Garage band

Since 1995, Steppenwolf’s Visiting Company Initiative has attempted audience cross-pollination by inviting companies like the Hypocrites and the House Theatre of Chicago to produce in Steppenwolf’s spaces. This year, it’s upping the ante: Three of the city’s scrappiest young theaters, all TOC faves, will share the company’s Merle Reskin Garage Theatre for a ten-week repertory.

Steppenwolf’s newly appointed director of artistic development, Polly Carl, late of Minneapolis’s Playwrights’ Center, explains what’s been dubbed the Garage Rep as a way “to showcase the work of three companies making their mark on a new generation of theater audience. We thought the Rep was the most effective way to create an exchange of resources and ideas and create a concentrated buzz.” What’s the buzz? We asked the Garage Rep companies to tell us what’s happening.

In 2008, Pavement Group wowed us with the punk-rock aesthetic of Lipstick Traces. The company returns to the punk well with the Midwest premiere of punkplay. Gregory Moss’s play about ’80s suburban teens discovering punk rock and, natch, themselves debuted last June at New York’s Clubbed Thumb. “I was just taken with the style of it, the young vernacular it spoke in—I think it speaks to a nontheater audience,” says Pavement Group artistic director David Perez, noting that “part of our mission is to make plays for people that don’t necessarily like theater.”

Dog & Pony Theatre Co.’s The Twins Would Like to Say is inspired by June and Jennifer Gibbons, British twins who made a pact of silence as children in the 1970s; they refused to communicate with adults, inventing their own secret language. They went on to fits of petty crime in their teens and spent their twenties hospitalized until Jennifer’s death at 29.

Like D&P’s stunning As Told By the Vivian Girls in 2008, Twins is an ensemble-devised piece performed in promenade; Vivian Girls’ Devon de Mayo shares writing and directing duties with Seth Bockley (Collaboraction’s Jon). “We asked everyone to pitch in dramaturgically, so we assigned cast members topics and they’d present their research,” de Mayo says.

The offering from the youngest company on the slate, XIII Pocket, is also based on true events. In 2003, a German man confessed to, as the BBC put it, “killing and eating a man he met after advertising for someone who wanted to be killed and eaten.” Playwright and director Stephen Louis Grush notes, “It was pretty famous in Europe. Maybe it was a little morbid for our tastes over here.”

Grush’s Adore features two actors on stage and a number of others on film. “These guys had a very intense disconnect in their personal lives, which is what I think drove them to the anonymity of the Internet, where you can create yourself,” the playwright says. To represent that disconnect, the “real lives” of Armin and his willing victim exist only on film, the live actors speaking to the screen. “The only time we actually see two people connecting is when these two men finally meet up.”

All three companies make a point of praising shared set designer Grant Sabin for making the repertory model work. “Grant’s really been visionary in conceiving of a way for the Garage space to accommodate our insane promenade show and also two more proscenium-based shows,” Bockley says. Adds Perez, “We’re lucky to be working with two other companies that have congruous ideas about how the space should be used. Grant’s done a tremendous job, an impossible job, of meeting everyone’s needs.”

Garage Rep is in previews, opening Sunday 28.

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