press : the art of unbearable sensations |  the great galvani |  white suit science
                 iris eats a rose |  my name is mudd |  bantam lightweight
                 eugene and the song of the wicked starling

THE ART OF UNBEARABLE SENSATIONS | 2009

CHICAGO TRIBUNE  |  THREE STARS

"NO LACK OF INTELLECT AT RHINOCEROS FEST — The Rhinoceros Theater Festival is at its best in that sweet spot where smart, experimental work meets hypnotic performances by actors who can make the seat-of-the-pants nature of the festival work for them. Playwright and director Shawn Reddy, creator of past Rhino shows such as My Name Is Mudd (based on the Lincoln assassination) and White Suit Science (an off-kilter paean to Mark Twain), scores another bull's-eye with The Art of Unbearable Sensations, presented by the Magpies.
 
"Reddy takes aim at American credulity and isolation in a series of monologues, all delivered by members of P.T. Barnum's traveling sideshow. From Diana Slickman's insinuating bearded lady, Ludmilla, who works the microphone like a slam poet, to Guy Massey's phrenologist burdened with a guilty secret, Reddy's intellectual fun house characters reflect a dizzying array of minor arcana from American history. That includes the hype surrounding the Civil War-era wedding of 'little person' General Tom Thumb and the unbelievable tale of Phineas Gage, who took a spike through his brain and became the subject of early speculations about cerebral function.
 
"'Cerebral' is an apt adjective for this show, which tosses around references to early electro-muscular experiments, 19th Century songwriter Stephen Foster and famous sideshow cons such as the Fiji mermaid with robust glee. But Reddy and his ensemble add plenty of showmanship to the intellectual stew. Kathleen Powers is a vindictive, three-armed spiritualist abandoned at birth, and H.B. Ward is The Great Galvani, tormented son of early Italian physicist and frog vivisectionist Luigi Galvani."—Kerry Reid

CHICAGO READER  |  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

"This cunning, bittersweet piece—comprising monologues delivered by a quartet of sideshow freaks, who use Barnumesque razzle-dazzle to avoid facing troubled, fraudulent lives—proves once again that Curious Theatre Branch's Shawn Reddy is a total man of the theater. He wrote, directed, designed, and built it. Reddy's characters are prone to semi-surreal flights of fancy. Spiritualist Madame Petrovna, for instance, dreams of murdering the mother who abandoned her in infancy by crushing her with rotten 'speckled pears' loaded in a bassinet. These beguiling flourishes underscore the emptiness of lives reduced to marketable quirks. Reddy pushes four veteran stars of the Chicago fringe—Diana Slickman, Kathleen Powers, Guy Massey, and H.B. Ward—well beyond their comfort zones, giving the evening an edgy immediacy."—Justin Hayford

TIMEOUT CHICAGO  |  "RHINO REPORT" FEATURE

"This succession of carny-flavored monologues reflects writer/director Reddy's fascination with the secret history of American entertainment. Mashing the experiments of Luigi Galvani and the neurological curiosity Phineas Gage with the sideshow spectacle of P. T. Barnum, Reddy imbues his investigations into identity and artistic failure with a giddy melancholy. With an all-star cast from the Chicago fringe.... Massey skates brilliantly across the surfaces of his phrenological monologue, proffering emotional discoveries like an inexhaustible bouquet."—John Beer

NEW CITY  |  COVER HIGHLIGHT

"UNIQUE FREAK — 'Theater has such an opportunity to challenge audiences and give them a very unique experience,' says Shawn Reddy, of Curious Theatre Branch and The MAGPIES. The Art of Unbearable Sensations, Reddy's own MAGPIES side-project and Rhinoceros Theater Festival installment currently running at the Viaduct, is a case in point. The piece, which consists of a series of 'monologues/lectures that delve into what might have been the private lives of P.T. Barnum's circus freaks,' confronts audiences in a way much different than other theater. 'There is a lot of audience participation,' says Reddy. 'We get the audience to perform self-examinations of their own heads and to close their eyes and envision scenarios with the medium. We get the audience to play a more active role.' Reddy, inspired by his sympathy for circus freaks—'people would just pay twenty-five cents to see them and then walk away'—and his concern over shock art—'what purpose does shock art serve when nothing is shocking, everything is possible?'—has created a piece that should not be absentmindedly observed. 'If the audience goes away from the theater and holds on to what we did a couple hours longer and thinks about it—that's all we can ask,' Reddy says."—Meaghan Strickland

CENTERSTAGE  |  EDITOR'S PICK

"Weird, stylish and unexpectedly moving. Must see show!"

