Apocalyptic Butterflies
KIMBERLY SENIOR
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 PM, and Sundays at 7 PM
Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave
Producer
Set and Props Designer Lighting Designer Costume Design Design
Composition and Sound Design Stage Manager Technical Director Production Manager
Cast
Muriel Tater...................................................Jennifer Avery
Trudi............................................................Kerry Cox
Hank Tater....................................................Larry Grimm // AEA
Francine Tater ...............................................Margaret Kustermann
Dick Tater .....................................................Rob Skrocki
Additional Production Team
Photographer..................................................Saverio Truglia
Casting Director..............................................Jennifer Avery
Master Electrician............................................Stephanie Hurovitz
Press Relations.................................................Karin McKie
Assistant Director // Associate Producer................Brant Russell
Assistant Director.............................................Alison Daigle
Assistant Stage Manager.....................................Noreen Snyder
Assistant Production Manager..............................Erin West
Costume Assistant............................................Julie Brink
Props Assistant................................................Michelle Caplan
Production Assistant..........................................Amanda K. Berg
Director's Note: Hank Tater tells his mother “I have a vision of how life should be and life is not cooperating.” We can all understand this. So we laugh. Wendy has so beautifully constructed a comedy we can relate to, so we laugh. We come to the theater to sit in the dark among strangers and laugh- because if we don’t we’ll cry- and it is here that we create imperfect and strange families both better and worse then the random lottery ones we received at birth.
We hope you, like Hank, can embrace the humble totems we place at your feet tonight. Even in the darkest places lies the courage to seek transcendence.
Playwright's Note:A trickle of peculiar memories was recently released by hearing an old Beatles song. When last I heard that song I was a teenager visiting a girlfriend in a completely unfurnished McMansion on Long Island. She and her divorced mother were living there with a Dutch tulip importer. That is, the importer was Dutch as well as the tulips. He was a merry, florid, Falstaffian man and the evening took on a surreal cast as I watched this Dutchman dance around his empty living room to The Ballad of John and Yoko, surrounded only by tubs of tulips. Had the furniture been repossessed? Or had it never been bought? Perhaps the family was just a few bounced rent checks away from moving on? In any case, it dawned on me that strange things happen in my plays because strange things happen.
When I was thirteen I lived on a commune in Vermont. Because we couldn’t drive yet my friend and I would regularly hitchhike into town. One day, a yellow Volkswagen bug convertible, driven by two older hippie girls from the commune, came to a stop. They told us to hop in quickly, and casually said they were in kind of a hurry. Why? Because one of them had just cut her pinky off in the restaurant meat slicer and they were taking it to the hospital in Burlington to be sewn back on. They cheerfully held up a little white handkerchief chrysalis, with spots of red just beginning to seep through. A missing digit later found its way into APOCALYPTIC BUTTERFLIES but the play was actually inspired by another story.
A Maine cousin’s eccentric neighbor had a load of totem poles delivered to his son’s front yard. Nobody was exactly sure what the father was driving at, but he was clearly driving at something: something about gods and nature and family. The son saw only that a bizarre, grass-killing totem pole pile had been dumped on his hard-won lawn. Which is where our story begins.
The play begins and ends with an unusual event, but by the end of the play the strangeness verges on the miraculous. I’m interested in the collision between the everyday and the transcendent, those moments when the ordinary life takes a hairpin turn, causing us to perceive the world differently. Flipping through an old draft of APOCALYPTIC BUTTERFLIES, I realized that I had misspelled the word transcendent, not once but many times; and I thought isn’t that humanity in a nutshell? We strive for transcendence, misspelling it all the while.
Special Thanks: Carrie Scott and Red NO 5, Mark Buxton and Effen Vodka, Luther Goins and Actors Equity Association, Jim Lichon, Bob McGarvie and the Steppenwolf Scene Shop, Northside College Prep, Dennis Vulich, Leo Burnett, Ideotech, Drum Scan people??, Pinata Graphics, Cathy Taylor, Goose Island Brewery, Wendy McLeod, Intelligeng Lighting Company, Chicago Dramatists, CAMP, Environmental Encroachment, Scott Kennedy, Martha Lavey, Ed Sobel, Lance Stuart Baker, Ray Vlcek, Jeremy Kay, Chicago Dramatists, Wesley Kimler, Megan Pitsios, Sonal Shah, Chau, Sam Porretta, Wally Vincenty, Margaret Noble,
