Displaying items by tag: Organic Theatre Company

Chicago - Jackie Taylor, the author of more than 100 plays and musical bios, thousands of poems, a screenplay, and two books, has been selected as the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s 2025 Fuller Award recipient in honor of her lifetime achievements. Taylor will be celebrated at a ceremony on Monday, October 20, at her Black Ensemble Theater (4450 N. Clark Street). Registration is open. Presenters will include Jeff Award-winning director Daryl Brooks, UIC Associate Professor of Theatre Lydia R. Diamond, poet and author Haki Madhubuti, and Harvey Young, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. The American Writers Museum is a major partner in the program. 

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame selection committee consisted of past Fuller Award recipient Patricia Smith, Linda Bubon, Yoland Nieves, Ugochi Nwaogwugwu, and Keehnen Owens. During the stringent selection process, the committee considered dozens of outstanding candidates, evaluating the quality of their literary output, the strength of their Chicago connections, and their greater contributions to Chicago’s literary life.

Born August 10, 1951 in Chicago, Taylor was raised in the Cabrini Green housing project. Taylor founded Black Ensemble Theatre in 1976, a year after she made her Hollywood acting debut in the now classic film Cooley High.  

Taylor majored in theater with an education minor, and after earning her B.A. from Loyola University in 1973, she began working with Free Street Theater. In addition to her acting break in 1975's Cooley High she produced and starred in television and film - as well as in theatrical productions with such companies as the Goodman Theater, Organic Theater and Victory Gardens Theater. Early in her career, Taylor concluded that Hollywood’s depiction of African Americans would continue to be largely negative, which led to her to found Black Ensemble Theater, according to her biography at History Makers. Since the start, Taylor has written, produced, and directed stories that cut across racial and cultural lines. Her mission, she says, is to bring people together.

Among Taylor’s many writing credits are The Other Cinderella, The Hoochie Coochie Man: Muddy Waters (co-written with Jimmy Tillman), The Marvin Gaye Story, The Jackie Wilson Story, All In Love Is Fair, I Am Who I Am (The Story of Teddy Pendergrass), Don’t Make Me Over (The Story of Dionne Warwick), Don’t Shed A Tear (The Billie Holiday Story), Somebody Say Amen, At Last: A Tribute To Etta James, and Precious Lord Take My Hand. She has had featured roles in several major films, including Hoodlum, Barbershop 2, The Father Clements Story, Losing Isiah and To Sir With Love: Part 2, and worked with such greats as Sidney Poitier, Laurence Fishburne, Vanessa Williams, Bill Dukes, Glynn Thurman, and Lawrence Hilton Jacobs.  

In 2010, Taylor broke ground on a new 20-million-dollar Black Ensemble Theater Cultural Center, which opened on November 18, 2011. The Free To Be Village development, introduced in 2023, aims to expand the existing campus, in part to offer affordable housing to artists in the community and establish an education program. The project’s goal is to reinforce and grow the theater’s mission of reducing inequality in the arts. 

Taylor earned a master’s degree in education and receive an honorary doctorate degree from DePaul University. She has worked for the Chicago Board of Education, the Illinois Arts Council, and Urban Gateways. Through the years, Taylor has taught every grade level from kindergarten through major universities. She served as president of the African American Arts Alliance and is on the board of the Betty Shabazz International Schools.

The City of Chicago honored her by naming a street after her, Jackie Taylor Street, and Governor Pat Quinn declared March 27, 2009, Jackie Taylor day in Illinois.

Taylor’s many awards include a Special Jeff Award for her cultural contributions and a League of Chicago Theater Lifetime Achievement Award. She has been named as an outstanding performer, director, and business woman by dozens of media outlets, including New City, Chicago Defender, Today’s Chicago Woman Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times. She and her work have been featured in Jet, Variety, the New York Times, The Washington Post and Essence.

Registration closes when the theater reaches capacity.

Organic Theater has done such a wonderful job in The Memo, it is hard to imagine a more perfect presentation of this play by Czech writer and statesmen, Václav Havel.

The Memo is at turns funny and unsettling. While the original The Memorandum is rooted in the totalitarian Eastern Europe, in Paul Wilson’s fresh translation as The Memo, it reads as a commentary on the increasingly overbearing pressures today to perform in professional settings. That pressure is often ratcheted up to effect performance toward ambitious goals, often harnessing social pressure and WeWork-style perks toward these ends.

Set in a mythical office (the set is all in grays is by Terrence McClellan), The Memo opens with clerks busily waltzing in a stylized manner through the office, processing manila files. This and other transition scenes are choreographed by Erica Bittner, with music by Tony Reimer. Then a derby-wearing executive arrives with a bright red folder.. When he places it in the inbox on the main desk, the movement screeches to a halt, and the action and dialog commence.

