Sketchbook

LAP STANCE Chair-bound Weiler remains American idle.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

“There are millions of stars in the universe,” the spoken intro to both of this year’s Sketchbook programs informs us. “Sketchbook’s universe is made of stories.”

That’s as close as we’re going to get to thematic cohesion. In its eighth year, Sketchbook has its atmosphere down—live DJs, loud music, swirling lights, lots of video. It’s theater in a club setting, meant to convince non-theater people that theater is cool. And it’s worked, drawing young crowds of irregular theatergoers. But if you’re looking for a similar aesthetic unity in the 14 short plays Collaboraction has chosen out of 5,000 submissions, you won’t find it.

Wait a minute, you’re thinking, 5,000 submissions? That’s a huge jump from the 600 or so the company has claimed in recent years. The surge in entries is the result of Submit, this year’s new framing device. Collaboraction invited regular people from every walk of life (or, presumably, every walk of life represented on its mailing list) to submit audio, video and written responses to 14 questions, some related to the themes in the represented plays; selected excerpts are used in video projections, mixed into the sound design or read by the five-member ensemble that provides interstitial entertainment and moves the scenery. It’s a neat gimmick that yields some interesting stories, and it provides sorely needed connective tissue for the 10-minutes-or-less slices of drama packaged in two alternating programs of seven each.

For the most part, these plays illustrate the limitations of their brief form. Most, good or bad, turn on a single gimmick or joke. Who’s got time to develop more than that? Plays that attempt straightforward drama, like Eric Ziegenhagen’s Bad News, end up feeling more like scenes from larger, unfinished works. Worse, Bad News traffics in the kind of upper-class family angst that’s most often found on the stages of mediocre regional theatres; it feels decidedly out of place in this rock ‘n’ roll environment.

Several of the plays are underdeveloped—as if they had something to say but no room to flesh it out. Still, they’re interesting, unlike Sketchbook’s one truly irritating piece, Jose Rivera’s Yellow. This liberal guilt trip presents an affluent New Yorker–reading couple whose yellow-ribbon yard display belies their discomfort when an actual soldier shows up at their door looking for support. We’ve gotten Rivera’s one-note message long before he’s done pushing it.

But even the best Sketchbook plays this year turn on gimmickry. Itamar Moses’s Treadmills milks every possible relationship metaphor out of the titular gym equipment in a very modern breakup scene; Sean Graney’s I’S N UR B1UDStR33M COZIN FA60SIT0SIZ depends entirely on video projection and internet l33t speak, giving teen actor Bubba Weiler nothing to do but sit in a wheelchair and type.

Graney’s piece is one of many to take advantage of Sketchbook’s high-tech trappings. The three best plays (all part of Program B, if you can only see one night) demonstrate both the highest tech and the lowest. In Cassandra Sanders’s slight but adorable Chicago Summer, two twentysomething hipsters meet cute on their bikes, rigged up to frames which are manipulated, marionette-style, by two actors playing older, wiser versions of themselves.

At the high-tech end is Ira Gamerman’s Dated: A Cautionary Tale for Facebook Users, a monologue for the excellent Jurgen Hooper that uses live video feed and manipulated computer screenshots to lampoon the way social networking has turned its users into casual stalkers. It’s the piece that most directly addresses the daily concerns of the demographic Sketchbook is after, fitting most comfortably into the ultramodern milieu. The best piece of all is Emily Schwartz’s Cowboy Birthday Party, which hinges on a surprise. (We won’t ruin it, but if you’ve seen the Strange Tree Group’s work you already know their loopy stuff works well in a party environment.)

We can’t help but see Sketchbook as worthwhile for Chicago theater in its cross-pollination effect alone. By our count, 64 actors are employed this year, and if audience members discover the work of Graney, Schwartz, Jesse Weaver or Greg Allen here and go on to seek it out in those writers’ native habitats, that’s great in the long run.

But as an incubator of new work, Sketchbook’s power is questionable. Six of the 14 playwrights represented this year are repeats from last year; most of the rest have had work in prior iterations. Whether Collaboraction received 600 submissions or 600,000, it seems to be the company’s friends and associates that get produced every year. If Sketchbook truly is a party, they’re keeping the guest list awfully small.