Concerts

Last October, the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD) and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) appointed multidisciplinary artist Ariella Granados as its first Central West Center artist in residence. Supported by the MOPD, the National Endowment for the Arts, and DCASE, the residency offers studio space and funding for Granados to develop her artistic practice, host open studios and meetups for artists with disabilities, and present a series of public programs between January and July. 

January programming launched with an open studio with Granados and a sound workshop by blind media artist Andy Slater. On January 27, Granados screens Experimental Graphic Score Performance, their first work completed during the residency, alongside an hour-long DJ set. Programs in upcoming months include a DJ workshop, an improv/comedy workshop with Jesse Swanson of iO, a set design workshop, and a makeup/character workshop—all designed to cultivate a community of artists with disabilities. 

“What I love most is . . . Ari’s playfulness in their work,” says Zhen Heinemann, DCASE director of visitor experience and public engagement, who has been working with MOPD on the residency. “The projects . . . seemed a fun entry point for folks . . . with wigs, makeup, set construction, improv. That kind of work supports a social environment to celebrate in community. Because Ari is a performance-based artist and a makeup artist, it’s a theatrical world. People who come from the performance world come from a place of collaboration and community. It’s a program that’s about opening arms and gathering people in, in a fun, playful, joyful way.”

Blending humor, drama, and improvisational play, Granados’s work spans creative direction, makeup, performance art, video, and music—frequently casting herself in alternate worlds and even altered bodies to experience, process, and reimagine personal history, family dynamics, and existence as a first-generation Mexican and Indian artist with a disability. In 2021, Granados created a series of videos using green screens to transport them to spaces such as the surface of a resident card (No Documents), a meat processing plant, a gas station convenience store, and the set of a telenovela (I Used To Have Cable Before He Left, parts 1-3), using makeup and costuming to transform themself into characters that inhabit these spaces, including imagined renditions of their parents. 

In 2022, during a residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Granados began to transform the background into the foreground by reinventing herself as a green character. “The color green is used to render things in postproduction, so I’m thinking of [the] color green and blue as ways of rendering my body,” says Granados. “I use the color green as a metaphor. When you’re standing in front of a green screen, you have to render the image you want into the green screen for you to be where you want to be. I started using green screen to put myself in different places, to recreate memories and imagine memories. [Now] I use the color green as a way of rendering my body.”

For more information about the programs and residency with Ariella Granados at Central West Center, and to register and request accessibility needs, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/public-programs-central-west-center-artist-in-residence-ariella-granados-tickets-477485651437

At the Central West Center, which houses the MOPD and the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services at 2102 West Ogden, Granados has been developing an album called /’pôlzē/. “It’sspelled the way it’s pronounced, palsy: to be paralyzed,” says Granados. “It’s me thinking about my experience being paralyzed and how I can convey that through sound, and thinking about experiences I’ve found paralyzing in my upbringing.” Coproduced with drummer Eddie Burns, the album also features musicians Josh Jessen (keys/synth), Alec Trickett (percussion), William Corduroy (bass/guitar), and Kenneth Leftridge Jr. (saxophone/flute)—a “community of people coming together,” says Granados. Three songs from the album will be presented on January 27, with videos created in collaboration with sound engineers at VSOP Studios, production assistant Erika Grey, and directors of photography Alex Halstead and Pouya Shahbazi.

“I grew up in the church and grew up singing,” says Granados, who was born in Texas and came to Chicago to study art at UIC. “When I left Christianity, I left singing. But when I built a friendship with Eddie and began to participate in the music community, it happened out of nowhere—going to the studio, making songs—before I knew it, I had eight or nine songs.” 

“This is what it feels like to be in my body, a paralyzing experience,” says Granados. “I have Erb’s palsy, paralysis on my right arm. It was medical mistreatment—the doctor’s fault when they were delivering me—then I was not properly treated. My mom had just immigrated to the U.S. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to navigate the medical system.”

“I didn’t really come into my disability identity until three years ago. I grew up hiding my arm—for 23 years. I was not in my body. I was very much just in survival mode,” says Granados. “Like many of us, I had a lot of time to sit with myself through the pandemic, and that was it for me. I was forced to come to terms with my feelings around my disability. I was tired of hiding. I think the moments that gave me confidence in coming into myself were through self-expression with my makeup and clothing. I was naturally drawn to bright colors and patterns as a way to distract myself from my disability.”

“Coming into my identity as a person living with a disability has helped me understand myself and step into my body. For so long I have been so deeply dissociated, living with chronic pain, what comes with having a disability. I’d premeditate how I would get up and move across the room and make sure I would do it in a way that people wouldn’t notice my arm.” Now performance has become “a way to reclaim my body,” says Granados.

Community has been key to Granados’s progress. “Finding the Chicago Artists with Disabilities Facebook page was life-changing to me. I had felt alone for so long. Being in a body is hard, especially with the upbringing I had. I grew up radically Christian, being at church conferences with 150 people praying for me, like God was going to heal my arm. It was because of those experiences that I hid. I broke with that when I moved to Chicago. I was 17. [I thought ] I shouldn’t be living with this much guilt and shame in my life for being myself, for wanting to express myself and be a human. Now I’ve been here for nine years. Community—that’s what’s kept me here, because the winters are brutal. There’s such a rich community here of artists and musicians. Now I’m slowly beginning to build a disability community. I’ve wanted this space for so long.”

