QUEER STORIES
Zebra Crossing Theatre at Chicago Filmmakers
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Created for Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, Queer Stories gathers together the work of ten local lesbian and gay poets, novelists, and playwrights. Some of the work has been previously theatricalized, most notably Nicholas A. Patricca’s poem “Frankie,” performed last June as part of an evening of his work–The Idea of Chaos at Key West–during Bailiwick’s Pride Performance series. Most of the pieces in this show either were created specifically for the page or were written to be performed in some poetry-slam-like venue. In either case, it was left to director Pamela Meyer to adapt the work for her six-member ensemble.
The range of topics in these 21 sketches is remarkably narrow; the majority of them concern in one way or another unrequited love, love gone wrong, and the deaths of friends or lovers. The sheer variety of the writing, however, is breathtaking: everything from Owen Keehnen’s straightforward comic narrative “The Hand Model” to D. Travers Scott’s consciously fragmented postmodern autobiography “Fifteen Incidents of Sexual Dysfunction” to Achy Obejas’s expressionistic playground chant “Knives.”
As a way of introducing Queer Stories Zebra Crossing’s artistic director Marlene Zuccaro tossed off the line: “If it wasn’t for writers we’d all be mimes.”
