For the second time in its three-year existence, the Wasserstein Prize—named for the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein—has chosen a Chicago winner. Marisa Wegrzyn was announced this morning as the winner of the 2009 prize, established after Wasserstein’s death in 2006 and awarded each year to a female playwright “who has not yet received national attention.” The award comes with a $25,000 stipend; it’s “intended for a writer to whom $25,000 will make a substantial difference in her professional life,” according to TDF, which administered the award for the first time this year. (That’s pretty much every writer I know. But I digress.) Wegrzyn’s script Hickorydickory was chosen as the winner by a panel of Wasserstein’s friends that included Lincoln Center Theater artistic director Andre Bishop, actress Alma Cuervo, entrepreneur Yscaira Jimenez, playwright Bruce Norris (whose new play A Parallelogram premieres at Steppenwolf this season) and Newsday critic Linda Winer. Last year’s Wasserstein Prize went to another Chicago-based playwright, Laura Jacqmin.

Wegrzyn, a Chicago Dramatists resident playwright and co-founder of Theatre Seven of Chicago, says the prize came at a good time. “I was canned from my dayjob this summer, and I was banking on the Temp Agency to find me work soon,” she told me in an email this afternoon. “Now I’m buying time to write. I’m going to pay my rent and the bills. But I also want to go on a shopping spree through the Sky Mall catalogue so we’ll see.” Hickorydickory will also get a reading at New York’s Second Stage as part of the prize. We profiled Wegrzyn in August 2007.

American Theater Company artistic director PJ Paparelli announced Tuesday night that the company is planning a months-long celebration of its 25th anniversary, commissioning short works from 34 playwrights from the Chicago area and around the country. Each playwright was asked to choose a year from the company’s lifespan, 1985 to 2010, and use that year as a springboard to address ATC’s mission question: What does it mean to be an American?

The short pieces will debut in groups of five on February 8, March 1, May 24, June 1 and June 7; the entire collection will then be reprised each evening June 16–20, during the Theatre Communications Group’s conference in Chicago. Paparelli and Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornes will collaborate on a prologue piece to introduce the evening.

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Photo: Zach Gross, 2007.

This evening, acclaimed performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes and Violeta Luna of the ensemble La Pocha Nostra cap off a weeklong residency at Columbia College with a free public performance of Corpo/Ilicito: The Post-Human Society #69. I talked yesterday with Gómez-Peña, the recipient of a 1991 MacArthur “genius grant” and a longtime explorer of cultural and psychological border territory, about the new work.

Time Out Chicago: You’ve described Corpo/Ilicito as responding to the challenge of the end of the Bush regime. How does Obama’s election alter the position of the oppositional artist?

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: We’re exploring philosophically the transition from a legacy of cultural fear, the demonization of the body of the Other: the Latino immigrant, the queer body, the female body. This legacy is still with us, parasitic, like a lingering fog in the streets and in the institutions. How is it affecting us? How are we self-censoring?

And then how does this fit with an institutionalized culture of hope? We’re trying to compare notes from our own project of hope. Are we in sync with them? Is Obama willing to listen to artists and intellectuals?

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Erik Kaiko, Govind Kumar, David Rhee and Joseph Anthony Foronda

Conceptually, Silk Road Cabaret: Broadway Sings the Silk Road seems like a brilliant idea. Silk Road Theatre Project, known for its mission of championing work by playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean descent, takes a century’s worth of musical-theater songs set along the ancient, eponymous trade route—most penned by American or western European writers who exoticized and “otherized” Eastern lands and their people—and gives them to performers of those ethnicities, who provide context and their own identity experience. It’s an act of reclamation, of sorts. And it’s hard to disagree that, especially in the mid-20th century when musical theater was at the height of its popular culture influence, shows like The King & I, South Pacific and Flower Drum Song had a strong impact on American perceptions of “the Orient.”

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St. Paul Pioneer Press theater critic Dominic P. Papatola reports that the Twin Cities leg of Kevin Von Feldt’s planned three-city tour of A Christmas Carol has been canceled. Minneapolis’s Orpheum Theatre called it off after Von Feldt failed to make a second deposit payment. Von Feldt tells Papatola that he’s hoping to reschedule the Minneapolis week, which was scheduled to come between stops in Baltimore and Chicago’s Civic Opera House, but that without that week the tour would likely fall apart. This is the latest complication for Von Feldt, who has a history of troubled productions; keeping in character, he threatens legal action against Twin Cities programmer Broadway Across America in Papatola’s report.

