way of knowing how long the new version will last, either. As the former Neo-Futurist will tell you: “And today’s truth is tomorrow’s bullshit.”

Such potty-mouthed, anything-goes, fortune-cookie philosophy is par for the course at Strus’s old stomping grounds, the Neo-Futurarium, where the playlets in the long-running, late-night Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind never last more than two minutes. And although the deliciously imposing actor makes a steady L.A. living in television and film (she’s back in town to perform in Henry IV at Chicago Shakespeare), she’ll briefly reunite with the landmark fringe-theater venue this week when she appears in Neo Solo, the festival of monologuists that concludes the Neo-Futurists’ prime-time season.

Stacked with current and emeritus company members, as well as some expert solo performers hailing from elsewhere in the fringe community, Neo Solo offers an eight-week lineup of the genre that remains a constant crapshoot, no matter how talented the performers.

“There’s always a question of how well solo work sells,” says Sharon Greene, the Neo-Futurists’ artistic director and Neo Solo’s curator. It helps, of course, when your artists come with a cult fan base, which many of the festival’s performers do.

After glowing reviews and a sold-out run at last fall’s Rhino Festival, Ian Belknap will reprise his staggering monologue Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart (A Comedy with a Body Count). Belknap’s bleak (and frequently, if inappropriately, hilarious) account of his grandfather’s unsolved murder and his hippie father’s suicide comes with built-in buzz. Although he’s not a Neo-Futurist, Belknap’s calm, sparse delivery style—he’s seated at a table with a glass of water and a manuscript—and use of his own life as dramatic material are exactly what Greene and the Neos were looking for.

“We wanted people who shared the company’s aesthetic,” Greene says. “We believe that sharing your own stories with very little space between you and the audience has undeniable power.”

Also on the bill is non-Neo Megan Stielstra. A noted fiction writer whose unique, dynamic readings often include elements of live music (distancing her from the pack of her hushed, floor-gazing peers on the lit-reading circuit), Stielstra will incorporate the live rock music of songwriter Julie Korman. Her piece I’m Fine and I’m Happy, loosely based on her experience with an ex-boyfriend, chronicles the life of a fiction writer who discovers the guy she’s seeing is dating other people, including a rock musician.

“When I was first asked to be a part of a performance series,” says Stielstra, a Columbia College fiction professor, “I thought, No, that would make me a performance artist, which gives me heart failure.” But as a central part of Serendipity Theatre’s 2nd Story reading series, she has become more than comfortable with the theatrical nature of performance prose. In fact, her specific brand of performance—pairing quirky Sedaris-style musings with unexpected theatrical trimmings like on-site musicians (she once used an entire New Orleans brass band)—is a text-based variation on the “story theater” style used by many Chicago theater artists.

“I never think of it as performance,” Stielstra says. “I just have ambitions to tell good stories.”

For Strus, Neo Solo is a chance to clarify her original stance on the joys of marriage.

“I see it as a radical, unnatural act,” Strus says. “Now that I’ve done it, I still believe in the covenant and sacrament of it, but I see it as a radical, unnatural act.”

Neo Solo hogs the spotlight Thursday 13.