Synopses & Reviews
More If Youve Got It brings together five full-length plays from Chicago's acclaimed Theater Oobleck. This collection features works by five founding members, each currently active with the company:
Uglys First World by Jeff Dorchen, in which a singing zombie, seeking revenge against T. S. Eliot, becomes a pawn in a battle to overthrow God;
Innocence and Other Vices by Dave Buchen, a half-true, half-blasphemous screwball comedy about the mildly unhealthy relationship between charity and capitalism;
Letter Purloined by David Isaacson, a whodunit comedy about war atrocities and a handkerchief;
There Is a Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher, a play in rhymed verse, about the poetry of William Blake and having sex in public; and
Necessity by Danny Thompson, a bloody and historically inaccurate bio-drama of Thomas Alva Edison. See what audiences around the world have come to know as uniquely Oobleckian: irreverent, vexed, impossibly funny, and unexpectedly transcendent.
Synopsis
More If Youve Got It brings together five full-length plays spanning the 24-year (and counting) history of Chicago's acclaimed Theater Oobleck, a company renowned for producing intriguing new works without a director and for audiences with or without the means to pay. (Ticket prices for Oobleck shows are always a suggested amount, more if youve got it, free if youre broke.”)
This collection features works by five of the six playwrights currently active with the company, each of whom were founding members of company:
Uglys First World by Jeff Dorchen, in which a singing zombie, seeking revenge against T.S. Eliot, becomes a pawn in a battle to overthrow God;
Innocence and Other Vices by Dave Buchen, a half-true, half-blasphemous screwball comedy about the mildly unhealthy relationship between charity and capitalism;
Letter Purloined by David Isaacson, a whodunit comedy about war atrocities and a handkerchief;
There Is a Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher, a play, in rhymed verse, about the poetry of William Blake and having sex in public;
Necessity by Danny Thompson, a bloody and historically inaccurate bio-drama of Thomas Alva Edison, from chain gang to electric chair.
(Founding member Terri Kapsaliss most recent work The Hysterical Alphabet was published by Whitewalls in 2008.)
Theater Oobleck was founded in Chicago in 1988, out of the ashes of Ann Arbors Streetlight Theater (1983-1987). The company immediately distinguished itself with its absurdist, deeply referential aesthetic, and with its unique operating structure: Oobleck is dedicated to developing new works (60 plays to date), without the use of a director, substituting the traditional directors role with a collaborative method. Two conventions are in place to help keep the creative process from descending into chaos. Outside eyes” (company members, members of the Chicago theater community at large, friends, and audience members) are encouraged to attend rehearsals and give notes on all aspects of the production, from the script to the lighting design to the actors interpretation, engaging with the production from the ground up. Each performer is also given actors prerogative”--the ultimate responsibility for her or his choices in blocking, delivery, even including the authority to amend the script in the course of a performance.
Aesthetically and politically, Theater Oobleck places itself at the crossroads of a number of influences, too many to mention (and they seem to multiply when no one is looking) but surely among them are: the surrealists (particularly Artaud and Jarry) and Brechts Epic Theater, The Goon Show, The Marx Brothers, Beckett (that great humorist), Punch and Judy, Freud, post-structuralist literary theory, Fellini, Charles Ives, Edgar Allan Poe, and Baudelaire. The plays are unabashedly maximalist, sparing no kitchen sink, fearing no obtuse reference, and shrinking from no dramatic challenge.
Each play in this volume displays, in its own way, that quality that Chicago audiences (and, increasingly, audiences as far flung as Austin, St. Louis, Savannah, Slovenia, and Finland) have come to know as uniquely Oobleckian: irreverent, curious, peripatetic, vexed, impossibly funny, and unexpectedly transcendent.
About the Author
Dave Buchen is a San Juan, Puerto Rico-based playwright and graphic artist. He is currently developing
Baudelaire in a Box an adaptation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal” as cantastoria.
Jeffrey Dorchen is an L.A.-based screenwriter and a regular contributor to the This is Hell radio program. His most recent play for Theater Oobleck is Strauss at Midnight.
David Isaacson is a Chicago-based playwright. His most recent play for Theater Oobleck is Casanova Takes a Bath.
Mickle Maher is founding member of Theater Oobleck and has worked as an actor, director, and playwright in Chicago since 1987. He teaches at Columbia College and the University of Chicago.
Danny Thompson is a Worcester, MA-based writer and video artist. He currently tours with the Theater Oobleck production of The Hysterical Alphabet.
Greg Kotis is the Tony-award winning author of Urinetown! The Musical and Yeast Nation. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Terri Kapsalis is the author of The Hysterical Alphabet and Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. She is a founding member of Theater Oobleck.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Greg Kotis
Introduction by Terri Kapsalis
Innocence and Other Vices by Dave Buchen
Ugly's First World by Jeffrey Dorchen
Letter Purloined by David Isaacson
There is a Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher
Neccesity by Danny Thompson