Getting into Organic produce
A young storefront company recalls an old one.
Steppenwolf gets the well-deserved glory as the great success story of the 1970s Off Loop–theater movement—the company and its ensemble members are now serving as Chicago theater’s ambassadors to Broadway, after all, having racked up seven nominations for this Sunday’s Tony Awards.
But the kids in the suburban basement weren’t the only ones redefining Chicago’s theater scene in the ’70s. Stuart Gordon’s Organic Theater Company was one of the more reliably eclectic producers, applying its decidedly DIY ethic to everything from the trippy sci-fi–and–macramé Warp trilogy to a tiny little world premiere called Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
The Organic in its heyday was an incubator of splashy comic-book theater, where the answer to “Why?” was pretty much “Why not?” One of the early ensemble-created shows was William Norris and John Ostrander’s 1974 entry, Bloody Bess—a swashbuckling, stunt-filled play about an English noblewoman’s transformation into a vengeful pirate captain. The homegrown bit of Chicago theater history gets a revival this week thanks to BackStage Theatre Company, and the Organic callback seems appropriate. Over its eight-year history, BackStage has proven itself (wait for it) one of the storefront scene’s more reliably eclectic producers, with a decidedly DIY ethic.
We’re not suggesting that BackStage is the new Organic, exactly; the companies’ aesthetics and missions are quite different. But as a standard-bearer for quality and innovation on a budget, BackStage evokes Organic’s scrappy spirit.
That scrappiness is evidenced by the fact the company even made it past its first year. It was founded in 2000 by Amy Monday and Janette Benton, both late of the now-defunct Boxer Rebellion Theater; Benton departed before the end of the debut season. Undaunted, Monday called on another Boxer Rebellion friend, actor Melissa Young, to pick up the reins as artistic director, in a selection process Monday describes as “Hey, would you do me a favor?”
With Young as artistic director and Monday as managing director, BackStage put together its initial ensemble and worked on emphasizing the importance of all theatrical disciplines, with ensemble members pulling double and triple duty on- and offstage. Even their board chair did everything from production management to lighting design.
The content on stage at this point perhaps reflected the scattered attention of artists doing so many jobs; the material ranged from gay comedy to Shakespeare to the ensemble-generated cabaret Everything’s Sexy. But the company was gaining a following and, with it, an increased workload. When Young stepped down in 2003 to pursue grad school, BackStage hired Brandon Bruce as artistic director.
Under Bruce’s tenure, the itinerant company strengthened its reputation for what he liked to call “doing big things in small spaces,” with sharp ensemble work in pieces like Denise Druczweski’s Inferno and The Skin of Our Teeth. After a couple of years, though, Bruce too was ready to step down and go the MFA route. But he had a replacement in mind.
At the 2006 non-Equity Jeffs, where Jason Kae was picking up the directing award for Infamous Commonwealth’s Kentucky Cycle (which he and Genevieve Thompson codirected), Bruce floated the idea. “He said, ‘I’m leaving the company; can I submit your name to be artistic director?’ ” Kae recalls. The 32-year-old Elk Grove Village native, an alum of downstate Millikin University, had a slew of freelance directing gigs under his belt but no administrative experience and was interested in the prospect of an artistic home. A résumé, three letters of rec and four interviews later, he had the job. (Monday wryly notes the process has gotten slightly more formal.)
“When I came on board, I wanted to focus up our mission statement,” Kae says. “Being where I was in my life”—he became a new daddy last fall—“I thought, nobody’s really exploring family. Not ‘family theater,’ but the idea of family in society, whether that’s mom and dad or the work family or what have you.” The ensemble members, many of whom have kids of their own, went for it.
Bess closes Kae’s first season, following stellar revivals of Waiting for Lefty and How I Learned to Drive, each certainly a “family play” in its way. The BackStage family, for its part, has already—several times over—crossed the management-change hurdle that proved too much for Organic, which never really recovered from Gordon’s departure in the mid ’80s.
“Having worked for a lot of companies, I saw that a lot of times the company hinges on the artistic director,” Kae says, “and when that artistic director goes away or has a breakdown or decides to pursue other things, the company falls apart.” For BackStage, things just keep falling together.
Bess raids the Storefront Theater Friday 13.
