Deadpan's labyrinth

Emily Schwartz and Carolyn Klein are two of the loveliest young women I’ve met in Chicago theater—vibrant, articulate about their craft and classy regarding the messy enterprise of shoestring show biz. This wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except that based on the bloody, pitch-black plays their company Strange Tree Group produces, I was expecting to meet eyeliner-caked nihilists resembling Morticia Adams or, at the very least, Stevie Nicks. Instead, coming from their respective office jobs, Schwartz and Klein, both pert, professional, could pass for members of an Oprah-worshipping book club.

“Everybody asks me if my childhood was terrible,” playwright Schwartz says with an amusingly guilty smile. “But it really, really wasn’t.”

The small-town Indiana daughter of a cartoonist father and librarian mother, 28-year-old Schwartz writes deadpan comedies that can be quantified by their body counts just as easily as they can be qualified by their goth, bone-dry humor and sinister creepiness. In last summer’s Mr. Spacky…The Man Who Was Continuously Followed by Wolves, a wayward damsel is lured to a dust-bowl farmstead where young women are cannibalized (it was a musical comedy). In 2006’s Funeral Wedding, about the mysterious slayings of two young women at the hands of a sexual predator, much of the humor comes from the ghosts of the two murder-rape victims. And in last fall’s Crucible: The Musible!, a collaboration with the trapeze artists of Aloft Aerial Dance, Arthur Miller’s Salem witch hunts are set to ’70s stoner rock; the trial of Ron Schlacter (rhymes with John Proctor) is interrupted by the cotton-ball-wigged judge pounding his gavel to Santana’s “Evil Ways.”

Chock-full of cheeky Gen-Y references and warmly jaded Wonkette humor but gleefully obedient to the rules of populist Grand Guignol, Schwartz’s plays forge their own delightful (if admittedly minor) genre. Think of them as Jenny Deadfuls.

The unique feminist empowerment of Strange Tree Group comes in part from Schwartz’s bifurcated boogeyman-Pollyanna influences. “At one point [during childhood], the local librarian told me I couldn’t take out any more ghost stories because the other kids need to read them,” Schwartz says. (Schwartz’s college job would be in a dusty special-collections branch of her university library, which contained locks of Edgar Allan Poe’s hair.) But for all the ghastly literature the playwright consumed as a child—reviews of her work invariably draw comparisons to the pen-and-ink macabre of Edward Gorey—Schwartz was reading in equal measure Little books, as it were: Little House on the Prairie, Little Women and The Littles.

Her sunny-shady voice has quickly emerged as unmistakable, regularly sticking out in Collaboraction’s short-play fest Sketchbook and attracting like-minded collaborators—self-identified as “Trees”—to her company. “These are all simply people who are drawn to Emily’s work,” director Klein says of her fellow company members. Having recently gone nonprofit, and Jeff-eligible for the first time with the debut of The Mysterious Elephant, And the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins* (*Who Kill Him), Strange Tree so far has only produced Schwartz’s work (something de facto artistic director Schwartz says she hopes will change). For a woman who didn’t even really know she was a playwright until the end of college—where she met Klein, now 33, who was pursuing an acting master’s—that’s pretty significant.

“My only role in four years was carrying a tray and wearing a bustier,” Schwartz recalls of her undergraduate acting pursuit at Indiana University Bloomington. Frustrated by her inability to get cast in a 600-person theater department, Schwartz spent an hour scribbling a five-page play that would become her first fully produced Chicago work, The Dastardly Ficus. That 2004 production launched Strange Tree.

Monty Python, Mel Brooks and the films of Christopher Guest are all mentioned as major comedic inspirations by Schwartz and Klein, the director of both Mr. Spacky and Schwartz’s upcoming The Mysterious Elephant. With the exception of Carol Burnett—whom Klein admires largely because of the hallmark Burnett Show scenes with laughing actors (“Any moment where actors are about to break over something funny is magical”)—the two women cite male humor heroes.

The absurdist “dude” humor, though, is leavened by the Trees’ DIY aesthetic (many of the design elements are pulled from company members’ apartments), which gives the shows a homespun, even domestic appeal. “We don’t have a lace cravat?” Schwartz posits hypothetically. “I have these dish towels we can cut up.”

Cutting up—both helpless victims and enthusiastic audiences—is fast becoming Strange Tree’s specialty.

The Mysterious Elephant charges the Chopin on Thursday 19.