THE GREAT GALVANI | 2008

2009 ORGIE THEATRE AWARD  |  OUTSTANDING PLAYWRITING

For "original, innovative, risky, thrilling, inspiring, and possibly outlandish work in Chicago Theatre."

CHICAGO READER  |  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

"Something sits center stage, hidden under a white drape in The Great Galvani, Shawn Reddy's artfully eccentric, psychologically probing, intriguingly veiled character sketch about a carnival barker confronting memories of his father's sadistic experiments on frogs. And that mysterious something is emblematic of this ambitious, satisfying Curious Theatre project, offering nine new, short plays on three separate bills."—Justin Hayford

TIMEOUT CHICAGO  |  FOUR STARS

"Reddy's The Great Galvani, a glittering historical riff, nestles a new depth of feeling between the heady association and sarcastic fury that are his forte. H.B. Ward is arresting in the title role... [an] exaltation of language as a self-sufficient narrative engine."—Brian Nemtusak

WHITE SUIT SCIENCE | 2004–05

CHICAGO READER  |  CRITIC'S CHOICE

"Writer, actor, and director Shawn Reddy seeks to explode the idea that you can understand history by memorizing a collection of immutable facts: his eccentric plays based on historical research find the fault lines that indicate tectonic shifts in how we interpret the past. In My Name is Mudd, which focused on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he considered theories about the conspiracies that might have been involved in the murder of our 16th president, and in the process mocked plays that pretend to reconstruct personalities and events. In White Suit Science, Reddy and the Magpies deconstruct the mythic power of the southern-style linen suit and the degree to which the image of such men as Mark Twain and 'Colonel' Harlan Sanders in ice cream suits both defines the wearers and obscures inconvenient truths. One of the items Reddy dug up was that Twain wore his famous white suit only in the last four years of his life, yet thanks to the Twain industry that's our dominant image of him. This alone would make for interesting theater, but Reddy also deconstructs his deconstruction of the past by adding a fictional version of himself to the story and mocking his own foibles even as he's convincing us of his arguments....
 
"...By turns satiric, sarcastic, surreal, and painfully sincere, Shawn Reddy's new play defies easy description. The piece begins as a discussion of Mark Twain and the myriad ways his memory has been cheapened, particularly by impersonator Hal Holbrook and Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. But soon enough, under the guise of comedy, Reddy and his ensemble of deconstruction workers engage in a fascinating postmodern analysis of whiteness, especially white suits in popular culture, and the ongoing whitewashing of history. In one of the strongest sections, Reddy reveals how far the contemporary citizens of Hannibal have gone to erase the central role played by slaves in Twain's youth. In this tourist trap, bristling with references to characters from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, there's nary a mention of runaway slave Jim."—Jack Helbig

IRIS EATS A ROSE | 2004

CHICAGO READER  |  CRITIC'S CHOICE

"There was a time when you could swing a dead cat in Chicago and hit several monologuists. Those days are gone, but the solo fires are kept burning every summer with the Fillet of Solo Festival. Previously a mixed bag of polished work and spotty rough drafts, this 'solo sampler' is as solid a showcase as you're likely to see. The eight performers in the rotating roster offer ten-minute pieces, each as meticulous, human, and articulate as the next... in Iris Eats a Rose, Robin Cline transforms a lecture-demonstration on the science of apologies into a brutal act of self-recrimination. With Cavan Hallman, Edward Thomas-Herrera, Susan Karp, David Kodeski, Stephanie Shaw, and Dan Telfer."—Justin Hayford

MY NAME IS MUDD | 2003–04

CHICAGO TRIBUNE  |  NEW CITY  |  TOP 5 SHOWS OF THE YEAR

"Experimental Rhino Features Funny 'Mudd'—Shawn Reddy's very funny non-linear musing on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln paints John Wilkes Booth as a peevish Civil War–era bloviator. The Mudd of the title refers to Samuel Mudd, a doctor who helped Booth in his escape after the murder... a cleverly constructed play... see these guys."—Nina Metz

