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The Book of Liz
n Chemically Imbalanced
Theater, 1420 West Irving Park Road
n Runs through March 29
n Tickets: $12-$18
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Mastering the cheeseball
North side theater runs David and Amy Sedaris play
By PHIL MOREHART, Contributing Writer
Theater review
Wundersiblings Amy and David Sedaris are behind some of today’s most challenging, innovative comedy. From the absurd, near surreal antics of Amy’s late television spoof, Strangers with Candy, to David’s bitingly funny essays, radio work and short story collections, they consistently spear notions of what comedy is and what it can be. Their collaborative stage play, The Book of Liz-currently in production at Chemically Imbalanced Comedy-is no different.
The play centers on Sister Elizabeth Donderstock of Clusterhaven, a cloistered, conservative, God-fearing religious community populated by the Squeamish (think the Amish-but kooky). Sister Elizabeth has a bit of a sweating problem. She also makes cheeseballs. And she’s damn good at it. So much so, that the delicacy is Clusterhaven’s chief export, providing the community’s sole economic sustenance.
Despite her talents, the well-intentioned Elizabeth is trampled upon by the forces-that-be in Clusterhaven. This culminates when her cheeseball-making duties are stripped and given to a new Brother who has connived his way into the flock. Feeling dejected, betrayed and alone, Sister Elizabeth does the unthinkable-she leaves Clusterhaven to try her hand at the modern outside world. The move opens her up to a magnitude of change, tests her resolve as a religious person, and throws Clusterhaven into a tizzy when they unsuccessfully try to replicate her cheeseball mastery.
The satire runs deep in The Book of Liz, with all manners of convention getting the skewer-religion, ethnic stereotypes, homosexuality and more. That it’s wrapped up in a farce complete with scatological gags, odd non-sequiturs and broad, near vaudevillian exaggerations makes it all the more enjoyable. And true to much of the Sedaris’ works, revelations about human nature and the fragility of the family dynamic run beneath-a sweet subversion that adds bright poignancy.
Though The Book of Liz’s words are its pedigree, they are only as strong as the players giving it life. Luckily, Chemically Imbalanced Comedy has that covered in spades.
This is the company’s second mounting of the play after a successful fall 2007 run, and it shows. The ensemble is strong and they project a real comfort with the material-no small task considering its physical intensity, verbal interplay and the fact that much of the cast takes on multiple roles.
Sarah Rose Graber is superb as Sister Elizabeth Dunderstock. She carries the show easily with a natural, doe-eyed, innocent charm and a voice of endearing, goofy inflection. Her performance is infectious, pulling the audience along with such strength that a genuine connection develops. Though we laugh at her naiveté, we also empathize with it and finally cheer its triumphs.
Brian Kash, as Brother Brightbee, the interloper who swoops into Clusterhaven with an agenda and swipes Sister Elizabeth’s place in the community, delivers one of the show’s funniest performances. Kash is a natural comedian; a compact, physical actor with a putty face who charts Brightbee’s transformation from despicable to pathetic with a multitude of preens, struts, screams and William Shatner-inspired dirges.
Also of note is supporting player Chris Froseth, who impressively tackles the challenge of three very different roles-one half of a young, street-wise Ukrainian immigrant couple who takes in Sister Elizabeth, a Clusterhaven Brother of extremely diminished intellectual capacity, and a smug yuppie on the hunt for cheeseballs. Whenever Froseth is onstage, laughter is guaranteed.
Chemically Imbalanced Comedy presents The Book of Liz in their new, black box storefront space on Irving Park Road. The confines are small and cramped, but the intimacy works in the production’s favor. The dialogue and action stay square in the audience’s face-right where the Sedaris’ intended.
