Interview: Remy Bumppo Artistic Director Timothy Douglas

Timothy Douglas seems a little nervous about the winter.  When we meet up for coffee at Coffee Chicago in Andersonville, he’s heavily bundled and admits that he hasn’t experienced a full winter in a long time.

It may seem like an odd thing for a Chicago resident to say, but Douglas hasn’t been in Chicago for very long.  He joined Lincoln Park-based Remy Bumppo Theater as artistic director in July of 2011, but prior to that, he was a freelance director for years, putting on shows in places as disparate as Louisville, Pittsburgh and New Zealand.  His globe-trotting freelance career was something of an accident, according to him. 

It’s a theme he revisits often when discussing his background: much of his success seems to have come as a surprise to him.  It’s a funny concept when talking to someone who has a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama. 

“Even at a young age, I knew myself well enough to put this thought together: that I knew that I just wanted to be a star,” Douglas says, with a touch of amusement at his younger self’s single-mindedness.  “I was really just living out a very active fantasy life.”

He assumed that “when the time came to separate the wheat from the chaff, I would just be weeded out and then I would figure out what I was doing with my life at that point.”

Douglas joined Remy Bumppo during a period of transition.  He took over from founding Artistic Director James Bohnen and Executive Director Kristin Larsen was tasked with finding “something different.” She says, “I didn’t know what that something different was until I had my conversation with Timothy.”  With other candidates, she had a dialogue, but no conversation.

Conversation and communication, as it turns out, are both very important parts of Douglas’ work process.

“I remember as an actor I was often in trouble with the directors because of the kinds of questions that I ask,” Douglas says.  He wanted to know what was going to happen with the lights and why he was being given certain directions, not because he was resistant, but because he wanted a deeper understanding of what he was being asked.

The response from the directors he worked with was primarily frustration.  Now that he finds himself in the hot seat, he says he gets to “satisfy a lot more curiosities I have about the storytelling on stage.”

He made the transition from acting to directing in 1994, a conscious choice because “I could no longer deal with the profession.  I didn’t have the skin for it.”

Douglas says he loves the process of collaborating to put together a production and he admits that at heart he might always have been a director. “I don’t want to design for the designers,” he says.  Rather, the look and feel of a production comes about from long conversations with the designers where all parties talk about how they think and feel about a play.

He’s particularly opinionated about the idea of contemporizing classic plays.  “I’ve seen it so often diminish the play,” he says.  His decision to set the current Remy Bumppo production of the 18th century Pierre Marivaux play “Changes of Heart” in 60s Chicago had to do with trying to help modern audiences have a greater understanding of the play itself.

The play involves a class-crossing romance between a prince and a commoner, an idea that would have been both shocking and “titillating” for contemporary audiences.  “I felt if the American audience didn’t have an equivalent understanding or an equivalent titillation, there was no way I could deliver the core of what Marivaux was saying.”

He chose to cast the lovers as an interracial romance, in the hope that it would give American audiences a more visceral awareness of the class issues at the heart of the play.  “I think our race challenge in America is actually primarily a class one.  It just seems to be that the majority of those we would call lower or poor classes happen to be people of color, so I thought, well, that’s immediate, that picture.”

The next play on tap for Remy Bumppo is “Chesapeake”, by Lee Blessing.  Douglas will be directing again and with the play’s focus on civil disobedience, it’s likely to fulfill their goal for thought provoking plays and community discourse.

Klingons!

Well, I've given the subject of this one away in the header.  Did you know that there is a production of A Klingon Christmas Carol going on right now in Chicago?  My understanding from Wikipedia was that Klingons are very warlike, but in person they were all quite nice.  For an inside peek, watch the video below.   Learn more about Commedia Beauregard, the theater company behind this show, here.

Did you know there is a museum of surgical science in Chicago?

Passersby might be forgiven for walking right past the International Museum of Surgical Science.  The museum is tucked inside a historic mansion on Lake Shore Drive, huddled between high-rise apartment buildings.  It shares space and administration with the International College of Surgeons, but inside, guests can view a veritable cornucopia of historical surgical paraphernalia.

One might think the mission of the museum is to make visitors glad they were born in the 20th century, but Lynnea Smith, Director of Education and Events, said the mission of the museum is to “help educate the public and enhance their appreciation and understanding of medical history.”

The museum spans four floors of the former home of Eleanor Robinson Countiss, who commissioned a mansion to follow the lines of Le Petit Trianon, a chateau on the grounds of Versailles.  Listed in both the National and Illinois Register of Historic Places, it’s one of the few remaining lakefront mansions and is the only one open to the public.

