Heigh-ho, Silver

“I should be honest: It was kind of a drunken idea.”

American Theater Company (ATC) artistic director PJ Paparelli is describing the Silver Project, the ambitious, unwieldy event he and ATC’s staffers cooked up to celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary this year. “We were sitting around talking, and this idea began to take shape that we were really excited about,” he continues. “Then when we sobered up, we were like, this is pretty crazy.”

The crazy idea was to commission a number of writers to pen short plays that would look at the American experience between 1985, when ATC was founded, and the present. “We thought about full-length plays, but how would we do that?” Paparelli says. “The short play seemed like a good way for playwrights to participate and not kill themselves in having to write a huge, expansive play about something.”

Paparelli and his staff decided to ask writers to peg each play to a certain year; the theater requested three choices from each author, with ATC making the final assignment, since Paparelli says they figured “everybody’s going to pick 9/11.”

“I didn’t think a lot of the playwrights we were after would say yes, just because they were busy, so I asked a lot more than we needed,” says the director, who arrived at ATC from Juneau’s Perseverance Theatre in 2007. The response from writers was overwhelming: The final count went from the anniversary-themed 25 to 35. Headliners include Neil LaBute, David Henry Hwang, Regina Taylor and Craig Lucas. “We wanted some names,” Paparelli says, “to get their perspective and engage them in Chicago, creating here in Chicago.”

The mix also includes a good number of younger Chicago-based writers. When Paparelli took over ATC, his programming choices alienated many longtime company members, who parted ways with the company last year. He says he’s been looking for ways to work with new Chicago artists, “but obviously we only have so many slots in the season.” He sees the Silver Project in part as a way to establish relationships with writers like Tanya Saracho, Justin D.M. Palmer and Laura Jacqmin.

It’s also an opportunity for ATC to work with new directors; each piece has its own, and Paparelli cites Collaboraction’s Anthony Moseley, Theater Wit’s Jeremy Wechsler and Dog & Pony’s Krissy Vanderwarker as among those directing at ATC for the first time.

The pieces will be rolled out on five evenings over the next several months then reprised on five consecutive nights in June, when industry org the Theatre Communications Group will hold its annual conference in Chicago. For the first outing, Speech and Debate scribe Stephen Karam penned Pee in the School, an education-system comedy inspired by the Bush-Kerry debates of 2004.

Brian Tucker, whose St. James Infirmary was seen last year at Congo Square, has Famous Blue Raincoat, a New Orleans–set play about a pair of brothers whose family baggage literally rises to the surface in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Egyptian-born Yussef El Guindi, whose work has been seen repeatedly at Silk Road Theatre Project, offers So Unlike Me, which Paparelli describes as El Guindi’s response as a foreigner to the social and political environment of 2003, when the Iraq War began. The initial slate also includes works by Stephen Belber and Itamar Moses (whose There’s So Much I Was Going to Do is one of three plays on the final docket to address September 11).

“It’s engaging so many people,” Paparelli says of his company’s challenging undertaking. “We just wanted to have a really interesting mix of voices.”

The Silver Project kicks off Monday 8.

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