Victory Gardens Fresh Squeezed announces the World Premiere of Aiming For Sainthood, written and performed by Arlene Malinowski, directed by Will Rogers. The production runs September 20-26, 2010, in the in the Richard Christiansen Theater at Victory Gardens, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago.

Following up the success of her solo show What Does The Sun Sound Like?, Fresh Squeezed premieres the second installment in her autobiographical trilogy.  When her deaf mother gets cancer, a middle-aged daughter moves back in her childhood room with two questions, “Where is God?’ and ‘Who took my Springsteen poster?”  Funny, touching and poignant, these theatre pieces are told through sign language and voice, using both Deaf and hearing storytelling and theatrical techniques.

“Arlene is such a compelling theatrical voice” says Fresh Squeezed Associate Producer Will Rogers. “This amazing woman has her hands, quite literally, in two different worlds and her engaging, generous spirit on stage is magnetic.  We are excited to have Arlene back on our stage as she continues exploring the intersections of deaf and hearing theater. We are thrilled to produce the World Premiere of this important piece”.

Arlene’s acclaimed autobiographical solo plays have played to sold out houses and standing ovations throughout the country. These stories are about the hilarious, heartbreaking, heartwarming, totally true tale of a hearing prodigal daughter growing up in a deaf family & culture.  It is the tale of a girl/woman surviving and interpreting sound for her parents while interpreting the world for herself. They’re the tales of being a cultural tourist, bridging a world of two languages and two cultures, and the universal search for identity.

Aiming for Sainthood is a project of Victory Gardens Theater Fresh Squeezed and The Access Project Crip Slam Series. Aiming For Sainthood was originally commissioned and workshopped by 16th Street Theater in Berwyn with further workshop development by Chicago Dramatists, Millennium Park and the Chicago Department of Chicago of Cultural Affairs.

Arlene Malinowski is an actor/playwright who views her solo work as an extension of the social justice issues she has been committed to for the last 25 years.  Her five solo shows have been produced and performed in venues nationwide.  Her work has been honored with a 3Arts Nomination, LA Theatre Ovations nomination, LA Weekly Award, and a Garland Award.  Television credits include CSI, ER, The Practice, The X Files, Any Day Now, The Division, Sweet Nothing in My Ear.  Arlene has taught in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and Artist in Residence with the 2011 Quad City’s Arts Program.

Will Rogers is Associate Producer of Victory Gardens Fresh Squeezed.  As part of the series he has directed Arlene Malinowski’s previous solo-show What Does the Sun Sound Like?, Margot Bordelon’s You Are Here and Literally Sexy.  Within Fresh Squeezed, he has also had the privilege of producing work with 2^nd Story, The Neo-Futurists, The New Colony, 16^th Street Theater, Drinking & Writing Brewery, Mike Daisey, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, WNYC’s Radiolab, Charles Busch, Julie Halston, Terry Galloway, and many more.  In Chicago, Will has directed Silent Night of the Lambs and the Summer Camp reading of Marked Down Woman for Hell in a Handbag Productions.  Will most recently produced and directed Busch Fest, a festival of four early works by Charles Busch, with his company The Idea Place.  Will is an alumnus of Lincoln Center Directors Lab and Directors Lab Chicago.  Previous to his move to Chicago, he directed in Austin, TX; Freedom, ME; Birmingham, AL; and Savannah, GA.

About Fresh Squeezed

Fresh Squeezed brings together provocative and exemplary artists in a series of special performances seeking out new, diverse audiences. Through language, music, poetry and history, Fresh Squeezed explores the varied ways theater is being performed today and surveys the performing arts medium to bring fresh new perspectives to the stage.

Fresh Squeezed encourages new people to visit the theater and poke around. Not just new audiences — but also new writers and performers and cultures and ideas. We are a theater dedicated to tending new plays, and in our rapidly diversifying cultural landscape, Fresh Squeezed allows us to cast a wide net and find hidden treasures that are relevant to our community. But don’t get the wrong idea; it doesn’t all have to be that heady. Victory Gardens is about some nonsense and laughter too.

Logistics and Amenities

Tickets

Tickets, $20 or $15 for Group and Access, are available through the Victory Gardens Box Office, 773.871.3000 (tty:  773.871.0682), tickets@victorygardens.org, or www.victorygardens.org.  For group discounts, 773.549.5788, groupsales@victorygardens.org.

Location

Performances are at the Richard Christiansen Theater at Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, in the heart of Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Performance Schedule

The production opens on Monday, September 20, at 7:30 p.m. and continues Wednesday at 2:00 p.m.; Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. All performances will be sign interpreted. The September 23 and 26 performances will be Audio Described and will feature word for word captioning.

