THE MADELYN TRILOGY PROP THTR
PRICE $15, $20 for the full trilogy
WHERE Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston
WHEN Through 10/7: Sun 5 PM (Then Sun 10/21 and 10/28 7 PM, Athenaeum Theatre)
Over its 19 years Chicago’s chronically underfunded, understaffed, overstuffed Rhinoceros Theater Festival has lumbered from Wicker Park to West Lakeview to East Rogers Park, barely eluding gentrification, audience attrition, and artist exhaustion. Two years ago this showcase of original fringe performance settled in at the Prop Thtr, on Elston’s lonely industrial corridor. But then along came last week’s hand-of-God storm, killing power at the Prop for three days and sending the Rhinocerites fleeing once again.
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The festival was scheduled to open with its usual assortment of challenging works: two full-length autobiographical monologues (including Michael Martin’s first since 2002), a “word jazz celebration” of Kerouac’s On the Road, the first two installments of Idris Goodwin’s “Danger Face Trilogy,” and all three massive plays in Beau O’Reilly’s family saga, “The Madelyn Trilogy.” The power outage wiped out all openings on Friday and Saturday nights. But having heard that the Reader planned to review the show, curators O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus decided on Saturday morning to present all eight and a half hours of “The Madelyn Trilogy” the next day–they just had to find a vacant theater with electricity. Magnus’s husband, Stefan Brun, put in a call to Jefferson Park’s Irish American Heritage Center, where he helped build a black-box theater a couple years ago, and director John Daley agreed to hand over the keys. The company sent out e-mail blasts announcing an 11 AM curtain for the first play of three on Sunday. That day, O’Reilly and crew were frantically loading all their props, costumes, and set pieces into a U-Haul when the power came back on. They kept loading.
This drunken heap of giddy misanthropy–she calls children “solipsistic mongrels” and religion “paternalistic vomit”–is Madelyn. Her ultimately successful suicide attempt is what brings members of the fractured, eccentric McGuffin clan into toxic proximity, first in Madelyn Dangles the Noose and for years to come in the second and third plays. In a cheeky subversion of the American family drama, the McGuffins aren’t her family but her in-laws–her own family can’t stand her. Madelyn is the ex-wife of two brothers: hulking, uncommunicative Michael McGuffin, crippled by the dissolution of their marriage 20 years earlier, and career lothario Peaches McGuffin, who dallied with Madelyn for two months before blithely moving on to his next conquest.
