The sun rises hard on the West Side of the city, hitting a dusty lot at Chicago and Avers Avenues and causing it to explode with so many tiny bright lights that it appears, for a magical moment at least, as if someone during the night had sprinkled it with a million diamonds.
It’s not diamonds, of course, but rather shards of broken glass–bottles, vials and Lord knows what else–accumulated over many years in this beleaguered and predominantly black section of the city. This harsh Humboldt Park intersection is one that most of you will never see, unless you get lost on your way someplace else or are in search of an illegal substance to buy.
But you should have seen what took place there one Sunday afternoon in August, when a group of young, white and relatively privileged theater artists poured out of a nearby brick building and proceeded to have a parade.
In other parts of the city, the 8-year-old Redmoon Theater Company has become famous for its parades and outdoor performances. Though the troupe has staged its inventive puppet/mask theatrical productions to critical acclaim at ticket-selling venues such as Steppenwolf and Pegasus, its free outdoor spectacles, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and at North Avenue Beach, have wowed the masses. Its annual Halloween Lantern Parade and Spectacle attracts thousands of people.
But in many areas of Humboldt Park, parades are as rare as high-paying jobs and iced cappuccinos.
“The parade was just our way of saying thanks for letting us come into the neighborhood,” Jim Lasko told residents afterward. (Lasko, with Blair Thomas, is co-founder and co-artistic director of Redmoon.)
It was last fall that Lasko, Thomas and other company members began driving around in search of a new set-building and rehearsal space, having outgrown the 1,500-square-foot Logan Square building that had served the troupes purposes for six years.
What they found was an empty building at 3839 W. Chicago Ave. that most recently had functioned as a parking garage and staging area for a small fleet of ice cream trucks.
The building’s neighbors included a couple of empty lots; an abandoned structure that once housed the China Star restaurant; Joe’s Bar-B-Q, offering ribs, rib tips and hot links; C&J Auto Repair and Andy’s Auto Repair; and a one-story building across Chicago Avenue “For Sale Cheap.”
“We did have initial concerns about how dangerous the neighborhood might be,” Thomas says. But if the area was dicey, the price was right: $1,200 a month for 7,000 square feet.
In April, they moved in.
“We didn’t go around and introduce ourselves to people,” says Lasko. “We didn’t want to try to sell ourselves. We were here for practical reasons and tried to be open to anyone who came in and asked what we were doing.”
What they were doing was creating colorful puppets and masks, some of them huge, that are used for their shows. Of the people who came in for a look-see, some were hustlers, “trying to sell us everything from old albums to steaks,” says Lasko.
One was a thief who stole $4,000 in stereo equipment.
Some were crazy, yelling or babbling. One man walked into the building with a question for Thomas: “What are you going to do with that dog?”
“What dog?” asked Thomas.
“The dog that’s in your truck,” said the man.
The truck had been parked and locked in the alley at the back of the building. Two bottles of Burgundy wine were stashed under the front seat.
When Thomas went to the truck, he found it still locked. But there was a barking, frightened puppy on the front seat. The wine was gone. The man just stood there, smiling.
“Never quite figured out what that was all about,” says Thomas. “We named the dog Burgundy and eventually found it a home.”
The area drug dealers and their lookouts have, but for the occasional menacing glare or foul word, ignored the Redmoon crowd.
One man makes a little money scavenging props for the company. Kids are always around, some of them just playing but others helping make masks and puppets.
Most of those who gathered around the Redmoon building on the Sunday of the parade were familiar with the company and its 25-some members. They had been watching them rehearse in the empty lot three or four times a week for three months.
The play they were rehearsing, “Long Live the King (the king is dead),” would have its first performance after the parade.
The scene was festive. A red wagon gave away free popcorn. A Mister Softee truck tinkled its bells. Mothers and fathers cradled infants. Little boys, lithe and shirtless, rode bikes in daredevil fashion.
“We don’t get much in the way of free things out here,” said Jane Gilliam, holding her 3-year-old daughter by the hand. “These people are nice to be doing this. They are nice people, too, always saying hello and such.”
Sadly, it is easy for most of us to ignore some city neighborhoods or to look at them and see only the blight and the bad. But this area, like so many forgotten others, is home mostly to good and honest people, struggling to raise families in the face of all-too-familiar urban ills.
“That they work out here says something good about the neighborhood,” said Gilliam. “It’s like a good message.”
In the alley, the Redmoon actors and actresses were asking what puppet or marionette characters the kids wanted to carry and maneuver.
“Who wants to be a dog?”
I do. I do. I do.
“Who wants to be a snake?”
Me. Me. Me.
