Interview Beau O'Reilly: Chicago theater is getting dumber

Promoters of Chicago tourism like to describe the city as “the theater capital of the world.” Other municipalities might take issue with that, and some of Chicago’s own theater personalities do. One of them is Beau O’Reilly, a local playwright, actor, co-founder of the Curious Theatre Branch, and organizer of the annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival, which runs through the end of the month. The seven-week festival showcases up-and-coming talent via intriguing events like Radio Vs. Theater: The Final Smackdown, where O’Reilly faced off against NPR’s Ira Glass in a battle of storytelling media. Rhino Fest and the Curious Theater Branch are often considered part of the fringe theater scene, and the outspoken O’Reilly thinks that’s part of the problem. He recently spoke with The A.V. Club about audience shrinkage, the dumbing-down of theater reviews, and beating up Ira Glass.

The A.V. Club: Who won the smackdown?

Beau O’Reilly: It was tied after the last round.

AVC: Could you take Ira Glass in a fight?

BO: I think I did take Ira Glass, and I could again if I had to. He’s kind of a tall, skinny, wormy kind of guy, whereas I’m solid and built to last.

AVC: In addition to the smackdown, the festival had 15 world premières this year. Is that something you actively pursue?

BO: We are interested in always generating new work. That’s what our company does; we have four playwrights, and we make new plays every year. That’s a main focus that we share as a company, so the Rhino is an extension of that, in that we’re able to invite people that no one’s ever heard of to do a piece. We’re able to invite people whose work we really like, but they wouldn’t do this piece in their normal situation for whatever reason.

AVC: Rhino has about a week left. Are you ready for it to be over by this point?

BO: Yeah, usually I am, because it can be pretty exhausting. It’s kind of a constant presence. The balance of organizational presences in the festival is working pretty well this year. Sometimes it’s me and one other person, when they can get there. This year it’s me, Stefan [Brun, Prop Thtr technical director], and Jenny [Magnus, co-founder of The Curious Theatre Branch], and then a handful of other people who are there when they can get there.

AVC: Has staffing traditionally been the toughest part of the festival?

BO: The toughest part is getting the audiences to come. No matter how good a show is, if you’re always playing to five or six people, it’s really hard to keep the energy up and keep the work good. It’s not artistically satisfying at a certain point if it’s too tiny. One of the things about doing six nights a week and at least two shows a night—and sometimes four shows a night—is that that’s a lot of shows to tell people to see. Even if you want to recommend everything, you’d sort of have to be crazy to like every single thing. There just isn’t enough time to get people to everything. So it counts on the artist, to some extent, drawing their own people, or getting a buzz going on their own.

AVC: Is that harder to do now? How has Chicago theater changed since the festival started in 1989?

BO: Well, the main thing that’s different is that the audiences are smaller; the interest in new work is less than it’s ever been. The quality of the reviewers that review the work is dumber… There are people who actually care about it enough to do it, but they’re not in charge of the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Reader. Their opinion of new work in the city used to carry a lot of weight; it doesn’t anymore. You can get a mediocre review from any of those papers and survive it. You can get a bad review, and nobody reads it. You can get a really good review, and it doesn’t make much difference.

AVC: Do you think it’s just that the scene has shrunk and the people who are the mouthpieces for it have also…

BO: Gotten dumber. I really do think that it’s dumbed-down… I think it partly has significance because it used to be this really palpably exciting scene. Everybody in 1994 was talking about Chicago theater and how Chicago theater was the center of the new theater in the country. There’s this reputation that that’s still the case. There’s just as much work—and a lot of really excellent work—being produced year in and year out that gets ignored or barely noticed.

AVC: Like fringe theater?

BO: The press has called it the “fringe.” We just think we’re making fucking plays. The press decided that we were this other thing. But the fringe, it’s kind of an amazing scene of people that have been making work together, or in response to each other, or in relation to each other, for fucking 20 years. What are we getting out of it? We get to do our work—that’s what we get out of it. It’s really not a commercial scene; it’s really not a sellout scene. It just really isn’t. There’s just high quality of work year in and year out, out of that fairly tiny group of people who produce original work in the city.

AVC: It’s surprising that new work doesn’t get more attention.

BO: It’s not surprising; that’s the problem. If it was surprising, you would notice that something is altering, but nothing is altering. It’s just business as usual. We don’t care about the work that actually brought us to the place where we have jobs.

AVC: The city still likes to tout itself as the theater capital of the world.

BO: I think it’s out-and-out untrue. It’s a false statement. They don’t support their new work; they don’t support…

AVC: “They” meaning people in Chicago?

BO: More “the establishment,” but I’m not sure what that word means in this context. The funders, the press, the audiences—that will get me in trouble. I think there is this tremendously loyal fan base; it’s just gotten smaller.