Act 1: 2009
Act 1: 2009: Whose garage can we rehearse in?
We will be going back in time, ten posts over ten days to celebrate #10yearsWishbone anniversary.
Maybe Baby It’s You with David Brown, Brandon Little, Laurie Jones, and Elizabeth Colson.
Spring saw Wishbone’s first official production, Maybe, Baby It’s You by Charlie Shanian and Shari Simpson running at the Gorilla Tango Theatre. Directed by Katie Jones, the cast featured Wishbone members Brandon Little, Laurie Jones, Elizabeth Colson, and David Brown. Mandy Stertz designed the set and Kimberly Van Ness designed the costumes. Gorilla Tango was our first space and we adored it. Despite freezing rehearsals in the theatre’s garage and other people rehearsing loudly in the basement below while we performed, Gorilla Tango was filled with people making art and doing what they loved. Maybe, Baby It’s You is a play about falling in love, over and over again and remaining hopeful against the odds. And in that first winter, on a shoestring budget, with no one to tell us what the next move should be, we fell in love with our grungy spaces and the opportunity to do theatre we cared about. We were young and ready to conquer anything.
Part of the reason Wishbone began in Chicago was the city’s devotion to creating new theatre. In our time there, every member of Wishbone had the opportunity to meet and work with brilliant, creative playwrights. To celebrate the wealth of talent and offer opportunities for playwrights and actors alike, Wishbone was inspired to create The Merrythoughts Masquerade - a night of new, whimsical and off-kilter, ten-minute plays. From three men sharing a very large shirt to alternate endings for the Titanic, there were dozens of new performers, directors, and playwrights who came together to perform in an upstairs bar space...followed by a stellar party of course.
Who isn’t wearing a wig?
Katie Jones doing opening remarks.
Winter. Laughs are all well and good but Wishbone had the opportunity to delve into its darker side when Laurie Jones chose to stage Stephen Mallatratt’s ghost play, The Woman in Black in a former funeral home. Leaning in to a scary idea is one thing in theory and another thing entirely when the building manager tells you to “just put the lighting equipment back there on the cadaver table” (yup, that really happened). The play was directed by Laurie Jones and performed by Vincent Truman, John Mark Sawyer, and Janelle Rinne. Costumes were designed by Kimberly Van Ness. Joining the Wishbone team for the first but certainly not the last time was stage manager extraordinaire: Theresa Ebenhoeh. So extraordinary was Theresa that when the power went out within two minutes of the opening of the play, she ran back into the old embalming room (not making this up) and got the power back on in no time. She may have magical powers.
The power of The Woman in Black is its simplicity and reliance on excellent actors... and now we can brag about our actors (since they aren’t writing this) and say we were incredibly proud of them. If you don’t believe us, just read the review in the Chicago Reader (which thrilled us).
“Staged ghost stories can easily cross a line into camp. But Wishbone Theatre Collective does a bang-up job with Stephen Mallatratt’s clever adaptation of a 1983 novel by Susan Hill...Vincent Truman and John Mark Sawyer deliver the rich language with shivery nuance and believable British accents, Truman playing characters of all ages and classes. Laurie Jones’s minimalist staging takes full advantage of the venue, a former funeral home.”
— Laura Molzahn, Chicago Reader