The culminating project of Granados’s residency is designed to build and acknowledge this community of disabled artists—a video in which they intend to engage other artists with disabilities in visions of utopia: “What does utopia mean to you? What does it mean to be in your body? What makes you feel the most at home?”

For themselves, Granados says, “I don’t care for perfect. Utopia to me is an imagined place of rest and pleasure, where humans who look like me and different kinds of ways are celebrated and honored. Utopia is a place where I can exist freely and safely in my body. It’s a place that is digitally rendered, green, with an influx of images of big arms and hands. Utopia is a place that accommodates every body. It’s a place that prioritizes access and needs across the board.”

“I’m not a victim of pain; I am in relationship with pain and that complicates things because it’s one of the things you just have to come to terms with, and sometimes it’s really difficult to accept. I spend time in my room doing my affirmations—‘I am enough, yes’—but goddammit I’m also in a lot of pain. What do I do with that? Make art.”

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Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has long been overshadowed by Jane Eyre—its “more popular younger sister,” in Sara Gmitter’s words—the 1853 novel takes the spotlight at Lookingglass Theatre next month in a world premiere adaptation written by Gmitter and directed by Tracy Walsh. 

Based on a period of bereavement, homesickness, and unrequited love in Brontë’s own life, Villette traces the journey of English protagonist Lucy Snowe to a fictional, French-speaking city where she builds a new life as a teacher at a girls’ boarding school. 

“It’s her last novel, and I think it’s her best one,” said Gmitter, an artistic associate at Lookingglass, in a joint interview with Walsh, one of the theater’s ensemble members. According to Gmitter, the bookis more psychologically complex and mature than Jane Eyre. “Villette is so much more realistic, and so much more grounded in real, lived human experiences that we can all relate to—that poignant feeling of unrequited love that Lucy feels and that sense of wanting to make a place for herself.”

Villette2/8-4/23: previews 2/8-2/17 Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; opens Sat 2/18 6:30 PM, then Tue-Wed 7 PM, Thu 1:30 and 7 PM, Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM; Sun 2/19 6:30 PM only; Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $50-$75

Walsh added that this novel is special because Lucy finds happiness, not through a “Hollywood-style” makeover, but rather through the personal connections she finds as she works to achieve a successful career and a home of her own. “She’s made a whole life for herself,” Walsh said. “It’s not a story where love saves her—where she suddenly has a physical transformation and becomes physically desirable to everybody.”

With most editions of the book clocking in at 500 pages or more, adapting it for the stage is an exercise in selectivity. Gmitter took Lucy’s first-person narration as a starting point for the play, which is also told from her perspective. 

“What would Lucy do if it’s a play? She’s only going to show us the characters that we absolutely need and the scenes that we absolutely need,” Gmitter said. “What does this audience, this night, need in order to go on the emotional journey that she wants them to have?”

One of Gmitter’s priorities for the adaptation was conveying Lucy’s sense of humor, which surprised her when she first read the novel. “Lucy is so funny sometimes—the observations that she makes, the way that she calls nonsense nonsense, and the way that she’s so honest but in this wry way that is also so clever.”

Her complex inner life was another key quality to get across in the play. “Just because Lucy doesn’t have all the experiences that a typical romantic heroine might have, she still has all these feelings, and she still has so many thoughts,” Gmitter noted. 

“The language that she has in the book is so beautiful,” she added. “We can’t have all of the beautiful words [in the play]. Fortunately, we have an amazing actor [Mi Kang] who can show us the beautiful words with her face and with the way that she holds herself.”

Kang leads a cast of six, most of whom are new to working with this playwright and director. “We had the best time assembling this cast,” said Walsh. “Sara and I agreed that we would know the people when we saw them because they would be the people who were these characters.”

“They’re an incredibly talented group, and they understand the play really well,” she continued. “You can tell when somebody gets the play, and this group of people just knocked it out of the park in their auditions.”

Gmitter added that it was important to find actors who could create a character that audiences would love to watch “even when they’re being awful.” She explained: “Some of them do some things that are not so kind, but you still love these characters because they’re so rich and they’re so deep.”

When it came to designing the production, Walsh and Gmitter were grateful to have plenty of time to meet with their designers—who are usually booked on multiple shows simultaneously—and work through the play together. 

“The design concept is that, rather than being a literal representation of a 19th-century world, it’s more of a psychological representation,” Walsh explained. “[It’s] warm, beautiful, compelling, psychological, and constantly transforming itself.”

Similarly, the costumes (designed by Mara Blumenfeld) are inspired by “a 19th-century silhouette,” but without the signature bell skirts of the era. One reason for this change is practical; there are four women characters in the play, and the space on stage is limited. “If everybody’s got the giant skirt on, there’s no way everybody’s going to fit,” Walsh said. 

“Because we made the decision to not make them specifically period-correct, we could play around with pulling in different kinds of looks, so the costumes look fantastic,” she added. “They look from another time, but they don’t look from any time in particular.”

In another departure from interpreting this period drama literally, Walsh and Gmitter decided the actors should speak in their own accents even though all the characters are British or from a fictionalized Belgium. The only exceptions are lines that the Francophone characters deliver in their native language; the actors have worked with a dialect coach on these. 

