Off-off Broadway In Chicago

Edmund De Santis is a celebrated playwright and a founding member of the celebrated Harbor Theatre Company in New York City. De Santis has written many plays, including the award-winning Recensio, Thinking and Other Positions and American Subways to name a few. He is also coming to Chicago in November to see the Chicago premiere of his semi-autobiographical comedy Making Peter Pope, which is, coincidentally, the first time a Chicago company has staged one of his works.

Making Peter Pope is an edgy comedy about life, love, growing up, getting it up, keeping it up and getting it on with a hunky Italian. Combine a gay son, his crazy lesbian sister, a grief-stricken father, a nacho-munching stepmother (a faded showgirl), a pot smoking stepsister and her homophobic husband together with the hunky Italian boyfriend and you have Making Peter Pope, a play about trying to find love in the most unexpected places.

"Making Peter Pope came to me after a year of writer`s block. I decided to sit down and just write with no expectations and boundaries, so the first draft of this play was extremely long and there were tons of extraneous characters. I kept honing the idea of how the character of Peter related to the audience," commented De Santis. "In earlier drafts, people found him too hostile to the audience, trying to shock them. I tried to craft him more where he became a character that asked the audience to join in and go on this ride in his head with him."

At it`s New York premiere in 1999, Backstage wrote that "De Santis' play is engrossing, entertaining, suspenseful and sexy?" and NYTheatre.com listed it as one of the Top Ten Off-Off-Broadway Shows of 1999. Additionally Making Peter Pope is included in the recent anthology plays and playwrights for The New Millennium published by the New York Theatre Experience.