One at a time!

LEGGO MY EGO David Kodeski, Dorothy Milne, Brigid Murphy, Pamela Webster, Susan McLaughlin-Karp, Tekki Lomnicki, Edward Thomas-Herrera and Clare Nolan, clockwise from top left, fight for the spotlight.

I liked the fact that I got to be the center of attention," says writer-actor Edward Thomas-Herrera when asked why he embarked on a career as a monologuist. He suspects he's not alone. "That's the reason most solo performers do it. We love the attention. Does that make me sound vain?" Normally it would. But if you know how to reward an audience's attention with agile wordplay and anecdotal acrobatics, your self-indulgence is soon forgiven.

For Thomas-Herrera, getting attention comes easily. His puckered sourpuss, gin-dry wit and tartly painful and funny recountings of personal trauma (everything from childhood sissy-boy tauntings to the sorrow-soaked death of his mother) make him kin to David Sedaris. But unlike some of his louder and less-gifted ranting peers from the early '90s solo scene (many of whom have not surprisingly drifted away), he doesn't just demand attention. With his finely honed chops, he earns and sustains it.

What Thomas-Herrera shares with most of the other dozen-plus performers showcased in Live Bait Theater's tenth annual Fillet of Solo Festival, running Friday 22 to August 26, is longevity. A decade ago, when Live Bait artistic director Sharon Evans decided that some of her favorite itinerant solo artists needed a regular place to call home at least once a year, it was the height of the monologue craze. "In '94 and '95 it seemed like everybody had a solo show," Thomas-Herrera says.

These days, with a lot of the scene's worst hangers-on no longer hanging on ("A lot of them were writers who couldn't really act or actors who couldn't really write," says Thomas-Herrera), the performers left standing are mainly the Gen Xers who always had something new to say, and a unique way of saying it.

Some are retired Neo-Futurists (Scott Hermes, Stephanie Shaw and David Kodeski, whose specialty is crafting one-man shows from the found journals of the unfamous). Some are '90s fringe icons (grrrl power troupe the Sweat Girls and Brigid Murphy, former mistress and maven of Milly's Orchid Show, the tawdry pageant that used to fill the Park West). And some are Tekki Lomnicki, a Chicago original who has spent her lifetime clobbering the hurdles of diastrophic dwarfism, and living to tell about it onstage.

Each is comfortable alone in a spotlight, and each offers a perspective you won't find anywhere else. Case in point: BoyGirlBoyGirl, a four-person company of monologists (consisting of Thomas-Herrera, Shaw, Kodeski and Susan McLaughlin-Karp) who each write about the same topic, is basing its Fillet contribution on a Details magazine interview with Kevin Federline about his marriage to Britney Spears. ("It's a scintillating read," Thomas-Herrera says acridly.)

"Look at Kodeski," Evans says of the much-traveled performer, who first worked as a waiter in Live Bait's now defunct cafe. (He applied for a job there after reading a story on Live Bait in Chicago magazine.) "He's a stubbornly idiosyncratic, independent thinker. There's nobody else doing what he's doing, and he's been doing it for years."

Evans doesn't have much use for anything based on formula. Don't ask her, for example, about Russell Crowe's domestic pet in Gladiator. ("They gave him a dog at the end of the movie," she says with exasperation. "They always give the lead guy a dog because they've done market research that [indicates] people will relate to him more if he has a dog.") Having built a theater dedicated solely to producing new works by local writers, Evans isn't in the market for retread.

When she and husband John Ragir (Live Bait's executive director) bought the building at Clark and Irving Park "for a song" in the mid-'80s, the pair lived in the upstairs apartment, while the ground floor functioned as a factory. After that operation shut down, Evans and Ragir had the space gutted and opened the doors of Live Bait in 1987.

"Everything north of Addisonwas considered dicey then," Evans says. "And we were across the street from the cemetery, so hopes weren't very high that we'd make it."

"We're different from the Steppenwolf model, where a bunch of friends from college get together and start a theater company," Evans says. "And from the beginning we were putting solo artists on the bill with regular plays, which is basically the opposite of the ensemble philosophy. When [Live Bait] first started, this town was so Mamet-ized it was hard for [solo performers] to break in."

Eighteen years later, and after several career permutations of her own (solo performer; hip, irreverent playwright with Girls! Girls! Girls! in the late '80s; sophisticated dramatist with Blind Tasting in 2003; community liaison to the Chicago Police Department, where she currently teaches playwriting) she's seen the evolution and death of countless theater companies.

In particular, she laments the recent loss of Famous Door, the well-respected midlevel troupe that officially pulled up tent posts in June. "They were just as talented as we were and not any dumber," Evans says, shaking her head.

"It's an arbitrary scene. One day a new company of college friends is the one everybody's talking about, and the next month they're completely gone." The tenth annual Fillet of Solo Festival opens Friday 22 at Live Bait Theater. For a complete schedule, see Theater listings.