Recommended Ages

The production is recommended for ages 12 and older.

Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Avenue, will present the World Premiere of The Invasion of Skokie, a 2010 finalist in the Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition by Network Playwright Steven Peterson.  The Invasion of Skokie will preview September 2, open September 10 and 11, and run through October 10, 2010.  Associate Artistic Director Richard Perez will direct.

It is the summer of 1978 and neo-Nazis are about to march on Skokie, Illinois now that they’ve won their U.S. Supreme Court case. In the midst of this ominous day, Morry Kaplan scrambles to find a gun to confront the Nazis while his wife Sylvia tries to keep the peace and her husband safe. Meanwhile, their daughter Debbie arrives for dinner with Charlie, once the ‘shabbes goy’ from the synagogue, now the man she announces she plans to marry. Mixing both comedy and drama, playwright Peterson asks whether a father can protect all he believes in without losing the daughter he loves. Set on a suburban backyard patio, The Invasion of Skokie is a funny and touching take on a significant day in Illinois history.

Steven Peterson is a current Senior Network Playwright and past Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists. His plays Blue Glass Paper, Paris Time, The Shabbes Goy, Protestants, and Heart of the Forest have been developed through staged readings and workshops at Chicago Dramatists. He is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

Director Richard Perez served as the Artistic Director of the Bloomington Playwrights Project in Bloomington, Indiana for seven years.  At Chicago Dramatists, he is responsible for The Playwrights Network, Chicago Dramatists’ national membership program of more than 200 writers, casting, support of Chicago Dramatists’ 60 Associate Artists, and collaborations with other Chicago theatres.  He recently directed Aiming for Sainthood by Resident Playwright Arlene Malinowski at Millennium Park.

The Invasion of Skokie features Mick Weber Morry Kaplan, Cindy Gold as Sylvia Kaplan, Tracey Kaplan as Debbie Kaplan, Steve Lehtman as Howie Green, and Bradford R. Lund as Charlie Lindal.

Developed in part through readings and workshops at Chicago Dramatists, the 2010-2011 productions were chosen from hundreds of plays-in-progress to be a part of the season. Continuing to introduce audiences to new work by local playwrights and engage theatre goers in new experiences, Chicago Dramatists’ season will continue with the February 2011 presentation of Resident Playwright Aline Lathrop‘s provocative play, Bordello, with guest director and Associate Artist Meghan McCarthy.  Chicago Dramatists will also bring the 2009 Wendy Wasserstein Prize-winning Resident Playwright Marisa Wegrzyn’s Hickorydickory, directed by Chicago Dramatists’ Artistic Director Russ Tutterow, to its stage to culminate the new season in Spring 2011.

About Chicago Dramatists

In the fall of 1979, four playwrights came together to hear their work read aloud and to hone their craft.  Today, Chicago Dramatists’ amazing record of achievement has landed them an invaluable place in the artistic community as a vital source of inspiration to 40 Resident Playwrights, 200 Associate Playwrights, 60 Associate Artists, and thousands of audience members.  Over the past three decades, Chicago Dramatists has worked with over a thousand playwrights, produced and developed thousands of plays and stayed true to its mission to nurture compelling, challenging and diverse plays that move on to productions, earn awards, and define the American theatre.

Chicago Dramatists has helped launch the career of hundreds of award-winning writers, including Tina Fey (30 Rock), Rick Cleveland (Mad Men), Rebecca Gilman (Spinning Into Butter), Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House), Lydia R. Diamond (Stick Fly) and Keith Huff (A Steady Rain).

Each season Chicago Dramatists presents three world premiere productions and the signature Saturday Series of weekly staged readings of plays-in-progress.  The theatre also conducts educational outreach to 400 at-risk students at Chicago Public Schools, awakening the possibility of self-expression by writing for the theatre. Through passionate dedication, personal nurture and careful exposure, Chicago Dramatists carries on its thirty-one-year-old mission of developing new plays and playwrights for the next generation of theatre.

Chicago Dramatists is located just minutes from the Loop at 1105 W. Chicago Avenue, at the 24-hour Chicago Avenue stop of the Blue Line subway, and is just off the Ogden and Augusta exits of the Kennedy Expressway. There is street parking available and free reserved parking with ticket purchase. For more information visit www.chicagodramatists.org.