CHICAGO READER  |  CRITIC'S CHOICE

"Playwright-director Shawn Reddy has fine-tuned his glorious send-up of historical reenactments. With his excellent six-member ensemble and general approach, putting forth speculative half-truths and fabricating outrageous lies about John Wilkes Booth's 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Obscuring key facts about the principal figures and about the subsequent trial, Reddy proves there's an awful lot of wiggle room when it comes to history, which can easily be distorted to serve any agenda. Anchored by Guy Massey's acid portrayal of Booth as a preening ham who accentuates every syllable, Reddy's cast gleefully delivers his raucous slide show/lecture/sucker punch to the entire American educational system. That the characters arrive at a few modest epiphanies of their own is beside the point; as the grandson of the titular character observes midway through, there's no need to waste time on silly details if everyone involved is too dead to object."—Nick Green

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES  |  RECOMMENDED

"...cleverly written... a thinking man's vaudeville... it is a meditation on the absurdities and ironies of history as seen in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the failed actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. It begins with that famous joke line: 'Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?' But through the principal characters, and such supporting figures as Mudd (great-grandson of the maligned doctor who helped the injured Booth when he was on the run), and an effeminate hairdresser who travelled with the actor, Reddy puts a quirky spin on history as a strange dance between fate and the fated."—Hedy Weiss

EUGENE AND THE SONG OF THE WICKED STARLING | 2003

CHICAGO READER  |  CRITIC'S CHOICE

"In 1890 amateur ornithologist and theater aficionado Eugene Schieffelin released 50 pairs of European starlings in New York's Central Park as part of a crackpot crusade to introduce to America every species of bird mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. Today the 200 million descendants of those 100 creatures befoul urban landscapes with their droppings and threaten many native bird species with extinction. According to writer-director Shawn Reddy, it's a perfect illustration of 'what happens when you don't incorporate scientific knowledge into a clever idea.' The stories of Schieffelin and other notable bird-watchers are intertwined in the interactive multi-media piece Eugene and the Song of the Wicked Starling, part of the Museum of Science and Industry's 'Experiments: Science and Art' performance series. The legend of Icarus is told in a movement-based piece performed by Kat McJimsey and accompanied by original songs by Jenny Magnus and Beau O'Reilly. Leonardo da Vinci's plans for flying machines, based on avian anatomy, are displayed with mirrors to correct for his right-to-left notations. Visitors are encouraged to leaf through Shakespeare's works to look for the 606 references to birds, and to draw pictures of the papier-mache birds perched in the surrounding 'forest.' Reddy hopes the piece will elicit active participation. 'Museums set up situations where everything has to be so reverent,' he says. 'We want people to question what they're seeing and how they're seeing it.'"—Nick Green

BANTAM LIGHTWEIGHT | 2002

CHICAGO READER  |  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

"Shawn Reddy's Bantam Lightweight emphasizes the possibility that absurd conversation could also stand for an internal dialogue. The dialogue is decidedly first-wave stuff (though in its texture and gaminess it recalls Stoppard) that hews to the vague rules of an almost contextless situation, consistently falling into aphoristic metaphors for subjective experience.
 
"In the literal scenario two aging friends tromp around an attic room planning the entertainment for an upcoming gathering. What these coots call entertainment, however, is perplexing. One favors punning and involved word games; the other, telling allegorical pseudoscientific anecdotes with a mile-long morbid streak. Under the guise of 'brainstorming,' however, both seem engaged in some inscrutable competition. The ambiguity of their intentions, combined with the opacity of their backgrounds and relationship, keeps their characters and the play's dynamic resolutely protean.
 
"The only constants in Bantam Lightweight are the conversation and a strangely calm sense of death's imminence. Eventually it becomes clear that the dialogue is an end in itself, a shield against the silence encroaching upon the two characters. And whether they represent one man or all old men, when this realization dawns on them, Reddy's lyrical writing flowers into chains of profoundly beautiful epiphanies. As the play closes it's impossible to say whether one or both characters have met a symbolic end—by the work's entirely reasonable description of what directly precedes it, likened to 'floating away, on a little piece of ice... knowing there's nothing left but to jump.' Reddy, who also directs, has crafted a small gem—a funny, gently moving existential drama... engrossing and delightful... perfectly illustrating the fragility and precariousness of existence."—Brian Nemtusak