Today, it houses such marvels as an iron lung, a series of terrifying implements that were once used for amputations (the resemblance of one of these to a s’more toasting fork is noticeable), a series of fetuses in various stages of development and actual footage of a brain surgery operation from 1953.

Other treasures abound in little pockets hidden throughout the building, like a display of an ophthalmic surgery kit from 1917 or Napoleon’s death mask (included because he was a supporter of new forms of medicine).

I know, you want to see what's in that eye surgery kit.  You're in luck:

The top floor of the museum showcases contemporary art exhibits that link art and medicine, in an effort “to see how medicine can inspire artwork,” said Smith.  Artist Julia Klein, creator of one of the two exhibits currently on display, said her work isn’t “medically oriented in any way other than the fact that for the last couple years I was using orthopedic casting tape,” but when she heard about the call for proposals, it seemed like a perfect fit.

Klein’s exhibit, called “Joint Work”, is a series of “articulated line-centric sculptures created from segments of wood bound together with orthopedic casting tape,” per the museum website. She said she hopes people can “make a connection between seeing the casting material used in a sculpture and thinking of that casting material being used on someone’s arm.” 

Housing a museum in a mansion is not without its challenges.  The museum had to be closed for two weeks at the end of August in order to deinstall an exhibit and then reinstall artifacts.  “We don’t have a loading dock,” Smith explained.  Despite these challenges, the museum also hosts special events.  As Klein put it, “On one floor, you can get married, on the floor directly above, there’s the instruments that they use to drill into someone’s head.”

The museum is open 10-4 Tuesday through Friday and 10-5 on Saturday and Sunday for the courageous and the curious.

The above picture was one of the least terrifying pictures I took while visiting this museum.  Pictures not included: a pile of kidney stones, a gallstone, and a display that tells the most horrifying amputation story ever.

Update: my mother says I should post the gross photo I showed her.  So when you read this, remember, my mother suggested this go in the post.

A visit to famed Chicago bookstore Quimby's and a book launch therein

Quimby’s bookstore, the Wicker Park mecca for independently-published and small press books, comics, and zines, celebrated the launch of David David Katzman’s new book, “A Greater Monster”, Thursday night.

“A Greater Monster” is about an ad executive who goes on two hallucinogenic trips before breaking into an alternate reality.  Katzman calls it a “psychedelic fairy tale.” It was 7 years in the making and features 65 pages of illustration and links to two websites.  Katzman worked with three professional musicians and a sound engineer to compose the music posted at one of the websites.  The second link features an animated sequence from the book.

Katzman said the decision to include multimedia elements “happened very organically, as I was writing it.” 

He said one of the main themes of the novel was changing perspective and point of view and instead of just accomplishing that through the point of view of the main character, he said he “wanted to change the perspective and point of view of a novel and of a reader.”

Quimby’s, according to their site, favors “the unusual, the aberrant, the saucy and the lowbrow.”  They’re carrying Kaztman’s book on consignment, which they’ll do for any title that costs less than $25 retail, without review.  “That’s one of the things that we’re really proud of, here, is that we provide a platform for authors to say what they want to say without any sort of review process or our values determining what gets on the shelf,” said Neil Brideau, a Quimby’s employee.

The store also accepts applications from authors who want to hold events at the store, though store manager Liz Mason said they were now getting too many applications to host everybody.  However, Katzman has “been around in the independent publishing community for a while and we’ve always carried his books and he’s done events here and we’re excited about celebrating that release with him.”

Katzman self-published the book through his own publishing company and is in the process of choosing a distributor now.  The book is available at Quimby’s in Wicker Park and on Amazon.  If you're interested in what's involved in self-publishing, Katzman has been blogging about the experience on his website.  Here's a closeup of that cover, which I loved:

You can also follow Katzman on Goodreads, where you can tell he has good taste because he's reading "Cloud Atlas".  I don't think I've linked to Quimby's yet.  Go to Quimby's!  They have the most comprehensive FAQ section of any website, ever.  I did a lot of research to come up with that fact, obviously.  In all seriousness, their FAQ is a great resource for anyone interested in self-publishing comics, books, etc, or for learning more about the store itself.