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Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
GOLDSTAREVENTS.COM Member Review
“Really had a wonderful experience. The acting was fantastic and SOOO funny. Couldn’t help myself from laughing. Great! Loved every character, and their diverse personalities gave it depth.” Four Stars
“We enjoyed it. Funny and cute - nice small theater, very authentic experience.” Three stars
“The cast & crew did a wonderful job bringing this wacky Amy Sedaris play to life!” Four Stars
“Superbly acted performance. Nice intimate venue. Well worth it!” Four Stars
“Great script, acting and set design. This ironic play had excellent twist, turns and character development that makes it worth seeing. The theater is intimate and makes you feel like you have personally met the cast.” Four Stars
All Reviews can be found at goldstarevents.com
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Friday, December 14th, 2007
“11-year-old Laura is sent to spend Xmas with her barely endurable, backwoods uncle and family in the Southwest. Laura pursues her (inevitable) Xmas joy, along the way encountering a requisite cast of oddities. The show works when it’s quick on its feet—highlights include a manic, Hispanic ostrich farmer, some great recurring prop bits and an improvised, mid-show audience therapy session with holiday therapist, Judy McClure. The show’s an easy holiday pleaser”
CHRISTMAS IN PARADISE . . . ARIZONA Farrell Walsh’s episodic comedy follows the yuletide adventures of an unflappable little girl who gets sent to Arizona to spend Christmas with her loser uncle and ends up helping a Mexican-American ostrich farmer reunite with his family. Walsh occasionally displays a flair for characterization: the excitable ostrich farmer (played with cartoonish precision by Brian Kash) and a slacker border-patrol vigilante are especially vivid. An improvised audience therapy session, held halfway through this Chemically Imbalanced Comedy show and led by a wittily passive-aggressive Angie McMahon, is the highlight. –Zac Thompson
GOLDSTAREVENTS.COM Member Review
As with most indie theater productions, you never really know what to expect until you go and check it out. Seasonal Disorder was a riot! Clever from start to finish, we laughed the entire time. Definitely recommended for those who are into the indie theater scene and are looking for some serious non-politically correct laughs!
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Saturday, December 8th, 2007
On our last night at the Cornservatory a High School Student named Theresa attended our show and wrote a paper on her experience. Here is what she had to say:
At the Cornservatory in Chicago, every Saturday night at 10:30p.m., three random and local improvisational groups and a stand-up comedian showed what they had to offer in the Chemically Imbalanced Comedy’s Saturday Night Showcase. Although the show will not take place any longer at their beloved Cornservatory, there is no doubt that the show will still have its audience dying of laughter at its new home at their very own Chemically Imbalanced Theater in Chicago.
The Cornservatory itself is a quaint little theater, no larger than two classrooms put together, but in a good way. It fits about 50 people who are just there to have fun. One cannot miss this theater at all; there is a large sign reading “The Cornservatory” in funny print. But there also happens to be an oversized painting of fresh corn on the paint-chipped front door, giving audience members a chuckle even before the show started. Inside, there is a little front area with a desk where people, most likely some improv group members, working to help people get seated and make sure they bought a ticket. These people, including Angie McMahon and Mike Devine of the troupe 96 Decibels, were kind enough to give us money back when half of our original party of four could not attend. Past the curtain separating the stage and the front area, there are some rows of cushioned metal movie theater chairs and a little three-tiered stage with only two chairs on it. The walls were mostly painted black save for one, painted white with individual blue snowflakes, which can be covered if necessary. Another prop could be a mini-wall painted very curiously, with blocks of red, yellow, blue and green in some order placed in the center of each side. Many of the people who filed in past that wall, yet did not fill all fifty seats or so, were in their twenties and were acquaintances of the comedians or just friends in general who looked like they were there before instantly took a seat and opened up some pop most likely bought at the Jewel nearby. It was a very friendly atmosphere, for many people were just there for laughs, and I was instantly comfortable.
The show started out with a brief description by Angie of where the bathrooms were (in the back) and how we should not run onto the stage if there was a fire. She then introduced Robert Bucemi, the stand-up comedian who was to host that night. A very funny and talented man, Robert had very good jokes that made the room echo with laughter, including his jingle for a breakfast cereal called “Blueberry Morning.” He also had a joke saying everyone looked the same age, which was a compliment for my aunt and me. My aunt happens to be in her forties and I was the youngest person there (the show is not recommended for anyone under 13) and we were sitting in the second row with the first row empty at that time. He described how he met a girl on MapQuest and also read us his poem entitled “Love is a Fat, Crushing Bear.” Afterwards three improv groups preformed, including ClubGroupTeam, Bust, and 96 Decibels. Each took a suggestion from the audience and incorporated it easily with skits from the top of their heads. Some comments included “fur” and “buttsmoke.” Somehow, they got it to work.