All the actors auditioned with and without foreign accents, and “everyone we saw was fantastic,” said Walsh. “But when we had them drop their accents and just be themselves, suddenly we were able to get this really honest window into who they were as actors. Then we just knew—this person is Monsieur Paul [Lucy’s love interest] or Madame Beck [headmistress of the school where Lucy works].”

“Unless the accent is necessary as part of the storytelling—especially since we’re telling a story that’s not set in the present day—it’s one more little excuse for the audience to think, ‘Oh, this is not now; this is not here. This is an adaptation of an old novel,’” added Gmitter. “If it’s [the actors’] own accents, it’s that much closer to what’s real and what’s present for the audience.”

Ultimately, Gmitter and Walsh want audience members to feel a personal connection with the resilient heroine of Villette and to be inspired by her remarkable story. “My hope, honestly, is that there are people who come out of the theater feeling the way I felt the very first time I read the book, when I was blown away by how much this, at the time, 150-year-old book was speaking so directly to me in a way that other books hadn’t,” Gmitter said. 

“For me, the message of resilience is so important,” added Walsh. “Lucy loses so many people; she struggles. She has to start her life over in a new place, with every obstacle in her way and nothing to help her.” 

“It’s such a great reminder that, at the end, she’s content,” Walsh concluded. “To take stock of what you have and to say, ‘This is a good life; it’s the life I have, and I’m going to find joy in it’—for me, that’s a really powerful message that Lucy shares, and I hope that resonates with the audience.”

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The post Chicago Reader Volume 52, No. 8 appeared first on Chicago Reader.Read More

Last October, the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD) and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) appointed multidisciplinary artist Ariella Granados as its first Central West Center artist in residence. Supported by the MOPD, the National Endowment for the Arts, and DCASE, the residency offers studio space and funding for Granados to develop her artistic practice, host open studios and meetups for artists with disabilities, and present a series of public programs between January and July. 

January programming launched with an open studio with Granados and a sound workshop by blind media artist Andy Slater. On January 27, Granados screens Experimental Graphic Score Performance, their first work completed during the residency, alongside an hour-long DJ set. Programs in upcoming months include a DJ workshop, an improv/comedy workshop with Jesse Swanson of iO, a set design workshop, and a makeup/character workshop—all designed to cultivate a community of artists with disabilities. 

“What I love most is . . . Ari’s playfulness in their work,” says Zhen Heinemann, DCASE director of visitor experience and public engagement, who has been working with MOPD on the residency. “The projects . . . seemed a fun entry point for folks . . . with wigs, makeup, set construction, improv. That kind of work supports a social environment to celebrate in community. Because Ari is a performance-based artist and a makeup artist, it’s a theatrical world. People who come from the performance world come from a place of collaboration and community. It’s a program that’s about opening arms and gathering people in, in a fun, playful, joyful way.”

Blending humor, drama, and improvisational play, Granados’s work spans creative direction, makeup, performance art, video, and music—frequently casting herself in alternate worlds and even altered bodies to experience, process, and reimagine personal history, family dynamics, and existence as a first-generation Mexican and Indian artist with a disability. In 2021, Granados created a series of videos using green screens to transport them to spaces such as the surface of a resident card (No Documents), a meat processing plant, a gas station convenience store, and the set of a telenovela (I Used To Have Cable Before He Left, parts 1-3), using makeup and costuming to transform themself into characters that inhabit these spaces, including imagined renditions of their parents. 

In 2022, during a residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Granados began to transform the background into the foreground by reinventing herself as a green character. “The color green is used to render things in postproduction, so I’m thinking of [the] color green and blue as ways of rendering my body,” says Granados. “I use the color green as a metaphor. When you’re standing in front of a green screen, you have to render the image you want into the green screen for you to be where you want to be. I started using green screen to put myself in different places, to recreate memories and imagine memories. [Now] I use the color green as a way of rendering my body.”

For more information about the programs and residency with Ariella Granados at Central West Center, and to register and request accessibility needs, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/public-programs-central-west-center-artist-in-residence-ariella-granados-tickets-477485651437

At the Central West Center, which houses the MOPD and the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services at 2102 West Ogden, Granados has been developing an album called /’pôlzē/. “It’sspelled the way it’s pronounced, palsy: to be paralyzed,” says Granados. “It’s me thinking about my experience being paralyzed and how I can convey that through sound, and thinking about experiences I’ve found paralyzing in my upbringing.” Coproduced with drummer Eddie Burns, the album also features musicians Josh Jessen (keys/synth), Alec Trickett (percussion), William Corduroy (bass/guitar), and Kenneth Leftridge Jr. (saxophone/flute)—a “community of people coming together,” says Granados. Three songs from the album will be presented on January 27, with videos created in collaboration with sound engineers at VSOP Studios, production assistant Erika Grey, and directors of photography Alex Halstead and Pouya Shahbazi.

“I grew up in the church and grew up singing,” says Granados, who was born in Texas and came to Chicago to study art at UIC. “When I left Christianity, I left singing. But when I built a friendship with Eddie and began to participate in the music community, it happened out of nowhere—going to the studio, making songs—before I knew it, I had eight or nine songs.” 