A night at Improv Olympic

I remember back in the days of yore, I once ditched a pep assembly.  Back in yore, if you ditched a part of school, I think you were supposed to go out in the parking lot and smoke or something.  Or maybe just leave.  But I wouldn't know, because when I ditched that pep assembly, my friends and I snuck off to one of the theaters at my high school to play improv games.  That is the kind of dangerous rebel I was back in those days. Anyway, apart from attending a few improv shows in college, it's been a while since I saw or participated in improv.  I was a bit nervous about going to see a show at Improv Olympic.  Did I still like improv?  Did it just make me think of Michael Scott on the Office, introducing a gun into every scene?

As it turns out, the shows at Improv Olympic are quite excellent, mainly because all the groups are actually quite good at improvising, which is a skill we should appreciate when it's not being attempted by Michael Scott.  I interviewed Cook County Social Club after their set, which you can listen to below.  Obligatory links: check out Improv Olympic here and you can learn more about the charming fellows from Cook County Social club here.

Oh No! Doom gallery actually very pleasant, non-terrifying

Last week I checked out Oh No! Doom, an artists' collective/gallery in Bucktown.  It's at 1800 North Milwaukee, and if you get there before the artists, you can just go down the street to the Wormhole cafe for a quick mug of cider and a game of Tetris.

I've posted a slideshow feature I created about the gallery below, but because of time constraints, I didn't give Lana Crooks a chance to describe what she does.  She was at the gallery first and so I ended up asking her a lot of questions about the gallery itself.  The mounted plush moose in the slideshow is hers, but in the interest of fairness, here's something else she did.  She took this rocket ship:

And then turned it into this plushy squid rocket ship:

Oh No! Doom both sells and showcases art and if you want to check out the gallery, you can head over there Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.  The Petit Monstres show mentioned in the slideshow is going to be up until November 12th, and then their next show will open on November 19th.  Without further ado, here are the artists of Oh No! Doom describing what they do:

Guild Complex rewards prose, performance

Entering the downstairs stage room at the Chopin Theater can make a person feel a  bit like they’ve stepped into a different decade.  The red walls and mismatched light fixtures are complemented by padded old-fashioned furniture, some of which faces the old man playing jazz piano on the stage and some of which faces the opposite wall for any guests interested in stimulating conversation.

The ambience gives the room a salon atmosphere, and on Wednesday night, the room played host to the Guild Complex Prose Awards, an annual award show put on by the Guild Complex, a literary organization devoted to supporting diverse and emerging voices through performances and readings.  Six semi-finalists read their work aloud to an appreciative crowd and then both a non-fiction and a fiction prize were awarded. 

The winning non-fiction piece was by Robert Hobson, a burly 22-year veteran of the US Army.  When he read his piece, “Camel in the wire,” his delivery style was terse and unadorned, but within moments, audience members were riveted by his retelling of the taut, anguish-filled last moments of a camel that blundered into barbed wire at his base 22 miles from the border in Kuwait.

Hobson said the piece was a combination of two other pieces, because “some of the stuff was just too raw and when I combined them, I was able to push past some of the feelings.”  It took him two years to write it, but he said he thought it was his strongest piece and he chose to send it to this competition because he wanted it to be read in a literary setting rather than in a military magazine.

Billy Lombardo was the big winner for fiction with his piece “All of our crosses.”  A slim, tidy man who wore a necktie to the event, his reading style was quiet and understated, and his story about a man helping his elderly father shovel was both poignant and funny in the way it portrayed the ways parents can drive their children crazy while still inspiring profound levels of sympathy.

Lombardo said he was motivated to submit this piece because he’d written it recently and he knew he still wanted to work on it.  He also won an audience award for his reading of it.

The goal of the contest is to “give space to emerging writers, underserved writers, and underserved audiences,” Kimberly Dixon, executive director of the Guild Complex, said. Dixon said they were most interested in pieces “if the work gets the listener or the reader to think differently about the world or to see the world in a new way and particularly if it uncovers something that might not normally get attention or get a voice.”

“The whole idea is create something that’s not currently out there,” Mike Puican, Guild board president, said.  “We’re looking at blending poetry and theater, we’re looking at blending literature and music, or sometimes non-art mediums.”

The Guild Complex has two poetry performance programs this weekend, while visitors to the Chopin Theater can look forward to performances of the Nutcracker Thursday through Sunday through December and a magic show late Friday nights.

The Chopin Theatre is a gem, truly.  Go check them out.  They have shows all the time and owner Zygmunt Dyrkacz would love to talk to you about art.

If you're interested in the Guild Complex group, you can find more information about their events here.