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WHAT WE DO Interview Series: Calamity West

WHAT WE DO is a visual interview series where we briefly talk to Chicago theatre artists about their art — what they do, why they do it, and what their creative process is like, even as it shifts in the midst of a pandemic. We’ve given each artist 8 written questions, as well as 3 prompts for photographs that capture their current headspace. 

We start with Calamity West, Chicago-based award-winning playwright, and professor of playwriting at the University of Chicago and Webster University.

SELF-CAPTURE: A selfie, self timer portrait, a baby photo, or just a really awesome picture of yourself that you love.

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‘In the Canyon’ of America’s Grim Future

Calamity West has written a play set in a near future so plausible it feels as though we’re already, inescapably, locked into it. Produced by the Jackalope Theatre Company, In the Canyon begins in 2007 with Hope (Liz Sharpe) and her dud of a boyfriend, Doug, (Andrew Burden Swanson) on the afternoon they’ve ended an unintentional pregnancy. It’s a rational decision made by an ordinary woman, but this choice sets off a lifelong chain of events that carries us all the way to 2067. As we leapfrog from decade to decade in each subsequent scene, we watch America dismantled by patriarchal nationalist fervor. Mother earth rebels.

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Calamity West’s ‘Hinter’ Combines Comedy and Suspense with a Dose of Social Commentary

Can you offer help to those who don’t ask for it? This is the central question of Calamity West’s Hinter, now in its world premiere at Steep Theatre. Directed by Brad DeFabo Akin, the play takes as its subject the unsolved murders of the Gruber family on the isolated Hinterkaifeck farm in 1922 Bavaria.  Continue reading “Calamity West’s ‘Hinter’ Combines Comedy and Suspense with a Dose of Social Commentary”