“This is what it feels like to be in my body, a paralyzing experience,” says Granados. “I have Erb’s palsy, paralysis on my right arm. It was medical mistreatment—the doctor’s fault when they were delivering me—then I was not properly treated. My mom had just immigrated to the U.S. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to navigate the medical system.”

“I didn’t really come into my disability identity until three years ago. I grew up hiding my arm—for 23 years. I was not in my body. I was very much just in survival mode,” says Granados. “Like many of us, I had a lot of time to sit with myself through the pandemic, and that was it for me. I was forced to come to terms with my feelings around my disability. I was tired of hiding. I think the moments that gave me confidence in coming into myself were through self-expression with my makeup and clothing. I was naturally drawn to bright colors and patterns as a way to distract myself from my disability.”

“Coming into my identity as a person living with a disability has helped me understand myself and step into my body. For so long I have been so deeply dissociated, living with chronic pain, what comes with having a disability. I’d premeditate how I would get up and move across the room and make sure I would do it in a way that people wouldn’t notice my arm.” Now performance has become “a way to reclaim my body,” says Granados.

Community has been key to Granados’s progress. “Finding the Chicago Artists with Disabilities Facebook page was life-changing to me. I had felt alone for so long. Being in a body is hard, especially with the upbringing I had. I grew up radically Christian, being at church conferences with 150 people praying for me, like God was going to heal my arm. It was because of those experiences that I hid. I broke with that when I moved to Chicago. I was 17. [I thought ] I shouldn’t be living with this much guilt and shame in my life for being myself, for wanting to express myself and be a human. Now I’ve been here for nine years. Community—that’s what’s kept me here, because the winters are brutal. There’s such a rich community here of artists and musicians. Now I’m slowly beginning to build a disability community. I’ve wanted this space for so long.”

The culminating project of Granados’s residency is designed to build and acknowledge this community of disabled artists—a video in which they intend to engage other artists with disabilities in visions of utopia: “What does utopia mean to you? What does it mean to be in your body? What makes you feel the most at home?”

For themselves, Granados says, “I don’t care for perfect. Utopia to me is an imagined place of rest and pleasure, where humans who look like me and different kinds of ways are celebrated and honored. Utopia is a place where I can exist freely and safely in my body. It’s a place that is digitally rendered, green, with an influx of images of big arms and hands. Utopia is a place that accommodates every body. It’s a place that prioritizes access and needs across the board.”

“I’m not a victim of pain; I am in relationship with pain and that complicates things because it’s one of the things you just have to come to terms with, and sometimes it’s really difficult to accept. I spend time in my room doing my affirmations—‘I am enough, yes’—but goddammit I’m also in a lot of pain. What do I do with that? Make art.”

Read More

Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has long been overshadowed by Jane Eyre—its “more popular younger sister,” in Sara Gmitter’s words—the 1853 novel takes the spotlight at Lookingglass Theatre next month in a world premiere adaptation written by Gmitter and directed by Tracy Walsh. 

Based on a period of bereavement, homesickness, and unrequited love in Brontë’s own life, Villette traces the journey of English protagonist Lucy Snowe to a fictional, French-speaking city where she builds a new life as a teacher at a girls’ boarding school. 

“It’s her last novel, and I think it’s her best one,” said Gmitter, an artistic associate at Lookingglass, in a joint interview with Walsh, one of the theater’s ensemble members. According to Gmitter, the bookis more psychologically complex and mature than Jane Eyre. “Villette is so much more realistic, and so much more grounded in real, lived human experiences that we can all relate to—that poignant feeling of unrequited love that Lucy feels and that sense of wanting to make a place for herself.”

Villette2/8-4/23: previews 2/8-2/17 Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; opens Sat 2/18 6:30 PM, then Tue-Wed 7 PM, Thu 1:30 and 7 PM, Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM; Sun 2/19 6:30 PM only; Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $50-$75

Walsh added that this novel is special because Lucy finds happiness, not through a “Hollywood-style” makeover, but rather through the personal connections she finds as she works to achieve a successful career and a home of her own. “She’s made a whole life for herself,” Walsh said. “It’s not a story where love saves her—where she suddenly has a physical transformation and becomes physically desirable to everybody.”

With most editions of the book clocking in at 500 pages or more, adapting it for the stage is an exercise in selectivity. Gmitter took Lucy’s first-person narration as a starting point for the play, which is also told from her perspective. 

“What would Lucy do if it’s a play? She’s only going to show us the characters that we absolutely need and the scenes that we absolutely need,” Gmitter said. “What does this audience, this night, need in order to go on the emotional journey that she wants them to have?”

One of Gmitter’s priorities for the adaptation was conveying Lucy’s sense of humor, which surprised her when she first read the novel. “Lucy is so funny sometimes—the observations that she makes, the way that she calls nonsense nonsense, and the way that she’s so honest but in this wry way that is also so clever.”

Her complex inner life was another key quality to get across in the play. “Just because Lucy doesn’t have all the experiences that a typical romantic heroine might have, she still has all these feelings, and she still has so many thoughts,” Gmitter noted. 

“The language that she has in the book is so beautiful,” she added. “We can’t have all of the beautiful words [in the play]. Fortunately, we have an amazing actor [Mi Kang] who can show us the beautiful words with her face and with the way that she holds herself.”

