Evanston: A Rare Comedy

Evanston: A Rare Comedy

a new play by Michael Yates Crowley
directed by Michael Rau

8:30pm, August 3 – 5 at HERE Arts Center (part of the Summer Sublet Series)

Featuring:
Bodine Alexander, Chas Carey, Leah Karpel, Michael Yates Crowley, Anna Margaret Hollyman, Devon Jordan*, Kate MacCluggage*, and Sam West (*Appears courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association.)

Sets: Sara Walsh,
Lights: Derek Wright
Costumes: Melissa Trn
Sound: Asa Wember
Fights: Al Foote III

SYNOPSIS
EVANSTON: A RARE COMEDY begins with the disappearance of a teenage girl in deepest suburbia and ends when a meeting of The Evanston Women’s Book Club goes horribly awry. In between, a transgender student dreams of death, a housewife dreams of Mexico, an economics professor has an affair with a Whole Foods check-out clerk, and the financial crisis rages on. The latest show from the Wolf 359 team – director Michael Rau and writer/performer Michael Yates Crowley – takes a chainsaw to language, convention and pretension to create a new kind of American story-telling: raw, sexy and painfully funny. Inspired by the words of Psalm 137 and the streets of Evanston, Illinois, A RARE COMEDY asks: how can we sing a song of joy in this strange land?

“Evanston: A Rare Comedy is not to be missed.” nytheatre.com.

The Huffington Post says, “PREPARE TO BE ROCKED by… Evanston: A Rare Comedy”.

PRAISE FOR “EVANSTON: A RARE COMEDY”

“The actors of troupe Wolf 359 manage to avoid the potential pitfalls of simplifying their stereotypical characters and create instead a hilarious, (at times unnervingly on-point) portrait of yearning Evanston citizens whose oblivion proves to be their most dangerous threat. This play definitely deserves an audience.”
– Elizabeth O’Neill, The Huffington Post

“…the production achieves something remarkable in that it’s a black comedy that isn’t cynical. It manages to satirize us without alienating us. The characters, in spite of their monstrous self-involvement and inability to process their feelings in healthy ways, seem sincere and all too real.”
– Joshua Conkel, nytheatre.com