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HED: With cocktails and cartoonist generals, Victory Gardens' "Chicago Stories" hopes to delight

BY ELISABETH KILPATRICK

MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

(919) 656-2300

It looks like your typical Chicago theater annual benefit. The lavish setting. The gourmet appetizers. The silent auction. The 10-minute musical comedy written by an Illinois Attorney General?

Victory Gardens Theater's will hold its 18th annual "Chicago Stories" gala at the Four Seasons Hotel on Friday. The theater asks Chicago celebrities to pen original 10-minute plays each year and then stages the shows at the festive gala. This year's trio of amateur playwrights is Bill Zwecker, columnist for Chicago Sun-Times; Richard Christiansen, former critic for the Chicago Tribune; and a husband-and-wife team: Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and Pat Byrnes, a cartoonist for The New Yorker.

"My favorite part is that we're right on schedule," said Dennis Zacek, artistic director of Victory Gardens. "We're right where we should be in the creative process."

Zacek has run Victory Gardens for 30 years, making his tenure the longest in Chicago theater history. He has directed "Chicago Stories" since its inception. This year's celebrity playwrights, chosen by Victory Gardens' board, will be making their theater debuts.

"We try to come up with people who are well known and loved," Zacek said, "and we try to get someone from the sports or political arena frequently."

Madigan and Byrnes' musical, "The Cartoonist General," is the married couple's stab at melding on stage their wildly divergent careers.

The real connections weren't entertaining enough for a 10-minute show," Byrnes said, "but we thought a spoofy hybrid, in the creation of a Cartoonist General, might be."

Madigan, who writes several speeches a week as Attorney General, outlined the musical's plot. Byrnes, who calls cartoons "very, very short plays," was in charge of script and lyrics. Their resulting creation will be the second musical for "Chicago Stories".

"[Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist] Rick Telander wrote the first one," Zacek said. "It was about sportswriters. It was quite funny, actually."

For his play "Sorry, Right Number," Christiansen drew on his years of reading scripts and watching plays as a Chicago Tribune critic. The play is a lighthearted look at a man's futile attempt to sleep in on a Saturday morning while being interrupted by several phone calls. He said that the playwriting process came easily, but that the risks involved in creating a play are much more "thrilling and frightening." than reviewing one "The playwright has a much more immediate connection to the audience's reaction to his work," he said. "Also, unlike reviewing, [when] playwriting. you depend on the good work of others than yourself."

Zwecker, who has worked as an entertainment reporter and film critic for CBS2 as well as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, will debut his play "Food for Thought" for "Chicago Stories." Written about the opening of a much-anticipated restaurant in Chicago's River North neighborhood, the play draws on Zwecker's years of covering the celebrity beat.

Madigan, Byrnes, Christiansen and Zwecker join a varied list of "Chicago Stories" celebrity playwrights. Their predecessors include former U. S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, former Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., and University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum. Clearly, Victory Gardens likes to mix it up with its roster of guest playwrights. Last year's gala featured chef Rick Bayless, WGN radio host Rick Kogan and "Check Please!" host Alpana Singh.

At Victory Gardens' first "Chicago Stories" performance, held at Quigley Preparatory Seminary, audio problems abounded. Zacek remembers that a board member's husband pulled him aside afterwards to offer some encouragement.

"He said, 'Don't give up. You can improve this,'" Zacek recalled. "So I did. I refined it over the years."

This year's $300-a-plate gala includes a sit-down dinner, silent and live auctions, and raffle. Victory Gardens typically sells 500 tickets to "Chicago Stories," and last year's event raised $220,000, almost 10 percent of the theater's $2.9 million annual operating budget.

Some of the proceeds benefit Victory Gardens' three educational programs, designed to give local Chicago Public Schools students a chance to visit the theater and develop theatrical voices of their own. Since opening in 1974, Victory Gardens has focused on original theater and playwriting. It's one of the country's few regional theaters that has its own playwrights ensemble.

"Plenty of Chicago theaters can say they have an ensemble of actors," Zacek said. "Here at Victory Gardens, we have an ensemble of writers."

Victory Gardens, "Chicago Stories." Four Seasons Hotel, 120 E. Delaware. 6 p.m. Friday. $300. Contact Kate Oczkowski, Victory Gardens Director of Events and Individual Giving, (773) 549-5788, ext. 2140.     

 

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