Lord and masters

His name is Lord Gerald Butterscotch Wepley, and his quest to root out the Darkwater Phantom that’s been haunting Wepley Hall has united three Chicago-favorite playwrights with a pair of storefront directors and an all-star slew of fringe-scene actors and designers. How this came to be is a mystery we simply had to investigate.

Lord Butterscotch is the eponymous hero of Lord Butterscotch and the Curse of the Darkwater Phantom, a spoof of British humor by Rebecca Gilman, Brett Neveu and Lisa Dillman. The three playwrights (with a fourth, Mark Guarino) had worked together on several projects at the Hideout that Dillman describes as “this series of short, broad comedies in the back of a bar”; each would write a short play using the same character setup and they’d stage all four together. “We did The Clowny Plays, which were a man, a woman and a clown; then The Ghosty Plays, which is a man, a woman and a ghost; and on like that, until we ended in 2004 with The Bushy Plays,” Dillman says. “I think that election killed our comic sensibility for a while.”

Gilman, Neveu and Dillman soon found themselves hankering for another project. This time, however rather than write separate plays, the three decided to work collaboratively. “Brett had this character that he and a friend had created in college named Butterscotch, who was this sort of upper-crusty British guy” who became the center of the new project, Dillman says. “I think Rebecca started the first scene, and we’d do three to five pages. Once she’d created a scene she would send it along, and whoever it went to next would add three to five pages.”

“We did that until it was done,” Neveu says, “and I think it took a year. There were big gaps where it would be somebody’s turn, and a couple of months would go by until we’d say, Hey, we need to do that—whose turn is it? We had no intention of anybody ever seeing it.”

“To me, it was for fun,” Dillman says, though “I had a back-of-my-mind suspicion that it could possibly be produced.”

Enter the directors. When the playwrights brought Lord Butterscotch’s tale to an end, Neveu mentioned the project to Strawdog’s Noah Simon, who was appearing at the time in Neveu’s The Earl at A Red Orchid, where Neveu is an ensemble member. “I told him we had this thing, and then it ended up in his hands,” Neveu says.

Nick Minas was working on The Earl as well. “They kind of put Noah in charge of finding a production for it,” Minas recalls. “We realized we had kind of a similar vision, and one thing led to another.” Simon and Minas decided to codirect under the auspices of Minas’s company, Blindfaith Theatre, best known up to now for multiple versions of its Edward Gorey adaptation Gorey Stories.

The playwrights realized they had a lot of work to do before Butterscotch would be ready for public consumption. “It was very long and kind of repetitious,” Dillman says. Neveu recalls that the same jokes made multiple appearances, “and we didn’t know it because we never went back and read what we’d written.”

Minas and Simon stacked the deck with handpicked jokers from both the Blindfaith and Strawdog ensembles; many of the cast’s résumés are chock-full of comedies by the Hypocrites, the Factory and Defiant Theatre as well. The directors also pulled in designers from their own worlds: Butterscotch will feature live music and sound design by Misha Fiksel, along with work by storefront stalwarts Grant Sabin, Maggie Fullilove-Nugent, Sean Mallary and Aly Renee Greaves.

Minas attributes the eclecticism of the Butterscotch company to “the collaboration between Noah and I. We were able to put people together and kind of have the best of both [our] worlds, and now a lot of different people who haven’t necessarily had a chance to work together are getting a chance to work on something.”

Playwrights collaborating, companies sharing and informing one another’s work, one show growing out of another...for an upper-crusty British guy, Lord Butterscotch exhibits a lot of the best traits of Chicago theater.

Butterscotch lords it over the Storefront Theater at Gallery 37 starting Friday 30.