Kang leads a cast of six, most of whom are new to working with this playwright and director. “We had the best time assembling this cast,” said Walsh. “Sara and I agreed that we would know the people when we saw them because they would be the people who were these characters.”

“They’re an incredibly talented group, and they understand the play really well,” she continued. “You can tell when somebody gets the play, and this group of people just knocked it out of the park in their auditions.”

Gmitter added that it was important to find actors who could create a character that audiences would love to watch “even when they’re being awful.” She explained: “Some of them do some things that are not so kind, but you still love these characters because they’re so rich and they’re so deep.”

When it came to designing the production, Walsh and Gmitter were grateful to have plenty of time to meet with their designers—who are usually booked on multiple shows simultaneously—and work through the play together. 

“The design concept is that, rather than being a literal representation of a 19th-century world, it’s more of a psychological representation,” Walsh explained. “[It’s] warm, beautiful, compelling, psychological, and constantly transforming itself.”

Similarly, the costumes (designed by Mara Blumenfeld) are inspired by “a 19th-century silhouette,” but without the signature bell skirts of the era. One reason for this change is practical; there are four women characters in the play, and the space on stage is limited. “If everybody’s got the giant skirt on, there’s no way everybody’s going to fit,” Walsh said. 

“Because we made the decision to not make them specifically period-correct, we could play around with pulling in different kinds of looks, so the costumes look fantastic,” she added. “They look from another time, but they don’t look from any time in particular.”

In another departure from interpreting this period drama literally, Walsh and Gmitter decided the actors should speak in their own accents even though all the characters are British or from a fictionalized Belgium. The only exceptions are lines that the Francophone characters deliver in their native language; the actors have worked with a dialect coach on these. 

All the actors auditioned with and without foreign accents, and “everyone we saw was fantastic,” said Walsh. “But when we had them drop their accents and just be themselves, suddenly we were able to get this really honest window into who they were as actors. Then we just knew—this person is Monsieur Paul [Lucy’s love interest] or Madame Beck [headmistress of the school where Lucy works].”

“Unless the accent is necessary as part of the storytelling—especially since we’re telling a story that’s not set in the present day—it’s one more little excuse for the audience to think, ‘Oh, this is not now; this is not here. This is an adaptation of an old novel,’” added Gmitter. “If it’s [the actors’] own accents, it’s that much closer to what’s real and what’s present for the audience.”

Ultimately, Gmitter and Walsh want audience members to feel a personal connection with the resilient heroine of Villette and to be inspired by her remarkable story. “My hope, honestly, is that there are people who come out of the theater feeling the way I felt the very first time I read the book, when I was blown away by how much this, at the time, 150-year-old book was speaking so directly to me in a way that other books hadn’t,” Gmitter said. 

“For me, the message of resilience is so important,” added Walsh. “Lucy loses so many people; she struggles. She has to start her life over in a new place, with every obstacle in her way and nothing to help her.” 

“It’s such a great reminder that, at the end, she’s content,” Walsh concluded. “To take stock of what you have and to say, ‘This is a good life; it’s the life I have, and I’m going to find joy in it’—for me, that’s a really powerful message that Lucy shares, and I hope that resonates with the audience.”

Read More

Mike Shaker’s sausages snap like firecrackers. His brisket melts away like smoked milk chocolate on your tongue. His mac and cheese is a warm, creamy security blanket in the cold, terrifying night.

Put them together on one plate and you’ve assembled the formidable, low and slow powers of Shaker Barbeque, headlining the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up—now at Ludlow Liquors in Avondale.

Shaker has decades of fine dining experience behind him (Nellcote, Nico Osteria, Cira). Back in the day, he headed up charcuterie production at the late, great Old Town Social. But when the pandemic struck, he left his post with the Boka Group and returned to the backyard passion he inherited from his late father.

Shaker Barbeque brisket

Armed with a pair of Weber bullet smokers and an infinite supply of post-oak, Shaker launched a guerilla catering and pop-up operation, pushing central-Texas-style barbecue on a greedy, salivating legion of chef pals. Today he has as much work as he can handle, emerging among the city’s tight-knit, collaborative renaissance of itinerant, new-school smokers. The sausages he stuffs with brisket trim and copious amounts of black pepper, achieving that startling snap with a five-hour, cold-hot smoke, interrupted by a skin-stretching ice water shock. I’ve been floored by those ethereal slabs of jiggly, smoked prime beef at previous Foodballs, when he’s jumped in to join the crew.

On January 30 he’s keeping it simple—filling walk-in orders for a single heaping plate of those magical meats, accented with his peppery sauce, plus mac and slaw on the side. Foodball OG Charles Wong of Umamicue is joining this crew, along with future Foodball OG Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ.

Look for a bacon fat-washed mezcal Old Fashioned from the gang behind the bar.

Just walk into Ludlow Liquors, 2959 N. California, starting at 5 PM, this Monday, January 30.

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Andy Warhol was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, a voyeur who wanted to be a superstar. Thirty-six years after his death we are still trying to suss him out. Which may be why this year we have not one but two plays about Andy Warhol being produced—one at the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, the other at Northlight in Skokie. (And in New York, Anthony McCarten’s play, The Collaboration, about Warhol’s relationship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, runs through February 11 at Manhattan Theatre Club.)

