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.
“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.”
We move to a big circular table nestled among computer workstations where Vanessa Stalling, an artistic associate, sits waiting to talk. I take a chair next to Stalling; Topolosky takes a chair next to me. Stalling is wearing a yellow ruffled shirt and a black sweatshirt. Her hair is cut very short and very close to her head in a way that is both gamine and brisk. Stalling will direct her first Redmoon show, The Princess Club, come fall.
“The Princess Club will be an ensemble show. We’re exploring fairy tales. There’s something incredible, beautiful, and magical about fairy tales, but they tell you really awful things as a woman,” says Stalling, noting the damsel-in-distress, beauty-obsessive world fairy tales promote.
“The women are going to be disfigured with bumps and humps, exaggerated backs and ankles,” she continues. “The idea is that we have distortions from the food that we eat, and women are fed fairytales.”
A man at a nearby computer turns around. His face gives me a vague and creeping sense of doom until I recognize him as “Once Upon a Time’s” villain. It is Seth Bockley, the apprentice director.
“Princess is one of those hot button issues right now,” he says, referencing a recent NY Times article.
Soon Maugeri emerges from the performance. He has dark eyes with long, wet-looking lashes, a startlingly feminine feature in a look that is otherwise very guy: gut, blue jeans, short hair. His wife recently had twins and he is carrying a tubby baby boy wearing a T-shirt that reads “Mom” in gothic, motorcycle-style letters. He sits the baby on the table, pats his stick-out tummy, and coos, “Look at that pot belly.” His wife, who drifts in and out of the room, holds a much smaller girl.
Maugeri created and directed the current show performed with tiny stick puppets in a toy theater. It is about a young girl who learns to listen to the language of birds and fights an evil industrialist/capitalist bird thief. The story is sentimental and simplistic with convoluted turns — the bird thief only turned villainous after being thwarted in good deeds. The words hope and dream pop up more than cuss words in “Goodfellas,” and the entire production is drearily serious.
Redmoon’s bitter edge is what defines and ultimately justifies its fluffy sweetness.
But the toy theater is amazing — intricate and inventive with tiny trapped doors everywhere that reveal small treasures. As with all Redmoon performances, after the show they invite the guests to come up close and peer at the marvels of the tiny contraptions and compartments.
“Once Upon a Time” is something of a goody-two-shoes sibling to 2005’s “The Cabinet,” a miniature spectacle performed out of an actual cabinet. It was Maugeri’s dark and wicked adaptation of the German expressionistic film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”
However, Redmoon’s bitter edge is what defines and ultimately justifies its fluffy sweetness. It was the beauty of a the acid-folk group The Bitter Tears singing, “It’s a death-filled world” to hordes of children in Millennium Park during the summer spectacle.
It’s what separates art from kitsch. It’s harnessing the evocative power of sentimental beauty and nostalgia to tell a story that is neither sentimental nor nostalgic.
It’s the difference between the meticulously crafted public spectacles that Redmoon creates and the private functions they perform at to help finance the spectacles, where performers are largely baubles.
Nonetheless, Redmoon for Hire has, in addition to corporate backers and government grants, been a major contributor to Redmoon’s current finances.
“They’re definitely a lucrative non-profit; they get HUGE sums of money from the city and private benefactors. They spend gargantuan amounts on shows and materials,” says the ex-intern. In 2002, the organization surpassed $1 million in revenue.
“At the same time,” he adds, “we’re not concerned with the kind of professionalism that a lot of other theater companies are concerned with — having a season for one. Redmoon has always been very open door, really casual. You can come in, put your hands on stuff. I don’t want to be the kind of place where you have to wear a suit and bring in a portfolio to work on stuff.”
He pauses as his wife enters to collect the slumbering baby and leave.
“Do you need any help?” he asks.
“No,” she responds, settling the two infants into a more manageable position. A back and forth of “fine” and “sure?” ensues, ending with Maugeri looking at us and saying, “I’m going to help her anyway,” and momentarily vanishing.
“Where were we?” he asks upon return.
“About not professionalizing?” I say.
“Ah,” he pauses, and then adds, “I just want to make sure we get it clear. The theater is not resisting becoming professional. We’re all about professionalism if it’s defined as appropriate structures to the medium. We’re not resisting.”
I ask if he fears the organization becoming what groups Cirque Du Soleil or Blue Man have become. “It must be nice to have such a lucrative base,” he replies. “It has liberated the key artists and they have an army of performers getting steady work. I wouldn’t want to do with some of the things they do, like staging a back-up show for Celine Dion in Las Vegas. I hate Las Vegas. It’s a tough town — one of the saddest places I’ve ever been.”
He glances at Topolosky, and laughs, “Should I not be saying that? Don’t write that down. I love the shows. I love the people. I love the buffets.”
– Story by Kim Velsey, first photo by Sean Williams