In honor of the 100th birthday of its Flat Iron Arts Building home, Collaboraction presents 11 short plays by 11 playwrights, each paying tribute to one decade of the Wicker Park icon’s history. Emily Schwartz specializes in gothic comedies and has a macabre, Goreyesque touch, so expect an infusion of dark wit and darker menace in her coverage of the building in the 1910s. Randall Colburn, who writes about the spiritual conflicts of born-again Christians caught between sex and God, most recently in Hesperia, takes on the 40s. The 80s go to Brett Neveu, whose plays often focus on nostalgia for small-town American life and the frailty of the family business. He gets special recognition for his inventive “subtractive approach,” a process of paring down scripts that yields spare action with sustained, profound silences. Bringing the Flat Iron into this millennium is Ike Holter, another talented local who made a big splash in 2012 with Hit the Wall, about some romantic encounters between patrons of the Stonewall Inn before it was raided by police; Holter also received praise for horror-conspiracy Loom later that same year.
The theater festival of the century at Flat Iron Arts Building
Collaboration presents a short play for each decade of the Wicker Park icon’s existence—on the occasion of its 100th birthday.