Arlene Malinowski may not yet be a household name, but her work has reaped unparalleled effect across both cultures and geographies. One of the most prominent artists to work in solo performance, Malinowski has dedicated her professional career to bridging the lacuna between two seemingly divided theatergoing communities: the hearing and the Deaf. Equal parts advocacy and art, Malinowski’s groundbreaking work helps audiences to explore the concepts of voice and voicelessness, sounds and silence. One of her newer pieces, Aiming for Sainthood, will soon be presented in Millennium Park under the direction of the Chicago Dramatists, the company where Malinowski works as a resident playwright. Malinowski recently caught up with ShowBiz Chicago to discuss the performance and how she hopes theatre can be used to start some timely, yet too often ignored, conversations about artistic accessibility.

Interview by Alissa Norby

ShowBiz Chicago: Let’s talk first about Aiming for Sainthood. It is the second part of a trilogy following What Does the Sun Sound Like. How did this trilogy initially develop?

Arlene Malinowski: I knew I had a story to tell and I wanted to tell my family’s story because people were always asking me questions. I loved sitting across dinner tables and telling the story of my family. What Does the Sun Sound Like is based on a question my father asked me when I was about twelve. It had been cloudy and the sun had come out. He looked at me and said, “What does the sun sound like?” I looked at him and I said, “The sun has no sound.” He said, “Rain, you can see the rain but you can hear it. You can see snow but you don’t hear it.” So that was sort of a puzzle that my parents constantly tried to put together in this world.

ShowBiz Chicago: Aiming for Sainthood is a piece that explores your experience taking care of your mother during her battle with cancer. What about this real life journey prompted you to want to share it with others through the stage?

AM: I think that the piece has universality in so much as when there is a crisis in any family it becomes a microcosm for all of your good things as well as the bad. Your bad is just exacerbated. If you love each other you love each other a lot more, and if you have issues you really start to have even more problems. I thought it was an important story to tell because I believe there are always stories out there in which the system fails the patient or client. And the system did not fail us.

ShowBiz Chicago: You have mentioned the significance of religion and piety in several of your works. How did faith play a role in your personal experience?

AM: It was a growing experience for me, both faith based and as a person. My parents are very devout [Catholic] and I had come up through Catholic school and wandered away from faith. I had this extraordinary experience during this event . Oh boy this is going to sound crazy. But my mother was in the hospital, she was supposed to be in for four days and she wound up being in for twenty-five. I had another mother, my hearing mother, although we never said that out loud. She was my Aunt Jane, my father’s sister who lived downstairs from us. She had always told me that when you die, you go to fertilize the earth, that there is no Heaven or Hell and you move on in the hearts of people. I was always being pulled by their relationship. When my mother was really sick, my Aunt Jane came back to me and told me that everything would be fine and to wait until Monday. And sure enough, on Monday, my mother turned the corner and we were home by Tuesday afternoon.

ShowBiz Chicago: I consistently find that our institutions and communities are not solely defined by what they include, but rather whom they exclude. Aiming for Sainthood explores  faith, hearing, Deaf, and the medical communities. What did you discover about the interface between these groups?

AM: I believe that there is an intersection, it’s just that you need to look for it and cultivate it. I think that people who are uncomfortable with my parents’ deafness, or we could extend it to people who do not speak English, it’s just being able to cross over your comfort level. When it comes to faith, it’s getting past your discomfort level to say, “What are the possibilities?” In the medical world it’s crossing over your discomfort level to really do your homework and know what’s what. They intersect, you just need to be open to it.

ShowBiz Chicago: When you were able to open yourself up to it, what was your experience?

AM: The savior character in Aiming for Sainthood is a gay nurse. My parents completely embraced him. He was the one who loved my mother back to health, and I truly mean loved my mother back to health. Doctors fix, but nurses love. He was funny, unapologetic, and brought food and comfort for us. He was a lovely man. One of his greatest lines was, “I am not a stereotype. I am an archetype.” Isn’t that great? My parents totally opened to him in a way that was quite astonishing, especially given their years. To see that openness from my parents and to see the hospital staff have that openness was just an amazing experience in retrospect.

ShowBiz Chicago: I saw Love Person at Victory Gardens last summer and am embarrassed to admit that it was my first theatre experience with both a Deaf actress and stroryline. What has the experience been like for you to bring these stories to hearing people for the first time?

AM: It is the greatest gift of my life to be able to tell our stories. This one, my story, really is a love letter to my parents and I wanted to be able to on two accounts. One, to share that story and invite people to look beyond their own viewpoints of disability. My parents grew up in a time and we still do where the culture says that disabled people shouldn’t marry, God forbid they have kids, can they really work and make a living? To all of those questions my play says yes, yes, and yes. On the other side, the universality of these shows was the biggest surprise for me. People who came from a first generation immigrant family would say, “Oh my God, that is my family. I do the interpreting for my parents.” Other people come to me and say, “That is my parent. My parent was always missing because of alcohol or drug addiction.” It’s a very unique experience too because people make the assumption that you have to grow up really fast because you’re interpreting when you’re eight years old. But I always say that in the hearing community, everyone has chores, even the five year olds. In our community that is just an accepted way of living. So the universality of my pieces has been the most delightful surprise.

