Displaying items by tag: Rough House Theater Co

For its sixth Halloween season, Rough House Theater Co. has transformed Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin Garage into a spectacular puppet haunted house. Last year I visted House of the Exquisite Corpse V: BLOOD & PUPPETS, and this year’s installment feels familiar in form but distinct in approach. The experience unfolds across six short puppet performances, each about seven minutes long and staged in its own small, enclosed box. Instead of sitting in seats, audience members peer through peepholes and listen through headphones, becoming voyeurs of a series of strange, self-contained worlds.

Last year’s “Blood & Puppets” theme offered a direct prompt. This time, LULLABIES gives its six creative teams a more abstract one, and they take it in folkloric, tall-tale directions. The stories draw on the uneasy promise at the heart of a lullaby: sleep, and you’ll be safe; stay awake, and you’re powerless. The audio narration felt especially full and impactful this year, adding texture to the stories and pulling listeners further into each room.

Jumping Jack Money. Photos by Greg India.

Exquisite Corpse's unique format gives each team room to experiment and draw on personal or cultural connections to lullabies. This variety is one of the production’s greatest strengths. Puppetry appears in many forms, often layered together: shadow puppets, hand puppets, and full-body puppets all share these small spaces. You’re close enough to notice the details in the figures and the mechanics of their movement, while the peepholes keep you just outside the worlds you’re watching.

That close-up view, combined with each team’s total freedom to construct an original world, raises expectations and makes the weaker moments more noticeable. There are always limits in live theater, but it’s disappointing when a story sets up a moment and then declines to stage it. “Jumping Jack Money” is a hilarious, cheeky piece, and its audience interaction is among the evening’s most charming. All the more frustrating, then, is that when the central conflict arrives, the piece avoids the playful challenge of staging a puppet fight and opts for a blackout that isn’t even dark enough to make the absence feel intentional. Another piece introduces a tornado—a chance for an intricate, dynamic effect alongside its many forms of puppetry, then buries the moment under a simple projected animation. Both left me wishing the production had followed through on the possibilities it had deliberately established.

don’t you want to live it? don’t you want to live your dream? 

My favorite stories show what the format can do when its ideas and staging work in tandem. Designed by Caitlin McLeod, “Hushaby hush, you’re not going with them,” performed by Finn Bradley, Eddy Barber-Rozema, Rachel Hartmann and Emilie Wingate, uses an angled castle set with meticulous detail. From all angles, the perspective gives the scene the feeling of a storybook illustration, making it an especially apt fit for a show about the tales we tell to get children to sleep.

The final piece, “don’t you want to live it? don’t you want to live your dream?,” created by J. Felix and Abby Palen and performed by Mallory Limbrell and Shannon Twenter, makes memorable use of its floating, moving set. The performers move around it, giving the puppets space to transform along with the scene. It’s a playful, visually inventive take on lullabies and a strong finish to the sequence.

The experience design has also become more cohesive since last year. Each performance space’s exterior peepholes now feel connected to the story inside, and the paths between each story, between and around the boxes, carry a more unified atmosphere, giving the six distinct rooms a shared setting: an eerie, wonderful night of lullabies and puppets!

House of the Exquisite Corpse VI: LULLABIES runs at Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin Garage through November 1. Tickets are available at roughhousetheater.com/tickets.

Do you like scary movies? I do. I blame the origin of this love of scary movies to being tricked into watching The Blair Witch project alone in a glass house in The Hills in Southern California in middle school; I loved the adrenaline rush, the ‘would I have survived that’ thought process that ensues. With spooky season officially upon Chicagoland, do you think I would miss the opportunity to see an Immersive Puppet Haunted House? No chance.

House of the Exquisite Corpse IV: SUPERSTITIONS is an annual themed anthology of puppetry art show. Part haunted house, part puppet show, and part platform for artists to create an immersive, experimental, non-hierarchical art form. The immersive puppet show features six haunted rooms which feature a different puppet show that run about 5-6 minutes a piece. You as a viewer observe the performances through peep-holes, adding to the voyeuristic horror-like setting. Each year, teams of multidisciplinary  puppet artists anchor to one particular theme which the artists interpret, prepare, and perform for audiences. This year’s anthology is centered around superstitions, each of the performances, each selecting a different superstition to feature. There’s “Step on a Crack,” by Ken Buckingham and Corey Smith,  “Broken Mirror,” by Justin D’Acci and Pablo Monterrubio, “If you lie, the devil’s darning needle will sew your mouth shut,” by Chio Cabrera, Alonso Galue and Brett Swinney, “Through the Looking Glass,” by Felix Mayes and Cam Armstrong Smith, “A White Bird in the House is an Omen of Death,” by Jacky Kelsey, Fletcher Pierson and Kevin Wesson, “Dreams Foretell the Future,” by Sion Silva and Emilie Wingate.