Andy Warhol’s Tomato tells the story of a young Andrew Warhola, before Manhattan and before he dropped the final “a” in his last name to sound less ethnic. Andy Warhol in Iran features Andy in the 70s—the laconic, white-wigged Studio 54 Warhol, the Andy who survived the 60s, the Andy who shook things up with his Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe portraits. The Warhol who was left after the Factory and the superstars and Valerie Solanas’s assassination attempt. 

For all their differences, the two plays share some striking similarities. Both are two-person plays, and both feature an encounter between Warhol and someone who is very different from Warhol. 

Andy Warhol in IranThrough 2/19: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; open captions and ASL performance Fri 2/10 8 PM, open captions and audio description/touch tour Sat 2/11 2:30 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$89 ($15 students pending availability)Andy Warhol’s Tomato2/2-3/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; ASL performance Thu 2/23; McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Boulevard, 630-942-4000, btechicago.com, $42

Andy Warhol’s Tomato embellishes an apocryphal story about Warhol from his art student days at Carnegie Tech. Playwright Vince Melocchi, who grew up in Warhol’s hometown of Pittsburgh, explains, “There’s a bar up the street from where I grew up, originally called Bunovich’s, when Old Man Bunovich owned it. There was a story that went around that a young Andy Warhol used to draw on napkins for Cokes for Old Man Bunovich because he got a kick out of them. Now, this is just a story, right? But it stuck with me.”

Commissioned by the LA-based Pacific Resident Theatre to turn this bit of lore into a play, Melocchi’s script catches Warhol at an interesting moment in his life. It’s Andy before he moves to New York, but already in his short life he has endured a couple of traumatic, life-changing events—the death of his father when he was 13 as well as the illness in the 3rd grade, Sydenham’s chorea (also called St. Vitus’ dance), that kept him confined in bed, listening to the radio and reading movie magazines. 

“This is a fable that conjectures what Warhol was like before he went to New York,” director Steve Scott elaborates. “It is kind of nice to get to know Andy as a kid when he was kind of just a person, a very distinctive person, but just a guy. This is Andy before the persona. But you can see from this play how the persona kind of formulated. There’s a whole scene at the end where Bones is looking at Andy’s sketchbook, and then we see the pictures that [Warhol has been] sketching and see how they became the works that we know later on: Mickey Mouse and the Campbell’s Soup cans.”

The Buffalo Theatre Ensemble production is part of an ongoing celebration of Andy Warhol at the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage that culminates in a major exhibit of Warhol’s work at the Art Center: “Andy Warhol Portfolios: A Life in Pop” (June 3 to September 10). 

Bryan Burke (left) and Alexander Wisnieski onstage in rehearsal for Andy Warhol’s Tomato with Buffalo Theatre Ensemble. Director Steve Scott is seated at the table on the right. Courtesy Rex Howard Photography

The actor who plays young Andy in Andy Warhol’s Tomato, Alexander Wisnieski, is also making appearances at other McAninch Arts Center events as a Warhol impersonator. Wisnieski shares many of Warhol’s features—his Slavic bone structure, his extremely pale skin. In a silver wig he is a dead ringer.  

Wisnieski bubbles over when he talks about playing Andy. “I played Warhol [at COD] for his birthday party. And then there was a donor event. I did a ticket sale event before actually auditioning for the play. I’ll also be in the exhibit in a kids’ room video, which is really exciting. And then I will be there for four days after the exhibit opens.” Wisnieski will also appear as Warhol at a gala benefit on February 18 entitled “A Night at Studio 54: For the Love of Warhol.”

“I didn’t know all that when I cast him,” Scott laughs. “But he did an enormous amount of research to prepare for [his Warhol] gigs. He came in [to the audition] as prepared as I’ve ever seen an actor to play this character.”

When researching Andy Warhol it is hard not to do too much research. There is so much out there. Rob Lindley, who plays Warhol in Northlight’s show, admits to falling into the Warhol hole when preparing for the role.

“I am a research nerd,” Lindley tells me. “I do [a lot of] research for every project I do. I drove myself to Pittsburgh this summer so I could go to the Warhol Museum. Each day I was there I visited his grave site.”

Lindley admits he was motivated to do lots of research because he felt a “bit of pressure” playing Warhol: “There is certainly a challenge playing someone that was so well known. I feel like I’ve always played [fictional] characters. Well, [Warhol’s] a real character, that’s for sure. Whether he was a real person or not, it still remains to be seen. Andy himself said that his greatest work of art was himself and that he was his greatest creation. So there’s a challenge to that.”

The Andy in Andy Warhol in Iran is a very different Warhol than the callow fellow in Andy Warhol’s Tomato. This is the Warhol who once quipped, “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” At this time he raked in the cash doing silkscreen portraits of the very wealthy.  

One of his clients was the Shah of Iran. Andy Warhol in Iran was inspired by Warhol’s trip to Tehran in 1976 to take Polaroids of the Shah’s third wife, Farah, for a commissioned portrait. But the tale playwright Brent Askari tells is wholly fictional. 

“In [Askari’s] play, this young kidnapper tries to kidnap Andy Warhol to bring the world’s attention to what’s going on in Iran and to turn them against the Shah,” director BJ Jones explains.