Inside that red folder is the titular memo. The Managing Director, Gross (Tricia Rogers) struggles to read what sounds like gibberish (does she have it upside down?). Soon her shark-like Assistant Director, Balas (Joel Moses) arrives, joined at the hip now by that same mysterious derby-topped exec Kubs (Subhash Thakrar). Kubs speaks only through facial expressions – Thakrar is marvelous throughout with his big face an d exaggerated mugging. 

Balas explains that this memo is written a new, language – PTYDEPE – scientifically created for precision of expression, as a means to improved efficiency. It is being rolled out in administrative offices everywhere.
And it is here where The Memo strikes a dagger in the heart of the contemporary cultural ethos: those who adopt PTYDEPE will succeed, those who don’t will fall by the wayside - not so different than office apps that come and go. We watch as the Executive Director is coaxed into signing an authorization for this roll out, which then leads to the implementation of a PTYDEPE training department, and an unfolding world where The Office comes pickled in an Orwellian brine of 1984.

For context, Havel was that rare “poet king” who helped lead his people to freedom. Before the Arab Spring there was a failed Prague Spring (1968), an effort to liberate Czechoslovakia from the Communist Block. Dissident Havel ended up in prison. As with China today and the Soviet Union back then, Czechoslovakia’s totalitarian censorship inspired a flourishing expression of dark humored workarounds, lampoons, and with Havel, absurdist plays like The Memorandum– discrete takedowns of the excesses of central control.

While the object of the humor was obvious to audiences - the government censors could not pin down objections in those subtly subversive words on the page, making the power of the works even stronger. Eventually Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution (1989) precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union, and Havel became president of his now independent homeland. 

The performances and Havel’s characters are magnetic. The intellectual currency that the Organic Theater’s troupe has brought to The Memo is inestimable, informing inspired performances by supporting actors like Mary Mikva as the Director’s Assistant and Kris Downing as Translation Assistant. (Downing was awesome in Organic's production of The Melancholy Play, too.)

In particular the performance of Nick Bryant as J.V. Brown, the PTYDEPE trainer, is inspired – and a tour de force of acting as he shifts back and forth translating nonsense language to English with the passion of a revival preacher. You will love and surely recognize the many denizens of this office, incluidng Stephanie Sullivan as Kalous; Schanora Wimpie as Masat; Kate Black-Spence as Kunc; and Laura Sturm as Talaura. Don’t miss the chance to see The Memo, running at the Greenhouse Theater through June 16.

“Picasso at the Lapin Agile” is a charming “what if” story that has twentieth century groundbreakers Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso unexpectedly meeting at a bar in 1904. Set in Paris, France at the Lapin Agile, both men are on the brink of remarkable ideas – Picasso just a few years away from his famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Einstein months away from publishing his revolutionary theory of relativity. Both men are also very confident in their genius and competitive in gathering attention for their intellect.  

Written by Steve Martin in 1993, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” debuted at Chicago’s Steppenwolf on October 13^th of the same year following a brief workshop of the play in Melbourne, Australia. There are plenty of laughs as Einstein tries to impress the bar patrons with his wayward predictions of the future such as the automobile being a fad, or France becoming the superpower of the twentieth century while Germany becomes the voice for peace.

At one point, Picasso, quite the ladies’ man and not one to be pushed out of the spotlight - especially in front of one of his lovers, challenges Einstein to a drawing duel, creating a scene that is preposterously funny and really shows the boyish competitiveness in each of them. It takes many an intriguing debate or perceptive musing before the two fianlly realize that their contributions to the human race are equally valuable. Interestingly enough, Martin makes a weighty statement on how the contributions of these great difference makers of the twentieth century are remembered by most as Einstein and Picasso meet Elvis towards the end. As the three look to the heavens and see their names in the stars, Elvis points out, “There’s my name. Above both of yours and three times as big.”

The play is filled with interesting characters. Outside of Einstein and Picasso, we have a bartender, Freddy, who now and then surprises all with a profound statement of his own. We also have an idealistic barmaid, Germaine, Picasso’s art dealer, an inventor and a few regular patrons at the bar to which Einstein is often found attempting to break down his theories in a much simpler language in order for them to understand.

Superbly directed by Josh Anderson, the Organic Theatre Company’s current production of “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” at Greenhouse Theatre is an insightful piece that is both imaginative and funny. Joel Moses is wonderful as Einstein and Anthony Perrella Jr. is equal to the task as Picasso, together providing just the right touch of parodic humor to each character while keeping an appropriate tribute in place.      

The highly amusing “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” is being performed at Greenhouse Theatre through June 26^th.  For tickets and/or more show information visit www.greenhousetheatre.org.