rhinofest.com :: shows :: by ensemble

Notes to Molly

Little Boy Needs Ride

Notes to Molly: A couple has one bed, one bed that both never use at the same time. A play about failure, searching for things in the dark, and fish.

Little Boy Needs Ride: Two ancient monkeys bandy about a severed human head, and soccer is born. Years later the sport only exists to bind those in need of rides to those averse to giving them. Chris Bower presents a world of exhausted mothers unloved, traveling fathers adored, and transportation-needy boys who are not not not not interested in girls.

Johnny Ten Bones

Brain Surgeon Theater once again takes a macabre romp into the nightmares of childhood in this Rhinofest revival of their popular original rock musical Johnny Ten Bones. BST's intergenerational team of energetic local kids, professional actors, designers, and musicians brings to life a Leave-It-to-Beaver-esque world where "what's normal can tend to get rearranged." A typical barn dance turns into a treacherous fiasco while a dark secret keeps everyone in town on pins and needles. Find out if "Johnny" really exists in a play that "evokes the poetic, homemade beauty of early Redmoon shows" (Tony Adler, Chicago Reader).

Determination

A high-strung high school student rushes home from Homecoming to save the world from certain destruction at the hands of anthropomorphic machines from the future. Appearing on his heels, the jilted date with a sty in one eye—will she ever understand him? His stepfather haunts the rooms upstairs, a drug-addled freak—will he ever get off of the Internet? Cutting through all of this static to grasp ultimate triumph isn't easy... it requires... DE-TERMINATION.

Subject Matter Created and Destroyed

A circular discussion on creation not as a means to an end in the form of a product, but as its own end per se, featuring formal wear, building blocks and a human bowling ball.

I Am in a Small Space for a Reason I Don't Understand

Four deposed dictators, from their increasingly cramped and isolated position in history, relay their historical secrets to you, the amateur historian, in the historical reenactment that you want. There will be some singing. There are people for that.

Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman are composing and performing movement-based theatre artists, working together since 1991, who apply complex composed structures to ordinary daily human behavior. Notated movement scores often accompany their productions.

In their collaborative work for theatre, 'natural-looking' behavior is subjected to contortions, subversions and convolutions, letting 'naturalism' show its socially constructed face.

Imposters

Political Suicide

Alan Turing was a gay British codebreaker who helped develop the first computers and an emprical test for artificial intelligence and other minds. To write about him, Chrisler enlisted the two nineteen-seventies robots who first challenged Turing's test. Together with Chrisler, ELIZA and PARRY have written their tribute to Turing: a dark meditation on whether and in what forms our minds really exist.

Imposters is paired with Political Suicide, a short play in which two disenfranchised, lame-duck world leaders, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexy Kosygin, feverishly pretend they have the power to stop a nuclear holocaust while trying to shoot and hang themselves.

Action Spectacular

Mr. Porter and Mr. Blake were the preeminent stunt coordinators of our decade. Some time ago, Mr. Blake met with an unfortunate stunt-related accident. Vowing never to work without him, Mr. Porter has managed to rebuild his former partner Mr. Blake. But as one would expect, something is just not right.

Ulysses' Crewmen

Hear the Siren's Song! Insurgent Theatre secedes from America's ineffectual political processes. We join the struggle against the imperial political economy arranged by bureaucratic trade regimes that make us all complicit in the exploitation and destruction of others. We question and investigate the psychosexual underpinnings of both this bureaucracy and those of us attempting to rebel against it. We use Homer's Odyssey as a framework to stage these struggles in a single claustrophobic scene between two people, one of whom is bound and gagged.

King Pignacious:
A Swine's Rise to Power

King Pignacious: A Swine's Rise to Power is a dramatic multimedia recreation of the battle between Sow and Human expressed through the art forms of Punk, Reggae, film and good old 1950's rock 'n' roll.

King Pignacious led a quest to free Human workers from the insidious control by their employers via destroying their hospitals and ultimately their bourgeoisie system of health care. By invoking a state of chaos, Pignacious and his army were determined to purify the human world and free the minds of the working class. Accompanied by plenty of pulled pork and a full stock of swine flu vaccinations, this bizarre and insightful work is not to be missed.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Get Lost

Picking up the story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two clowns from Shakespeare's Hamlet, after they had been sent on a mission, leaving Hamlet's world, the Prompting Theater's story follows the two as they find themselves lost. Oh, what a horrible time to be without a GPS.

The Prompting Theater is a semi-professional theater company based in Champaign, Illinois. Sponsored by Developmental Services Center, the troupe is comprised of adult actors with developmental disabilities who perform in the Champaign/Urbana area. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Get Lost marks their Chicago debut!

Decline of Ballooning

Decline of Ballooning is a ghost-narrated story of a man and a woman caught up in a web of geomantic intrigue. It's a musical love story about aerial photography. The woman struggles to balance the stresses of her life's work with an increasingly unstable perception of reality, the man strives to actualize his ethereal yearning. Why does anybody ever do anything, and where are they all the time?

Madame X Paints Haydn Red

Three people trapped in a recording studio arguing about their debut: "I thought I turned you off...such a historicizing of the echo." Madame X Paints Haydn Red is an operetta that deals with youth culture stuck in a soundproof room moving between centuries of recording technology: Joseph Haydn's head stolen by phrenologists; the Jam re-recording the Kinks' David Watts; RCA color-coding their new 45 rpm records; "Opera is a shoddy refuge for emotional dishonesty." The musicians evolve with their recording techniques and all the while Madame X paints Haydn red.

The Garage on Clark Street: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

On Feb. 14th, 1929, four men walked out of a garage on Clark street to disappear in the wake of witness accounts, facts and speculations. Behind them, they left seven slain men. In voluntary absence from the scene of the crime, two "untouchables" plotted their words wisely. The event went down in history as The St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the names of the men involved will forever be bound together by it. This is their tale. In case you ever wonder what a man does in the 24 hours of killing or being killed.

Using live percussion, projected intertitles and live-action story telling with no words, Silent Theatre will bring the personal tales of the 13 men involved to life. The stories you haven't heard about. The ones we can only show you. Because we love showing. And Valentine's Day is all about love.

And Then It Burst

A boy is seduced by a girl while digging a hole. Two businessmen discuss the weather and grisly suicide with equal nonchalance. A mother and daughter argue over tea while hiding from the sharks outside their door. A man drifts through life with his heart beating in his hand. These are the alienated characters of And Then It Burst, a collection of short plays that examine the breakdown of communication in the most extraordinary of circumstances, a violent, hysterical, and heartbreaking look at how isolation follows us into the strangest of worlds.

Under Ground

Haunted by the voice of his abandoned wife, a brothel attendant finally decides to pick his way back to his family. But to what end? Under Ground presents a classic American revenge story.

Coydog

It's a long way to the hospital in a wheelbarrow.