Spectacle — it’s the swagger, it’s the back-up singers in matching costumes, it’s when too much is never enough, it’s Las Vegas and its antithetical twin Burning Man, it’s gold and gold and more gold. It’s the Flaming Lips with their dancing aliens, Santa Clauses, and rock superstars floating through the crowd in big plastic bubbles. It’s what Redmoon Theater does.
The first time I came to Redmoon Theater, it was in a police car with my sister on her seventeenth birthday. Rather than criminal activity, it was the result of poor directions, stupidity, and in this particular case, being lost in a very bad Chicago neighborhood.
But when we arrived at a thistle-pink building, which literally looked like a sore thumb amid the grays of the nearby warehouses, I felt an unusual mix of exhilaration, shame, and relief, which intensified with the scene that greeted us upon arrival — men and women in glittering black and red costumes singing and dancing atop a towering cake, each tier of the constructed confection a small stage.
The show began with vaudeville stereotypes — a showy emcee, clownish and over-wrought performances, a contrived plot — while a comedian, children’s puppeteer, torch singer, heartthrob, and child star were competing for a golden truffle. Only it felt more like a knock-off than a parody. But after painstakingly establishing the clichés, the performers pushed and warped them in a way that was all at once clever, bitterly funny, and tragic.
When the heartthrob sang, the groupies swooned, the women clasped their hands to their hearts, and the men clamped their hats to their crotches. When the painfully drab comedian finished with his schlocky wa-wa-wa bit, he slid into a graceful lament. The puppeteer and her monkey puppet, gleaming manic with enthusiasm after a chirpy ditty, revved up the platitudes to comfort the classic train-wreck child star.
“We’re trying to put our energy into how to create a sustainable theater that creates spectacle nationally and internationally. We want to be the nation’s spectacle makers.” – Frank Maugeri
Rather than comforting the child, the child crashed the puppeteer, who grasped at sunny aphorisms as she sank into despair. It was black comedy done gaudy Busby Berkeley-style with the tragedy reflected in the glitz and pep.
But then a chase between the truffle chef and a sous-chef minion broke out. In the kerfuffle, the cake fell to pieces, revealing the surprised-looking janitor who had unobtrusively soft-shoed and swept away the debris of the va-va-voom performances. He caught the truffle.
It was another cliché — the meek inheriting the earth, David and Goliath, the least shall be greatest, etc., and so on and so forth. But it transformed the flat fantasy musical turned meditation with the use of clichés, and turned pre-packaged identities into a story about possibility.
Redmoon began in 1989 with a show about the end of a romance called “You Hold My Heart Between Your Teeth.” A Chicago puppeteer named Blair Thomas made the show, and the next year he made Redmoon, co-founding it with dancer/choreographer Lauri Macklin.
Redmoon started to stage spectacles all over the city with a mixture of puppets and real actors, weaving different architectural and public spaces into their performances and alternating free outdoor spectacles with indoor shows to generate funding.
“I wanted to travel around the city all summer long, mostly to challenged neighborhoods,” says Frank Maugeri, Redmoon’s current associate artistic director, who joined the company eleven years ago after working as a social worker. “It was mostly fine to do it in these neighborhoods. We had a few run-ins with kids, but we would have had the same run-ins with kids in [upscale] Lincoln Park. It’s the same four particular kids with rocks everywhere.”
But even with indoor ticket sales and materials scavenged from thrift stores and the trash, budgets were tight.
“I remember Redmoon talking about budgets during those times and it was like, ‘Ok, we’ll invest in ten more scissors’…something on that scale,” says an ex-intern.
“In the first shop, we had to carve the masks out of clay rather than sculpting them with our hands because we had no heat,” remembers Maugeri.
Redmoon now fills a capacious warehouse on Hubbard Street in an area directly west of the West Loop, which I visited on a blandly gloomy morning. Nearby, looming industrial buildings sit empty — some strangely lovely — big windows, clock towers, regal shapes and sizes. Hip signs, the vanguard of a new era, have already started to crop up, but most buildings remain still and restfully expectant.
I hear singing when I walk into Redmoon — today they’re doing a performance of “Once Upon a Time (Or the Secret Language of Birds)” for a group of children. Redmoon, which insists that performances be made for, and occasionally by, a broad audience, invites members of the public in for volunteer build days and art programs, which it oversees carefully.
“We’re trying to stop the things we do with the community from becoming an after-school program or community theater, what most community theater projects become — that’s as uninteresting to me as it is to theater,” says Maugeri.
A current mentor for Dramagirls, a community program run out of Redmoon, he laughs, “Redmoon has a complicated time trying to make ten-year-olds suit their aesthetic.”
Redmoon’s aesthetic is a pastiche of nostalgia, whimsy, mechanics, and antique theatricality — it seems hard for even the willing to replicate or imitate it. And yet, a recognizable Redmoon aesthetic has emerged. When I mention this, Maugeri responds, “I’m glad that you said that because it means that we’ve created a language, an understandable vocabulary.”
When I arrive, Maugeri is overseeing this production, and I weave back through the twists of Redmoon to find Jenny Topolosky, the PR contact. I am a little surprised to see that she has the PR woman look of severe, business-like enthusiasm (although the exclamation points! in her e-mails were PR-like and even persuaded me to pepper my own e-mails with them!). But she is young and ever so slightly, softly anxious around the edges.
“I love original art and I wanted to work in a non-profit,” she tells me when I ask her how she came here. “And Redmoon is actually in the top ten [Chicago] arts non-profits.”