For Askari, the story is very personal: “My dad is from Iran, he’s Shiite Muslim. And my mom was an Episcopalian New England WASP. So growing up was with those two very distinct cultures, and I didn’t quite fit into either camp. 

“I got a commission from a theater in Western Massachusetts called Barrington Stage Company. They were interested in something historical about Iran. I originally was thinking like, we’re going to do something with the Shah.” 

But when Askari remembered Warhol’s trip to Iran, his plans changed.

“So the original idea was that it was going to be a two-person play with Andy Warhol and the Empress. But that only lasted about a day because I sort of realized as a dramatist that there was no conflict. And so that’s when I had the idea, like, oh, maybe I need somebody that has a completely different point of view, right?”

“In the play we have these two revolutionaries clashing,” Jones tells me. “One an artistic revolutionary and one social justice.”

“So my character is Farhad,” Hamid Dehghani, who plays Warhol’s would-be kidnapper, tells me. “He’s a young educated man who has been to America, who realizes the cruelty of the Shah’s regime. And so he decides to sacrifice and take immediate actions to make changes for his people and his country.”

The irony is the person Farhad decides to kidnap was about as disaffected, apolitical, and emotionally disconnected an American artist as you could find in 1976. 

After he was shot in 1968 Warhol famously said, “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.” But in a way Warhol continued living like he was watching TV for the rest of his life.

“Writing this play, I felt a mixture of pity and sympathy for Andy Warhol,” Askari reflects. “He lived this life of fame and fortune and success. But with all that he achieved, it seemed like he ended his life fairly unhappy.”

Yet he still fascinates. And that’s why his 15 minutes of fame will never run out.

Read More

Mike Shaker’s sausages snap like firecrackers. His brisket melts away like smoked milk chocolate on your tongue. His mac and cheese is a warm, creamy security blanket in the cold, terrifying night.

Put them together on one plate and you’ve assembled the formidable, low and slow powers of Shaker Barbeque, headlining the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up—now at Ludlow Liquors in Avondale.

Shaker has decades of fine dining experience behind him (Nellcote, Nico Osteria, Cira). Back in the day, he headed up charcuterie production at the late, great Old Town Social. But when the pandemic struck, he left his post with the Boka Group and returned to the backyard passion he inherited from his late father.

Shaker Barbeque brisket

Armed with a pair of Weber bullet smokers and an infinite supply of post-oak, Shaker launched a guerilla catering and pop-up operation, pushing central-Texas-style barbecue on a greedy, salivating legion of chef pals. Today he has as much work as he can handle, emerging among the city’s tight-knit, collaborative renaissance of itinerant, new-school smokers. The sausages he stuffs with brisket trim and copious amounts of black pepper, achieving that startling snap with a five-hour, cold-hot smoke, interrupted by a skin-stretching ice water shock. I’ve been floored by those ethereal slabs of jiggly, smoked prime beef at previous Foodballs, when he’s jumped in to join the crew.

On January 30 he’s keeping it simple—filling walk-in orders for a single heaping plate of those magical meats, accented with his peppery sauce, plus mac and slaw on the side. Foodball OG Charles Wong of Umamicue is joining this crew, along with future Foodball OG Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ.

Look for a bacon fat-washed mezcal Old Fashioned from the gang behind the bar.

Just walk into Ludlow Liquors, 2959 N. California, starting at 5 PM, this Monday, January 30.

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Andy Warhol was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, a voyeur who wanted to be a superstar. Thirty-six years after his death we are still trying to suss him out. Which may be why this year we have not one but two plays about Andy Warhol being produced—one at the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, the other at Northlight in Skokie. (And in New York, Anthony McCarten’s play, The Collaboration, about Warhol’s relationship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, runs through February 11 at Manhattan Theatre Club.)

Andy Warhol’s Tomato tells the story of a young Andrew Warhola, before Manhattan and before he dropped the final “a” in his last name to sound less ethnic. Andy Warhol in Iran features Andy in the 70s—the laconic, white-wigged Studio 54 Warhol, the Andy who survived the 60s, the Andy who shook things up with his Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe portraits. The Warhol who was left after the Factory and the superstars and Valerie Solanas’s assassination attempt. 

For all their differences, the two plays share some striking similarities. Both are two-person plays, and both feature an encounter between Warhol and someone who is very different from Warhol. 

Andy Warhol in IranThrough 2/19: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; open captions and ASL performance Fri 2/10 8 PM, open captions and audio description/touch tour Sat 2/11 2:30 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$89 ($15 students pending availability)Andy Warhol’s Tomato2/2-3/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; ASL performance Thu 2/23; McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Boulevard, 630-942-4000, btechicago.com, $42

Andy Warhol’s Tomato embellishes an apocryphal story about Warhol from his art student days at Carnegie Tech. Playwright Vince Melocchi, who grew up in Warhol’s hometown of Pittsburgh, explains, “There’s a bar up the street from where I grew up, originally called Bunovich’s, when Old Man Bunovich owned it. There was a story that went around that a young Andy Warhol used to draw on napkins for Cokes for Old Man Bunovich because he got a kick out of them. Now, this is just a story, right? But it stuck with me.”

