Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Long before she was a multi-hyphenate, award-winning singer/actor/director conjuring different worlds on stages across the globe, E. Faye Butler was enamored of the places she could go via her View-Master. The low-tech, vaguely binocular-shaped toy popular throughout the 1960s was the forerunner to virtual reality goggles: Insert a circular cartridge of slides, hold the gadget to your eyes and you could behold everything from the rings of Saturn to the Great Sphinx to cartoon strips.
‘Goods’
Tickets: $30
“When you had your View-Master, you could go anywhere.. I remember watching Bugs Bunny through it, and he was more spectacular than he was on television. Made me think I was in another world,” Butler said. The artist has devoted her 40+ year career to transporting audiences to other worlds, be it via an August Wilson drama or a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical or a Shakespearean tragedy.
Artemisia Theatre Announces Virtual World Premiere of Lauren Ferebee s GOODS
The year is 2100. Marla and Sam are celebrating their 20th anniversary working together as interplanetary trash collectors.by BWW News Desk
Two intergalactic trash collectors, both women, one Black, one white, are hurtling through space toward the finish of their anniversary route, ready to celebrate their return to Earth. But a surprising job sends them back out to the asteroid belt and forces them to make a devastating choice.
That s the launch pad for Goods, a world premiere play by Lauren Ferebee receiving its virtual world premiere May 5-30, 2021 by Artemisia Theatre. Chicago stage legend E. Faye Butler directs.
Bechdel Fest 8
Broken Nose Theatre presents Bechdel Fest 8: Realign, a festival of short plays featuring femme, female-identifying, nonbinary, transgender and queer actors playing characters who talk about subjects other than men. The festival references the Bechdel-Wallace Test created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel that asks whether an entertainment work features at least two non-male identifying characters in conversation about something other than a man. Many of the immensely talented artists involved in this season s festival have been signed on since last spring, back when we were expecting to host the event in-person during the summer, said Broken Nose artistic director Elise Marie Davis in a prepared statement. The fact that they graciously and enthusiastically stayed onboard as this year s lineup was pushed back, and ultimately pivoted to becoming digital, is enormously exciting to the Broken Nose family and myself.
Two new plays by Chicago writers ‘Pretended’ and ‘Bull: a love story’ to be developed by Paramount’s New Works Department in January
Paramount Theatre in Aurora will launch next month “The Inception Project,” a new play development initiative designed to create artist-driven, courageous, thought provoking new work in a radically inclusive environment. This is part of a bold new statewide initiative to address and heal the harms caused by racism thanks to a $40,000 Healing Illinois grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services in partnership with The Chicago Community Trust.
Following an eight-day rehearsal process, each play will be recorded and presented as a virtual staged reading open to Paramount subscribers, supporters, the local community, the state of Illinois and theater professionals interested in new work.