Awkward Festival
Association House
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These days, very young theater artists have taken the Neo-Futurist aesthetic into their souls and measure their own work against its standard. Indeed, repeated trips to Too Much Light by Max Alper, a 1998 graduate of Evanston High School, inspired him to create his own merry band of Neo-Futurists, calling itself the Theater of the Awkward. Until last week, the Awkward artists performed their shows–all original material–in the Alpers’ living room once a month before a more or less invited audience of friends and family. But two weeks ago they hosted the all-afternoon-and-evening Awkward Festival in “Sarah’s backyard” in north Evanston.
One witty performer called his homemade mix tracks “DBWWWG,” which stands for “Doing the Best With What We Got” (“It’s like DIY, but more better”). And much of the show was very much in the DBWWWG mode, though what these suburbanites got–speakers, electric guitars, and the like–is a lot more than most kids have at 17 or 18. Still, there was no Awkward Festival press kit. There wasn’t even a program, only a schedule posted at the entrance listing the acts and their starting times.
A week later I attended another ragged, fringier-than-the-fringe show, Association House’s In Memory of Lorca. Staged by Ralph Flores (who also adapted the script from the writings of Federico Garcia Lorca), this rough-hewn show starred young Latino and African-American actors. None was exceptionally gifted, though some–notably Daisy Cruz and Clarybelisse Marti–had an ease and presence onstage that, with time and work, could flower into something impressive. But any lack of expertise hardly mattered, because these open, sincere performers were so thoroughly committed to bringing the work of this rich, multilayered poet to life that they revealed a side of him I’d never seen before.