I know what you might be thinking. Horror show? Not for me. But for those perhaps not a fan of scary movies, fear not. There are no jump scares, no gore, only a series of artistic expressions utilizing multiple different puppet mediums. But puppets? Really? Yes! Did you know there are actually six different types of puppetry? There are far more than just those like Lambchop (creepy) or puppets like those in Avenue Q. There are marionettes, hand puppets, rod puppets, shadow figures, and Bunraku-style puppets, and you’ll see many of these artforms on display at House of Exquisite Corpse. The puppets add to that particular spine tingling, skin crawling curiosity that one gets when watching a scary or suspenseful film and it is executed in fascinating ways.

While there are no jump scares that will leave your heart pounding, the shows do feature some visual and auditory elements such as frightening imagery, strobe lights, loud noises, and haze effects. But fear not, those so inclined may soothe any creepy crawly feels with a drink at Front Bar at Steppenwolf Theatre only steps away. You will be on your feet for the majority of the show. The floor is concrete, so you may want to wear comfortable shoes. Audience members with limited mobility will be accommodated, all you need to do is email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to discuss any accessibility needs. The show is recommended for audiences aged 14 and over.

House of the Exquisite Corpse IV: SUPERSTITIONS runs through spooky season ending its run on November 2nd is conveniently located at the south end of the Steppenwolf complex, 1624 N Halsted, in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood tickets are available at www.tickettailor.com. Don't miss your chance to see SUPERSTITIONS at House of the Exquisite Corpse, you won't regret it, just be sure to throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder, just in case.

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Well suited to the season, Rough House Theater brings its third annual edition of a macabre puppet show, “The House of the Exquisite Corpse III,” to the Merle Reskin Garage Space at the Steppenwolf Theatre campus on Halsted Street in Chicago.

The one-hour immersive experience gathers audiences in groups of 13, who are ushered in at 15 minute intervals to view a half-dozen 10-minute puppet performances. An emcee warns ticket-holders of foggy settings, and gore ahead—but presumably the squeamish would not choose to attend in the first place.

Each clatch of audience members are guided to the individual viewings, set behind canvas partitions or plasterless lath walls, into which peep holes have been riven or torn at a variety of heights and of differing shapes. Puppets are designed by manipulated by black-clad marionettes perform in the various settings.

At each of the six locations you don headphones to listen in to the puppets’ voices, and the background music and sound-effects, carefully matching to the live action of the puppet. The whole series was inspired by the book “Our Homes and How to Keep Them Healthy,” published in 1883 by Robert Brudenell Carter.

The first, to give newcomers a feel for it, is entitled “The Difficulty of Proof in Arsenic Poisoning Cases.” In a memorable performance, it features a young woman, bed-ridden with a hacking cough, being encouraged to sip tea by an arm intervening from the background.

After several healthy draughts of the steaming liquid, which only seem to worsen her condition, she fumbles with a 1930s radio console, stopping to hear various news reports of murders by poisoning, or antique recordings of classical music. You will have to attend to see her outcome, but know that the other settings shift in time and and setting, but maintain the disquieting tone, some with added gore and unpleasantness—a perfect prelude to Halloween!

Performers include Pablo Monterrubio-Benet and Grace Needlman, Lee and Sam Lewis, Corey Smith, Claire Bauman, Chio Cabrera and Jacky Kelsey, Justin D’Acci and Sion Silva, Ken Buckingham, and Felix Mayes and Kevin Michael Wesson. Process directors are Claire Saxe and Mike Oleon.

“House of the Exquisite Corpse III” runs through October 29 at Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin Garage Space, 1624 N. Halsted in Chicago. It’s highly recommended, though not for the faint of heart certainly not those under 14.

*Extended through November 4th