LIZARD MUSIC
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The man’s name was Anderson Punch–at least that was what he was called when he arrived in Chicago from Louisiana in 1911. His friends, especially on his home turf on the south side, called him Casey Jones, after the folk song he often sang; when he died in 1974 at the age of 104, that was the name the obituaries used. But kids growing up here in the 40s, 50s, and 60s knew him simply as the Chicken Man.
The Chicken Man is a central figure in Lifeline Theatre’s odd and bewitching Lizard Music. As a mysterious and magic mentor who guides a little boy on an adventurous journey, the Chicken Man uses many names over the course of the show–Charles Swan, Vincent Van Gogh, Professor Kupeckie, Pieter Brueghel the Elder–but Anderson Punch and Casey Jones aren’t among them. But then, almost nothing in Lizard Music has its real name. Chicago, for instance, is called Hogboro; the all-purpose suburb from which the story’s hero, 11-year-old Victor, ventures into Hogboro is McDonaldsville; and the body of water that Victor traverses in search of an invisible lizard island is Lake Mishagoo. Like a prepubescent version of Naked Lunch, in which William S. Burroughs turned Tangier into the nightmarish Interzone, Lizard Music transforms reality into the weird and whimsical alternative universe created by its preteen protagonist, stimulated by loneliness and late-night TV.