ShowBiz Chicago: You have backgrounds in education and counseling as well as theatre. What about using the performing arts as a teaching tool particularly interests and inspires you?

AM: I always say that the work that I do onstage is just an extension of the socially conscious work I have been committed to for the last twenty-five years. This has not only filled my well but has given me a chance to heal. It sounds so grandiose, but Bertolt Brecht said that art can either by a mirror held up to society or a hammer to shape it.

ShowBiz Chicago: You have mentioned Brecht before in relation to your work as an actor. How do you incorporate that approach into your own solo performance?

AM: I think when I am really truthful in my work, I think when I find the core of my truth, then I am doing that. That is a hard thing to find in your own story. I know that I found it when I feel the catch in my throat and I think, “I should never say that. But I need to.”

ShowBiz Chicago: Theatre has done an increasingly better job in the past few decades in reaching out to populations that have largely gone ignored as audiences, such as people of color, religious minorities, sexual minorities, etc. Why do you think theatre still has such a long way to go in its inclusion of the Deaf community?

AM: I believe that theatre in general has a long way to go because people are, how do I say this in a nice way, idiots. I say that because Congo Square does amazing work and a majority of white theatergoers will say, “Well that’s black work.” The work that they used to do at Bailiwick, people would respond with, “Oh that’s a gay story. That’s a gay organization.” Although I will tell you that Deafness is the pretty poster child for disability. Nobody drools and it is the most accessible. People say “Oh look, pretty hands.” I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but I think that is the way it is. Theatre has a long way to go with disability theatre in general. That’s the next big movement in the country. You know we had the Civil Rights movement, Women’s movement, and the LGBT movement that is still taking place, but the next one is the disability movement. The Baby Boomers are all getting to be seniors, and they are going to say, “You are not going to treat us like this.”

ShowBiz Chicago: I hope that the movement can find its way into the artistic communities as well.

AM: I believe so. At least I hope so.

ShowBiz Chicago: How can theatre artists work to bridge the divide between the hearing and Deaf communities so that theatre experiences can really be for all and enjoyed by all?

AM: I know that theatre companies need to provide access, which means, if you’re going to have a show, at least one performance please have it be interpreted. In Chicago we are still building our theatergoing community. The reason that Deaf people are not theatergoers is because there has never been anything for them. It’s not that theatre doesn’t speak to them, it’s just that our theatres haven’t cultivated that experience. The bigger theatres have started the process of having shows with full access. Victory Gardens stands alone in this town for accessibility. It has the signed productions but also a device, which you can sit in front of you, that is a small box on a stand that you can read. It is for people who are either Deaf or visually impaired. There are certain productions that also have captioned on the wall, like opera. There are also audio described events. Blind individuals can come in before the show and the facilitator will describe the set, hold a talk with the actors. People can ask actors what they look like and what their costumes look like. When you engage in this dialogue it gives us both an opportunity to have a better understanding. When there was a blind person in the pre-show who said, “Tell me what you look like. Does your voice match your body?” I realized I had never been asked that. We also need accessible seating, which not only allows for a person with a wheelchair but also the people they are with to sit next to them, you know?

ShowBiz Chicago: Absolutely. But as you said, and it is an important point, Victory Gardens may stand alone in its relentless effort to reach out to these communities.

AM: I agree with you completely. I think it is just a matter of education to the theatres and a cultivation of Deaf theatre-going and disabled theatre-going crowds. The third component is that people want to see their own stories. They want to see themselves mirrored. I think that we’ve got to start moving away from, and this is a gross generalization, the white male-centric entertainment. Movies, television, theatre, all of it caters to a very narrow community. I teach writing, and I always tell the people in my class, “Every time you tell your story, you are speaking for those who cannot speak. And because of that you make the world a smaller, and a sweeter, place.” When you see yourself onstage or in a movie, the world becomes smaller all of a sudden, doesn’t it? And not quite so hostile. A great joy I have in my life is to help people find their voice. Nothing is more important and fulfilling than creating performance opportunities for people to tell their stories. The truth is always just so much better than any kind of fiction. But we stopped telling our stories. People stopped telling them because we’ve stopped listening. But telling your story, whether it’s on a stage or over a cocktail, is necessary not only for understanding, but for survival.