Ghost Bike

Ghost Bike recounts the story of Ora and Eddie, two kids who found freedom and friendship exploring the big Windy City on their bicycles-but when Eddie is killed by an errant motorist, the inconsolable Ora is not content to erect him a sidewalk memorial like that in the play's title. Instead, she invades the Realm of the Dead on her fixed-gear bike to reclaim her beloved comrade, whatever the cost.

Since an adolescent's grief encompasses the entire universe, the necro-deities who assist her in her quest are a pantheon drawn from Greek, Norse, Hindu and Buddhist myth. Nor should it come as any surprise that the preferred mode of transport in the underworld are the wheeled vehicles that play such a prominent role in Ora's memories of happier days.

Oh, but bicycles need ROOM, and lots of it—not unlike the 19th-century hippodromes that once housed spectacle employing live horses. Fortunately, soon after completing her modern adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, playwright Laura Jacqmin saw Buzz22 Chicago's production of She Kills Monsters and decided that the artists who transformed the Steppenwolf Garage into a Dungeons & Dragons fantasy kingdom were the ones to engineer its premiere.

"Our design team began working on this project in November of 2013," says director Sara Sawicki, "The bulk of the process was the seven-week rehearsal period in January and February of 2014, during which we received a second major rewrite. Laura was on-site with us through tech rehearsals and made revisions right up to the opening date."

Potential cast members were screened for their cycling skills, reports movement director Nathan Drackett. "Some of the actors used them everyday for their commutes, but others hadn't ridden in years. The show's intricate choreography made for extra challenges, so we also held an audition where we asked actors to demonstrate their skills at controlling bikes in confined spaces."

These aren't ordinary Schwinns or Huffys, either. Molly FitzMaurice and George Bajalia had to envision the kind of "spokes" flaunted by the velocipedal residents of Mount Olympus and its environs: a playful satyr's stacked-frame highboy, say, or Charon's handlebar-mounted shopping cart, big enough to carry both Ora and her bike across the roiling waters of the Styx.

"Constructing our own bikes allowed us to make them character-specific and to further differentiate the 'freak' bikes from what you see in your own neighborhood lanes," FitzMaurice explains, "The Norse god Hel, for example, who represents the competing forces of life and death, rides two bicycle halves—a Recumbent and a Sting Ray—that share a single back wheel, with their riders facing opposite directions."

"The customized bikes were made by Sam Leuthold and myself," Bajalia adds, "We chopped up three child-sized bicycles for the satyr's wee-bike—which was Molly's idea, by the way—and laid them down on the floor to map out how we wanted it to look, before Sam machine-welded them together." He chuckles, "We took it for a test-ride outside on the ice during one of the polar vortices, figuring that whatever was safe in 'Chi-beria' would be okay for the stage."

The internal logic of the underworld mandates that all of its denizens travel on wheels, but not all of them are necessarily cyclists. The central body of three-headed Cerberus may bunny down flights of stairs on a BMX, but his sidekicks navigate their sentry post on inline-skates, while a shade identified as "Old Ghost" pushes a rolling walker.

FitzMaurice declares her favorite to be the kick-scooter upon which a dainty-gowned Persephone makes her ladylike entrance. "In the early drafts of the script, Persephone was a pedestrian, but I'd been trying all through the development process to sneak a razor-scooter into the show. Then, after we'd already started rehearsing, Jacqmin wrote it in and I was so stoked! It was a moment of text-production synchronicity like you can only experience when collaborating on a new work."

Ghost Bike runs at the Greenhouse through April 6.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Contributing Writer