By Nick Green
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Corwin wasn’t interested in joining the crowded pool of hopeful directors, and Wax Lips, the theater company he’d founded at Illinois State University with classmates Brendan Hunt and Carla DeLio, was on temporary hiatus while Hunt finished his degree. Soured on performing, Corwin was searching for other ways to satisfy his love of theater. So he started writing plays, though not particularly well. “I had no idea of what the hell I was doing, and when I realized that I might be in over my head I decided to go back to school to learn structure and discipline.”
One Northwestern playwriting class later, Corwin began work on his first play, Slim Just Left Town, a story about the breakup of six mismatched couples, told in a series of 36 vignettes. When Hunt returned a few months later, Wax Lips regrouped and staged the play in the basement of the now-defunct Voltaire, on Clark Street. Encouraged by favorable reviews, Corwin “went insane over a two-week period in Omaha, Nebraska,” and returned with Navy Pier, an exquisitely constructed patchwork of intercut monologues that deals with an egomaniacal writer’s unlikely rise to prominence and how that affects his best friend. If theatergoers are masochists who take perverse pleasure from watching their own foibles played out onstage, then Navy Pier gave audiences their money’s worth–its characters are slowly dragged down by their own bitterness and self-absorption. Wax Lips’ production enjoyed extended runs at the Strawdog and Live Bait theaters in 1997 and ’98.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J.B. Spector.