The best part of the show was definitely the last group to perform, 96 Decibels, including Angie and Mike as stated earlier, along with Tom McMahon, Jay Gish, and, according to their website, www.cicomedy.com, Dave Walley, who I believe I did not see that night. They were the group given the suggestion “buttsmoke” and they had transformed it into a story about a butcher who smoked butts and a bar owner who did not like cigarette butt smoke, a mayor of a town, a girl who works at a bar. The mayor visits the bar to see the girl who works there and decides to fill up his own mug and he eventually gets drunk as leaves. He quickly comes back, saying he hit a man with his car. So the butcher, who was at the bar the whole time, goes out to take a look and comes back saying that the mayor was so drunk he didn’t realize it was a cat, and that he hit it with is bicycle. Thinking that there would be no political fallout, the mayor is relieved, that is, until he is sued by the owner of the cat as well as all the other cat-ladies in town. The debacle continues from there. Let me just say there is a duel, a death, and polish sausages. This group was really talented and interesting to listen to. They came up with different twists in their story to try to make the others fumble and it was hilarious to watch.
By the end of the show, I hadn’t realized that it was already past midnight. I was still laughing about all the jokes until three in the morning until I fell asleep, dead tired. After seeing this show I was amazed at the fact I never tried it out before and I am definitely going again, maybe even to some of their plays, at their new theater. It was an awesome show and I have a lot of memories from it that are absolutely wonderful. It also helped me feel more connected to the people around me including my aunt and I was really happy about that. The show was definitely something different than “Whose Line”, which I thought it would be like. Unlike the television show, I had no doubts about that the show was not practiced for and there were no hoe-downs. Improv, especially at the Cornservatory, really brings people together and makes them laugh and relieve stress. Especially in a world today that is constricted by negativity, it is important to just have a good laugh one in a while. The Saturday Night Showcase helps with the laughter a lot. It’s nice to just kick back, relax, and laugh with complete strangers who share the same sense of humor that you do.
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Thursday, November 29th, 2007
Time Out Chicago / Issue 144 : November 29, 2007 - December 5, 2007
Rabble-rouser Angie McMahon finds an Artistic Home for Chemically Imbalanced Comedy.
By Kim Jeffries
WE ROLLIN’, THEY HATIN’ McMahon and co. do it their own way.
Being a nomad isn’t fun. But Angela McMahon, executive producer and cofounder of vagabond theater company Chemically Imbalanced Comedy, tried hard to make it work over the last seven years. But her 20-member group won’t have to cart around its sketch, improv, stand-up and comic theater pieces for much longer. After wandering from Wise Guys pub to Frankie J’s on Broadway to the Cornservatory, CIC takes over the 40-seat Artistic Home theater in Lakeview, with its Saturday showcase remounting in the new space starting Saturday 1.“We were under a lot of constraints being an itinerant theater company,” she says, sitting in the dusty black-box space during a break in renovations. “A lot of times all we could do was hang a drape. Now that we have our own space, we can paint it however we want.”
Doing things her way has become McMahon’s calling card. Since 2000, her company has put on Saturday-night improv showcases for lesser-known groups, staged a wide variety of plays and run three successful years of Snubfest, an annual festival celebrating the talent of otherwise rejected comedians. As CIC climbs the comedy-circuit ladder, she finds herself constantly defending the company against those who think it “too cheap” or “too small” to give much credit. Her propensity for vocalizing these complaints has earned McMahon mixed reviews from her colleagues, who either respect her determination and skill or think her just plain abrasive.
I was called a pretty awful name by a head of a comedy festival,” she says. “I stir up trouble; I guess you could call me a troublemaker. But we just do what we do. We have to run our race and not worry about everyone else.”
McMahon admits to stepping on some toes while running: CIC’s production of Mr. Marmalade, Noah Haidle’s warped coming-of-age play, ran concurrently earlier this year with the city-produced Dog & Pony version, which upset plenty of insiders. And for the past two years, Snubfest has run simultaneously with Sketchfest (next year’s Snubfest will be in June).
But for all the griping, it’s hard to ignore her role in championing underrepresented Chicago comedians and actors by giving them show slots and encouragement. “That seems to be the overlying theme that she and CIC have created—from the point of view of the underdog,” says Jonathan Pitts, executive director of Chicago Improv Festival Productions. “People who are involved in comedy don’t always feel like Donald Trump [A-list material].”
McMahon, though, is striving for more than just a good performance: A degree from Columbia College in theater and classes at Second City and Annoyance Theatre have taught her how to act and be funny, but the knowledge she gleaned outside the classroom has allowed her to stand out. She worked with nonprofit theater Free Associates and on independent projects, learning the ropes of how to combine acting and production to create a well-rounded experience for the audience. Every time she saw a show, she would think to herself, “If this were mine, this is how I would do it.”
