When Jenny Magnus landed in eastern Germany this winter–bringing along original performance pieces, longtime collaborator Beau O’Reilly, and little else–she was met with bewildered stares. “They said to us, “We’ve seen Americans through TV, through magazines,”‘ she recalls. “‘But you are Americans we have never seen. You are Americans we did not know existed.’
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“They convinced the city government to give them this building, this Volkspark, for a dollar a year or something,” Magnus says. “Actually, it’s a complex of buildings. There is an auditorium the size of the Goodman, a whole room full of lighting equipment, a whole room full of sound equipment, a huge industrial kitchen, banquet halls, gyms. It’s about the size of the Overlook in The Shining.”
Magnus saw dozens of similar facilities lying empty all over the city, casualties of German reunification. “People who owned property before the war, especially Jews, had their land taken over by the state,” she explains. “Then when the wall came down and everything switched over to capitalism, so-called, suddenly there are all these disputes. “OK, you’ve had it for 40 years, but what about the people who had it for 170 years before you? And if there is no more state in the same way, what do we do with all their facilities?’ A lot of them are just sitting there. Huge factories, meeting halls like VFWs, only much, much bigger.”
She decided to run The Spewpolice under the theater’s fluorescent work lights, which were mounted behind black curtains. This gave the room an eerie glow, like streetlamps on a late-night city sidewalk, the setting of the play. “They could not get over this,” Magnus says, howling with laughter. “They were like, “What? How can you–? This is so–.’ I think at that moment they really were scared that we were going to be bad.”
The Trips: A Madras Parable opens at 10 PM this Friday at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1650 N. Halsted, and continues every Friday night through June 28. Tickets are $8; call 335-1650 for more information.