Commissioned by the LA-based Pacific Resident Theatre to turn this bit of lore into a play, Melocchi’s script catches Warhol at an interesting moment in his life. It’s Andy before he moves to New York, but already in his short life he has endured a couple of traumatic, life-changing events—the death of his father when he was 13 as well as the illness in the 3rd grade, Sydenham’s chorea (also called St. Vitus’ dance), that kept him confined in bed, listening to the radio and reading movie magazines. 

“This is a fable that conjectures what Warhol was like before he went to New York,” director Steve Scott elaborates. “It is kind of nice to get to know Andy as a kid when he was kind of just a person, a very distinctive person, but just a guy. This is Andy before the persona. But you can see from this play how the persona kind of formulated. There’s a whole scene at the end where Bones is looking at Andy’s sketchbook, and then we see the pictures that [Warhol has been] sketching and see how they became the works that we know later on: Mickey Mouse and the Campbell’s Soup cans.”

The Buffalo Theatre Ensemble production is part of an ongoing celebration of Andy Warhol at the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage that culminates in a major exhibit of Warhol’s work at the Art Center: “Andy Warhol Portfolios: A Life in Pop” (June 3 to September 10). 

Bryan Burke (left) and Alexander Wisnieski onstage in rehearsal for Andy Warhol’s Tomato with Buffalo Theatre Ensemble. Director Steve Scott is seated at the table on the right. Courtesy Rex Howard Photography

The actor who plays young Andy in Andy Warhol’s Tomato, Alexander Wisnieski, is also making appearances at other McAninch Arts Center events as a Warhol impersonator. Wisnieski shares many of Warhol’s features—his Slavic bone structure, his extremely pale skin. In a silver wig he is a dead ringer.  

Wisnieski bubbles over when he talks about playing Andy. “I played Warhol [at COD] for his birthday party. And then there was a donor event. I did a ticket sale event before actually auditioning for the play. I’ll also be in the exhibit in a kids’ room video, which is really exciting. And then I will be there for four days after the exhibit opens.” Wisnieski will also appear as Warhol at a gala benefit on February 18 entitled “A Night at Studio 54: For the Love of Warhol.”

“I didn’t know all that when I cast him,” Scott laughs. “But he did an enormous amount of research to prepare for [his Warhol] gigs. He came in [to the audition] as prepared as I’ve ever seen an actor to play this character.”

When researching Andy Warhol it is hard not to do too much research. There is so much out there. Rob Lindley, who plays Warhol in Northlight’s show, admits to falling into the Warhol hole when preparing for the role.

“I am a research nerd,” Lindley tells me. “I do [a lot of] research for every project I do. I drove myself to Pittsburgh this summer so I could go to the Warhol Museum. Each day I was there I visited his grave site.”

Lindley admits he was motivated to do lots of research because he felt a “bit of pressure” playing Warhol: “There is certainly a challenge playing someone that was so well known. I feel like I’ve always played [fictional] characters. Well, [Warhol’s] a real character, that’s for sure. Whether he was a real person or not, it still remains to be seen. Andy himself said that his greatest work of art was himself and that he was his greatest creation. So there’s a challenge to that.”

The Andy in Andy Warhol in Iran is a very different Warhol than the callow fellow in Andy Warhol’s Tomato. This is the Warhol who once quipped, “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” At this time he raked in the cash doing silkscreen portraits of the very wealthy.  

One of his clients was the Shah of Iran. Andy Warhol in Iran was inspired by Warhol’s trip to Tehran in 1976 to take Polaroids of the Shah’s third wife, Farah, for a commissioned portrait. But the tale playwright Brent Askari tells is wholly fictional. 

“In [Askari’s] play, this young kidnapper tries to kidnap Andy Warhol to bring the world’s attention to what’s going on in Iran and to turn them against the Shah,” director BJ Jones explains.

For Askari, the story is very personal: “My dad is from Iran, he’s Shiite Muslim. And my mom was an Episcopalian New England WASP. So growing up was with those two very distinct cultures, and I didn’t quite fit into either camp. 

“I got a commission from a theater in Western Massachusetts called Barrington Stage Company. They were interested in something historical about Iran. I originally was thinking like, we’re going to do something with the Shah.” 

But when Askari remembered Warhol’s trip to Iran, his plans changed.

“So the original idea was that it was going to be a two-person play with Andy Warhol and the Empress. But that only lasted about a day because I sort of realized as a dramatist that there was no conflict. And so that’s when I had the idea, like, oh, maybe I need somebody that has a completely different point of view, right?”

“In the play we have these two revolutionaries clashing,” Jones tells me. “One an artistic revolutionary and one social justice.”

“So my character is Farhad,” Hamid Dehghani, who plays Warhol’s would-be kidnapper, tells me. “He’s a young educated man who has been to America, who realizes the cruelty of the Shah’s regime. And so he decides to sacrifice and take immediate actions to make changes for his people and his country.”

The irony is the person Farhad decides to kidnap was about as disaffected, apolitical, and emotionally disconnected an American artist as you could find in 1976. 

After he was shot in 1968 Warhol famously said, “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.” But in a way Warhol continued living like he was watching TV for the rest of his life.

“Writing this play, I felt a mixture of pity and sympathy for Andy Warhol,” Askari reflects. “He lived this life of fame and fortune and success. But with all that he achieved, it seemed like he ended his life fairly unhappy.”

Yet he still fascinates. And that’s why his 15 minutes of fame will never run out.

Read More