Senior class

ALL SHE REALLY WANTS TO DO IS DIRECT Senior coaches the cast of Collaboraction's "Casanova", the fourth play she's helmed this year.

You'd never know it from talking to her, but Kimberly Senior's career has created a litmus test for the entire Chicago theater scene. The 32-year-old director—who founded Collaboraction in 1997 almost by accident when she staged a six-night-only play in the basement of CafeVoltaire with $500 her parents gave her—is surely the most credible member of the overly quoted "Theater should be more like a rock concert"-crowd.

Senior certainly has the rock-theater credentials: She helped pioneer Sketchbook, Collaboraction's short-play fest/rave that has garnered national attention in only five years of existence. And her résumé includes a mile-long list of projects with some of Chicago's preeminent storefront punks. But her talents run far deeper.

The unspoken promise of hipster populist theater, of course, is that once the storefront artists lure normally unwilling young audiences into the theater with their clever wiles—everybody wears jeans! you can have beer! there's a live DJ!—then eventually they'll be able to persuade those same young audiences to take a risk on Shaw or Chekhov.

It sounds pretty bogus, sure, but in Senior's case, it's no joke. Her newest venture, a nearly pitch-perfect rendering of Chekhov's Three Sisters at Strawdog Theatre Company, is the real deal: no gimmicks, no bells or whistles. Just a bunch of 19th-century Russians sulking in their parlor and lamenting how boring small-town life is.

"I didn't put them in leather," Senior says with a smile. "It's still 1898." Meanwhile, she's in rehearsal for Collaboraction's Casanova, by high-minded British playwright David Grieg. (She still directs there, even though she long ago handed over the artistic director reigns to Anthony Moseley.)

So now the question: Will the new, coveted audiences that Senior and Collaboraction admirably cultivated through Sketchbook take the leap with her into territory that's inarguably adult, nonrock theater?

Senior's answer is a perfectly honest one. "I have no idea, but it's the best thing I've ever done," she says frankly. With her huge brown eyes and sandpaper voice, you'd want to believe her even if it weren't true. At once very tough and very Fey (as in Tina), it's easy to see why theater artists of every stripe want to work with Senior.

Having lived in Chicago for a decade (she took a Steppenwolf internship immediately after college and has been on the administrative staff ever since), Senior has made her reputation not by fiercely imposing her aesthetic on plays, but by allowing them to breathe.

There are some unique stylistic traits in her work: She never uses blackouts except at the end of the act, and her characters are often seen laughing onstage. But "there's not really a 'Kimberly Senior' brand on my plays," Senior admits. "I'm not an auteur. I think of myself as the play's immune system. The elements of the play—the script and the design and the actors—are all like organs in the body, and it's my job to protect them so they can function properly."

Having knocked around the city tackling anything that anyone would let her, the director still seems as sprightly and energetic as a young, I'm-gonna-make-it-in-this-biz intern.

Senior partially credits a brush with death four years ago for her enthusiasm, as well as her career success. Standing outside a Redmoon rehearsal in March 2001, Senior was mauled by two trained attack dogs who had escaped from a nearby yard. "I'm a dog person, so I was trying to pet them, and then they jumped on me and I looked down and saw the inside of my thigh," Senior recalls. "My body was in shock, so I couldn't feel it."

After being laid up for a month (actor Lance Baker, whom Senior married last summer, was her caretaker), Senior scaled back her Steppenwolf hours, dove headlong into Collaboraction's The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild, and put herself on the critical and popular map. "I realized I had nothing to lose, and I had better stop wasting time," Senior says.

Senior's audiences have nothing to lose, either.

Three Sisters is running at Strawdog, while Collaboraction's Casanova is in previews at the Chopin. See Resident companies.