Some kids, already outfitted with green papier mache alligator heads, were being instructed in the phrases they were to chant during the parade: Hiddy, hiddy, hi. What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?
A drum loudly banged and they were all off, turning from the alley and moving south on Avers, past well-tended if tired-looking homes. On the porches and steps, from doorways and windows, people stared. To those not aware of Redmoon’s presence in the neighborhood, the whole thing must have seemed like an invasion of aliens from another planet. The faces of onlookers were bemused, bewildered. There were many smiles.
At Huron Street, the parade turned east, curving around the joint on the corner, Boss J’s Friendly Private Club–Members Only.
People were joining the marching and prancing crowd, drawn by its colorful costumes or perhaps by the lively “When the Saints Come Marching In” played by a seven-piece brass band.
More than 75 people marched, moving north on Hamlin Avenue, across Chicago Avenue to Iowa Street.
Turning left, the parade passed Our Lady of the Angels school, site of one of the city’s worst tragedies, the 1958 fire that killed 92 children and three nuns. David Cowan and John Kuenster’s 1996 book about that disaster, “To Sleep With the Angels,” measured how the area has changed: “Gangs, drugs and violence–more than fire–threaten the children who live there today.”
The band played on, past the school, turning back onto Avers, across Chicago again and onto the empty lot where, on a concrete slab, there stood a many-platformed 20-foot-tall metal tower on wheels. On and around that tower, the play took place, a virtually wordless tale of a royal family in domestic turmoil.
The sun was ferocious. The audience members fanned themselves with any handy pieces of paper or cloth. When, near the end of the 40-minute production, a hidden sprinkler began to shower the cast with “rain,” many in the audience, the kids mostly, ran into the shower, drenching themselves, giggling and dancing–becoming part of the show.
Beverly Wilcher watched it all in what she called “wonderment.” She is a 47-year-old owner and operator of a grocery cart that serves as a movable snow-cone business.
“This is wonderful for the neighborhood,” she said. “I just moved back here three weeks ago and there are so many people who I don’t see. Just gone or in the grave. In this place, it’s easy to get into trouble, but it’s hard to get out.
“This here, this is something we don’t ever have, don’t ever see. There is never any theater in these parts of the city. To see something positive like this, it’s just got to be good.”
That was the impression of most in the crowd, though most also confessed to finding the play, as one spectator put it, “confusing as all hell.”
Two weeks after this performance, Redmoon performed eight shows over four nights in a much gentler clime, near the lagoon that separates Lake Shore Drive from Lincoln Park Zoo. The opening show was a $100-a-ticket benefit for the theater company. The other shows were open to the public$10 for adults and $5 for kids.
This is not a well-to-do company. Money is tight. Still, cynics have occasionally questioned Redmoon’s motives. They point to some of its press material: “Redmoon Theater has taken their art to the streets of west Chicago–not just a finished product, presented to people with limited access to the arts, but (ital)by moving into the community itself(ital)” (emphasis Redmoon’s).
That may be hyperbolic, but it does not represent a Jane Byrne-moving-into-Cabrini-Green stunt. The company was founded on the philosophy of being open to a community’s resources in any form, from bodies to ideas. Its ties to Logan Square, its former home, are real and deep.
“Simply saying hello to one another is a really big thing,” says Lasko. “But we aren’t here to change people’s lives, enrich the neighborhood. Whether they understand or appreciate what we are doing, I think they understand we are serious and work hard at what we do.”
The company has started holding free art classes for neighborhood kids on Sundays, but it is unlikely to stay here for long. It needs more space.
“What we really need is an airplane hangar,” says Thomas. He is serious. He is also leaving Redmoon in December to “cultivate parts of me I’ve neglected; to not have to sit in a meeting for some time.”
He will take with him his Humboldt Park experiences.
“This is an area where people are living on the edge,” says Thomas. “Things are so basic, fundamental. That affects me and will eventually affect my art.”
Lasko shares that notion: “In this neighborhood, life is tough. There is no faking it. That’s a valuable lesson for me as an artist, a person.”
It is more difficult to determine what, if anything but a jolt of color, the neighborhood has gotten or will get from having Redmoon in its midst.
Two days before the parade and performance, a couple of blocks north on Avers, police conducted a drug sting that resulted in 75 arrests. Most of those pinched were, according to officer John Cruz, from the North Side and the suburbs.
On the day of the parade, more than 100 people had a good time. Some marched. Many more watched a play.
When it was over, they drifted away. Actors and interns got into cars and went home, many to the North Side. The sun began to set. Thomas locked up the theater’s building, got into his truck and headed east. The drug dealers and lookouts started pacing nervously on the corners, in shadows. And the empty lot at Chicago and Avers fell again into dangerous darkness.