In an unusual move for a very small theater company, the New Colony is transferring its current production, the new James Asmus play Calls to Blood, midway through its run. What’s more, the company’s transferring within the same building. Demand for tickets has been strong enough over the last two weeks in the Royal George’s 50-seat upstairs Gallery space that TNC is confident enough to pack up and head downstairs, into the 180-seat Cabaret space, starting Thursday 29. If the show’s as well executed as it sounds—I haven’t seen it yet, but you can read John Beer’s review—perhaps the extra seats are needed to accommodate repeat viewings; in the company’s equally unique ticketing scheme, a single ticket purchase allows for unlimited attendance. Calls to Blood runs through November 7.

Photo: Michelle Faust

The Hideout stage has played host to some colorful characters: Neko Case, Ken Vandermark and TOC Books editor Jonathan Messinger, for starters. But few have the flair for grabbing attention, along with body parts, demonstrated by its new resident, the bluesy and voracious flytrap relative Audrey II.

Last night marked the opening of the Hideout Players’ weekend-long production of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s boy-meets-flora saga Little Shop of Horrors. Featuring a cast of the club’s employees and regulars, the production blends a curiously infectious barroom-meets-community-theater vibe with a high level of artistic accomplishment. It helps that the Hideout’s staff and tipplers sport some impressive theatrical resumes.

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The cast of The Addams Family arrived in town this week for its final weeks of rehearsals before the show begins previews November 13. (The show won’t open for the press until December 9.) There are plenty of big names (Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth) and Broadway stalwarts (Kevin Chamberlin, Carolee Carmello, Terrence Mann) in the New York-bound production, but the cast also features some young up-and-comers. I sat down yesterday with two of them: Krysta Rodriguez, who portrays the show’s 18-year-old Wednesday Addams, and Wesley Taylor, who plays Wednesday’s unnervingly “normal” boyfriend Lucas Beineke.

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Second City fans of a certain vintage may recall the ballyhoo during every mainstage performance about other shows at the theater, including the long-gone weekend children’s show, which was promoted, to general laughter among adult audiences, as “Sunday, Sunday, the little bastards’ fun day.” Well, those fun days are about to come back, you lucky little bastards:

Second City is set to debut the kids’ show Hogwash in the de Maat Theater on the third floor of Pipers Alley Nov. 8. Tickets will be $10 a pop (and a mom and a kid). The new 50-seat theater is named after late instructor Martin de Maat. (Disclosure: I took classes from Martin at Players Workshop of the Second City in the ’80s and also performed in one of the Second City kids’ shows back in the day.)

Hogwash is an improv show for kids that’s been around a while–in fact, we profiled it in the very first issue of TOC. But Kerry Sheehan, president of Second City Training Centers & Education Programs, told me recently, “We’re going to do our own Second City productions” in the space as well. I spoke with Sheehan for a story in the next issue of Time Out Chicago Kids, which will be out next month, so watch for our roundup of improv classes for little bastards boys and girls.

As if to prove that anything can go wrong in live theater, nearly everything did at Monday night’s 41st annual Joseph Jefferson Awards ceremony. (See the full list of winners.) Starting with an over-descended curtain in the opening number by the cast of Million Dollar Quartet that briefly cut off the drummer and bass player from the rest of the band, the show was marked by a remarkable number of flubs. Most of the evening’s presenters seemed unrehearsed, leading to bungled sequencing with the PowerPoint projection of nominees’ and winners’ names and to a number of awkward moments waiting for winners who weren’t there. (I counted at least ten no-shows, about a quarter of the total, including Blackbird’s William L. Petersen, Miss Saigon’s Joseph Anthony Foronda and The History Boys‘ designer Brian Sidney Bembridge; also, not a single representative of Steppenwolf was present to accept its best production—large trophy for The Seafarer.) Hosts Elizabeth Ledo and Rob Lindley, too, seemed to be ad-libbing their shtick all evening. They’d have done well to take a cue from 50th-anniversary honorees Second City: Improv in rehearsal, then set the script.

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