![]() “People come by and try to provoke, of course,” Lorraine says. ![]() ![]() The production began its run March 21 and has been selling out performances, and it will soon be extended through May 12. Have they been getting attention? Oh, have they, Lorraine says, and the results have been even better than expected. That street, by the way, is Western Avenue. Their approach puts the theater itself on trial, and the stage in the window by extension does the same for the city outside and the audience, who are both watching and can be seen from the street. The play was written in the ’60s as a European “anti-play,” but Lorraine and her cast were struck by how it sounds now, she says, “a play of self-confessions in a call-out culture.” Some self-accusations are big, some are trivial (”I failed to shake the lotion before use”). The whole text is a series of confessions, says co-director and theater artistic director Melissa Lorraine, with no traditional narrative. That’s what Theatre Y currently is doing with “Self-Accusation,” an avant-garde work by the Austrian playwright Peter Handke. Heck, you even put some of your actors out on the sidewalk. ![]() You move your stage out of the private confines of the back of your theater and put it in your front windows - you’re a storefront, after all. What do you do if you’re a Chicago storefront theater and you want to stage a 1967 play about confessions? Especially now, when accusations and confessions have become, shall we say, topical?
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