Stage Left Theatre, a Chicago company with 40 years of history, is redefining storefront theater with its new production, The Distrikt of Lake Michigun, in an empty retail space on the sixth floor of Water Tower Place. The theater takes a lighthearted approach with this production about a segment of the history of Chicago—the 1886 event when George “Cap” Streeter ran his steamboat into a sandbar “451 feet off the coast of Chicago” near the foot of Superior Street and claimed it as a new governmental entity (titled “The Distrikt of Lake Michigun”) with himself as governor.
The evening begins with a 40-minute “entertainment” with contributions—music, dance, a poet doing a headstand, a strong man display, and a group singalong to “God Bless America / Because we are fucked”—by the performers. Our host for both the entertainment and the play is Andrew Pond as emcee and later as Cap Streeter. The play is silly, rambling and much too long, but Pond is a stellar physical and comic performer—and does his best to hold everything together.
The show, as Stage Left refers to it, has a long title: The Distrikt of Lake Michigun: A Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Ridiculous Tragedy (and also completely factual and also true). The playwright is Stephanie Murphy. Seth Wilson directs the show, which is more like a revue than anything with a plot. The script is larded with Chicago in-jokes (Streeter claims “dibs” on an offshore island) and plenty of music and kazoos (music by Aaron Kaplan) and a stage set consisting of a wooden, dare I say replica, of Streeter’s steamboat, the Reutan (scenic design by John Wright).
The cast is talented and makes as much as possible of the material they have to work with. Jennifer Mohr plays Ma Streeter, Cap’s wife, and Jessica Cutts plays Minnie, a showgirl and Cap’s other woman. Both Mohr and Cutts do excellent work as Ma and Minnie, who also shows off her juggling talent. Connor O. Locklin plays Officer K.M. Carraway, who serves papers on Cap Streeter contesting his “ownership” of the Distrikt. The chorus, which adds vaudeville and physical brio to the show, is Jules Schrader, Maya Paletta, Beth Fine, Jillian Leff and Madeline Meyer. Costumes are by Ben Argenta Kress and props by Charlie Dean.
The shoreline that Cap Streeter claimed was already the site for post-Chicago Fire rubble and contractors continued to dump backfill and rubble there, extending the size of Streeter’s “property.” (Perhaps ironically, one of the most expensive areas of Chicago real estate today is Streeterville. Chicago loves to honor its civic rogues.)
The director’s note reminds us that we should forget that a play can only be serious if it’s heavy and that The Distrikt is full of fun, passion and joy—and adds: “That is not to say that The Distrikt doesn’t have anything on its mind. The play’s ideology is clear enough: it’s about a society in which power rests in the hands of an overconfident huckster with the moral sensibility of the blood parasites that kill dogs.”
When you enter the theater space, you see no evidence of its retail history. Fixtures, product displays and visual merchandising have been removed and the whole area painted white. Stage Left presents its entertainment in one area (Minnie’s Orpheum Theatre) and then moves to the other side of the space, which forms the theater for The Distrikt.
Stage Left Theatre continues with The Distrikt of Lake Michigun through April 27. Total running time is 2.5 hours including one intermission. Tickets are $40 for performances Friday-Sunday. The location is the 6th floor of Water Tower Place, 835 N. Michigan Ave. Be forewarned that after 9pm the Michigan Avenue doors are locked. The only way out is at ground level on the east side of the building, where you can walk on Pearson or Chestnut to Michigan.
The theater advises that the play is for adults only because of “colorful language and saucy suggestive situations.”
Photos courtesy of Stage Left Theatre.
For more information on this and other productions, see theatreinchicago.com.
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