For me, the highlight of Collaboraction’s 2008 Sketchbook Festival was an eccentric, conceptually brazen, and very funny piece called “Cowboy Birthday Party” by Chicago playwright Emily Schwartz. It was so creative and so astounding, so in-tune with the exciting new work that Sketchbook has showcased in the past (unlike the disappointment of this year’s edition, but you could read about that in my previous blog post), that I was eagerly awaiting Schwartz’s next full-length play. I know she wrote Mr. Spacky…the Man Who Was Continuously Followed by Wolves which was much buzzed about last summer, and which actually won an Orgie award for best theatrical ambience or something like that (yeah, you read it right, the Orgies are theater awards supposedly given by anonymous critics/judges/audience members to the freshest, most creative, and tragically overlooked gems of the Chicago storefront scene, sort of like the antidote to the more conventional, fuddy-duddyish taste of the Jeff Awards). So I was looking forward to seeing her latest opus, The Mysterious Elephant and the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins…who kill him, currently being staged by her theater company Strange Tree Group in the basement of the Chopin Theater (which, notably, has hosted a bounty of theatrical delights this year such as the Hypocrites’ Our Town and TUTA’s Uncle Vanya). After several false starts given my wacky schedule nowadays, I finally made it to see the play last Sunday. Although Mysterious Elephant is not quite the must-see theatrical event of the season that some people have anointed it to be, I personally think it is unique, impressive, engaging, balls-out creative, and definitely deserves a wide audience. And I think it’s safe to say that Emily Schwartz and the Strange Tree Group are inarguably major talents on the rise, the ones to watch, the ones whom we can safely entrust the future of Chicago theater to.
Jul 15
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