The theater world is still struggling with funding cuts and fewer patrons in seats, which dates back to the pandemic. The current financial climate for theaters makes staging new shows even riskier. Yet two Chicago playhouses are not only rolling the dice on new works — they’re staging world premieres from first-time playwrights.
A Red Orchid Theatre is premiering “Veal” by Jojo Jones, a recent college graduate born and based in New York City. The Old Town theater company, founded in 1993 by a trio including the illustrious character actor Michael Shannon and Chicago theater veteran Larry Grimm, is known for gritty, dark shows with embedded social commentary. This new show already feels like a Red Orchid production; “Veal,” which runs until Nov. 2, is a dystopian dark dramedy about a young woman who becomes Queen of North America after a coup.
“At its core, in a Red Orchid play, the most important thing in the room has to be humanity,” said artistic director Kirsten Fitzgerald. She said from her first read, the play felt urgent and timely and fit into the style of the theater. “The play is comforting in its familiarity and its use of humor, and it’s also terrifying,” she said. “It plays with that absurdity that we tend to be drawn to here at A Red Orchid, where we can live in the truth until it’s just not a big enough container for the feelings.”
At Lifeline Theatre in Rogers Park, playwright Kimberly Dixon-Mays is excited for the world premiere of her play “Rabbits in Their Pockets,” about a pair of siblings in pursuit of resilience and joy. The show was developed through Lifeline’s 2024 BIPOC Developmental Workshop and is the first script from the program to be fully staged.
“The whole purpose of our workshop was to connect with BIPOC writers, with the idea that we would want to also produce their work,” said ILesa Duncan, an ensemble member at Lifeline. Duncan is the former artistic director, recently stepping down as the company restructured in response to budget woes. The theater currently operates with a managing producer, but the ensemble is collectively responsible for the artistic vision.
“Members of the ensemble really appreciated [Dixon-Mays’] approach,” Duncan said. “It was very unique to us and quite different from a lot of the work we’ve done. We’re known for our adaptation of existing literary work, and so books and maybe newspaper stories, but hers was based on folktales. It is a wholly original work and we were very excited about that.”
Both playwrights had different journeys to their coveted first staged productions, but they show similarities in storytelling. Each writer crafted a tale that hit close to home, with themes to which they feel personal connections.
Kimberly Dixon-Mays’ “Rabbits in Their Pockets,” is her first play produced for the stage since she was a student at Northwestern University in the 1990s. “It feels thrilling and surreal, if I’m being honest. Because like so many playwrights, I had an aspiration to get a full production and have been working toward it for a while,” she said.
Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
“Rabbits in Their Pockets,” which runs until Oct. 5, marks Dixon-Mays’ first time having a play produced since she was a student at Northwestern University in the 1990s. “My first grown-up full production,” she said.
“It feels thrilling and surreal, if I’m being honest. Because like so many playwrights, I had an aspiration to get a full production and have been working toward it for a while,” she said. Currently in her mid-50s, Dixon-Mays has had many staged readings and plays in development and workshops. But this show at Lifeline culminates a decades-long journey to a full production on stage.
Jones, on the other hand, started writing the “Veal” script in 2022, when she was a graduate student at New York University. She was in a playwriting class taught by Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee Kristoffer Diaz, whose newest play “Things with Friends” is on stage at American Blues Theatre through Oct. 5. Jones said Diaz connected with the script and submitted it for a fellowship, and although she wasn’t selected, being on the short list of finalists is how A Red Orchid Theatre found and commissioned her.
“It feels very quick,” Jones said. “When I wrote it, I was 23, and the characters are all 26 specifically. Now I’m 26, so it feels serendipitous and exciting that it’s happening when I’m actually the age of the characters that I wrote.”
As a writer, Dixon-Mays said she has always aimed to “not write about trauma.” She leans into difficult situations for her characters, but her intention is to write survivor stories. She has a reason for doing so: “Frankly, I was mentally exhausted, and I needed to write something that was joyful,” she said.
For “Rabbits in Their Pockets,” Dixon-Mays pulls from African folklore, using a trickster to drive her narrative. “It’s the kind of figure who gets in a sticky situation but is able to get out, and is able to get out with style and joy,” she explained. “That’s the kind of energy I wanted in my story and my characters.”
Jones said she wanted to write about something that felt honest and authentic. In “Veal,” the Queen is visited by three friends from middle school. She hasn’t seen them in many years, and they need help that comes at a strange cost. In the story, Jones explores themes of friendship between women, mental health in women and what happens when a person with no power suddenly has all the power in the world. “And whether nostalgia is a good thing or not,” she added.
“Veal” was written tonally as a comedy, but early readings rubbed Jones’ classmates in a different way. “I would call it a comedy,” she said, “But I brought in the first 20 pages to class, being like, ‘This is hilarious. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever written.’ And everyone was like, ‘So we read it, and we’re really scared.’ But I think it’s funny.”
Perhaps the reaction to the early pages reflect Jones’ approach to writing. She leans into things that are strange or weird because for her, they feel real.
“It’s exciting to bring in elements of things that are like, a little bit strange or a little bit off,” Jones said. “I feel like a lot of the time when we go through life, things feel that way. They feel strange or scary, or they feel weird. They feel like we have these heightened situations of being in an apocalypse or something, and we aren’t, but it feels that way.”
Another parallel is the two playwrights’ connection to audiences. Dixon-Mays wanted a story that was specific enough to be universally understood.
“I aspire to create plays where a character is struggling with something that’s like a universal human dilemma, with the specifics of who they are in this world,” she said. In “Rabbits in Their Pockets,” her characters are siblings who together must overcome past hardships to find joy — and to discover their own humanity and place in the world. In parsing big existential questions, Dixon-Mays hopes more people will see themselves in her story.
Jones’ story speaks to the generation of young people who have faced an epidemic of loneliness since the COVID-19 pandemic. “Veal” places a group of young adults who were once friends as teens back together. And it puts one of the young women in the position of ultimate power, which the playwright said she uses the play itself to assert her own: “I can make it that she’s as powerful as a queen,” Jones said, “and I don’t have to explain why, because it’s my play.”