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It was a dark and stormy night. A young theatre artist looked out the window of their parents' home in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. They heard a crash, "and I could just see a downed power cable and it was just sparking and dancing around. I was so struck by the electricity," they recall. "Energy, current, voltage: that's where art is. It's always still going to be going, even if you try to cut it off." So when it was time to form a theater company, they were ready.
The resultant company, LiveWire Chicago Theatre, has been official since 2006 and has produced to date a neat handful of nine main stage productions as well as curating the annual VisionFest, a collection of new ten minute plays, since 2008. The company mixes world premieres with underappreciated gems, trying not to do a play that's been in Chicago in the last ten years. In a city with over 200 theatre companies this can require a lot of digging, but the members are undaunted, "We look for things that are socially and politically relevant to us. We're all late 20s early 30s so we want works that speak to us right now. Very rarely do we do something that skews older."
The company has a unique organization, eschewing more customary monikers like ensemble or company, for the admittedly "hippy-sounding" collective, but for them it's a distinction with both emotional and practical resonance. This way they can still benefit from group input and camaraderie without any members feeling overly entitled. As they put it, being part of the collective means decision making and participation, "but it's no easy ticket to get cast in all the shows. We don't like to give favors out to ourselves, to fall back into a lackadaisical approach and lose that fire."
Indeed this desire to include as many people in the process as possible was part of what led to LiveWire Chicago's creation of the VisionFest, an annual one-act festival organized around a theme that gets selected by votes on the company's website. "We wanted a way to give back to the community and to seek out what the community wants. It's just sort of awe-inspiring the kind of community involvement that's possible. Every year I'm...shocked."
Benno Nelson
You can read more of Theatre In Chicago contributor Benno Nelson's writing at The@er (http://the-at-er.blogspot.com)
Full Storefrontal
Read the other articles in Benno Nelson's "Full Storefrontal" series that focuses on small theatre companies around Chicago on the Full Storefrontal page.