It’s this DIY mentality that drives McMahon—and for every person who calls her an awful name for that tenacity, there’s another who acknowledges her talent. “When you come from the artistic side you have a vision, and there’s no budget,” says Farrell Walsh, CIC’s artistic director. “Angie’s able to step in and talk about the reality of the situation.”
McMahon’s efforts have paid off with her company’s arrival in a permanent home, but not even she can plan for what’s next. “It’s interesting when an underdog becomes queen of the castle,” Pitts says. “You end up seeing things from a different point of view than before.”
Chemically Imbalanced Comedy reaches equilibrium Saturday 1.
Posted in Article, New Space, Timeout | 2 Comments »
Monday, October 15th, 2007
 This is another of those shows that is constantly changing every week, so we can’t guarantee it’ll be an awesome time. We CAN guarantee that we had an awesome time. Chemically Imbalanced Comedy takes place at the Cornservatory, a BYOB stadium-seating theater with a Jewel next door. Mmmmmm, cheap beer and comfy seats, the venue is great before we even mention the show.
Every Saturday at 10:30pm (Does “pm” need to be said? Who wakes up before noon on Saturday?), one stand-up comedian hosts three different sketch/improv acts. Last week Cameron Esposito hosted Pronounced, Angerstein Street, and Cyclops Baby (pictured). Highlights of the night included “You remind me of the lead robot in this science fiction book I got for you,” “This is how I masturbate in the office, “That girl said you raped her,” and an impressive knowledge of Wonder Woman facts. Strangely, we were most disturbed by the guy who knew way too much about Wonder Woman.
So while we can’t similar hilarity ever week, we can promise this Saturday a line-up including Yeti, Basic Eight, and 21st Century Men, hosted by one of our favorite stand-ups, Bill Cruz. Drinking cheap beer alone is sad; doing it at CIC is just economical.
Chemically Imbalanced Comedy. Saturdays at 10:30pm. $10. The Cornservatory: 4210 N Lincoln. CIC Box Office: 773-865-7731.
-Chris Singel
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Monday, October 1st, 2007
by Jonathan Abarbanel
The move of the Artistic Home to a new, larger space in Pilsen (reported in PerformInk Aug. 3) has fallen through. “There were some issues we couldn’t come to terms on, so we had to walk away from the space,” says company co-founder and artistic director Kathy Scambiatterra with some regret.
She noted that the deal was in the final stages of negotiation. The breaker, she reports, was over an option the Artistic Home wanted to extend beyond the original five-year lease. “If we were going to invest all that money (in a build-out), we wanted the option,” she says.
The Artistic Home still is in residence at 1420 West Irving Park Road until Nov. 1, enough time to allow Scambiatterra and other teaching staff to complete their fall term of classes, but not enough time to stage a show. As of that date, the space will become the Chemically Imbalanced Theatre, the troupe having signed a three-year lease. Scambiatterra says the transition already is in process and that all parties—even the landlord—are working in a helpful and friendly way. “I’m helping them get into the space; they’re helping us get out of the space.” For the last several years, Chemically Imbalanced has produced at the Cornservatory on a rental basis.
Scambiatterra is hopeful that the Artistic Home will secure a permanent space within a few weeks. “We’re looking in Logan Square a lot right now,” she says. She and her co-founder/husband, John Mossman, report that the
Department of Cultural Affairs Office of Artists Cultural Resources and the League of Chicago Theatres have been helpful in the space hunt. If the Artistic Home can’t find a suitable space by late autumn, Scambiatterra says they will look for short-term rental space for classes and to produce a season.
Posted in Article, Performink | No Comments »
Monday, September 24th, 2007
Striking a new balance
Posted in Comedy by Steve Heisler on September 19th, 2007
After years and years of theater-renting, including a stint at the Cornservatory, Chemically Imbalanced Comedy will be moving into their own theater space. Angie McMahon will lead her sketch, improv and theater company to the former Artistic Home, located at 1420 W Irving Park Rd, starting November 1. They’ll build out the snug 40-person space for a month and launch their full line-up of shows, including the weekly self-titled comedy showcase, on December 1. Additionally, their current play The Book of Liz will come back in January.
Cheers to CIC! Look for more info as it becomes available.
Posted in Announcement, Article, Timeout | No Comments »
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