Red Theater Chicago has announced a lineup for its 2017–18 season, which will be in residence at the new Strawdog Theatre Company space in North Center. The Red season will open with a new production of Kristoffer Diaz’s gonzo pro-wrestling play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity—its first staging in Chicago since its 2009 world premiere by Teatro Vista and Victory Gardens Theater. From that premiere, Diaz’s play went on to productions across the country and was named a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2011 Obie Award for Best New American Play. Jeremy Aluma will direct Red’s storefront-scaled Chad Deity, which will run August 18 to September 9.
In November, Red Theater artistic director Aaron Sawyer will helm his own Red Cyrano, an adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac that, like the company’s R+J: The Vineyard, will include a mix of Deaf and hearing actors, using both spoken English and American Sign Language. Finally, in June 2018, Elizabeth Lovelady will direct the Chicago premiere of Abbey Fenbert’s Sickle, an all-female take on the resistance against Joseph Stalin’s Ukrainian Holodomor, or forced famine.
In recent seasons, Red Theater has made all of its performances free to attend, and has made inclusion of artists and audiences with disabilities a company priority. In its season announcement, the company notes that Strawdog’s new space is wheelchair accessible. Red Theater will close its current stint in residence at the Den Theatre (where its upstairs space is not fully accessible) with Prince Max’s Trewly Awful Trip to the Desolat Interior, a world premiere by Ellen Struve and directed by Lovelady, opening April 22.
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