|
From the press release...
Hot on the heels of its unanimously praised premiere production of "Kennedy's Children," Four Humours announces its even more daring follow-up, the regional premiere of Beau O'Reilly's comedy-drama, "The Third Degrees of J.O. Breeze." This "exploration of the limits of compassion and love" [Chicago Reader] is directed by its cast, and features Jennifer Growden, Keith Launey, Michael Martin, and Joseph Dominick as "The Captain."
The structure of "The Third Degrees of J.O. Breeze" is as simple and stark as its content is comic and ferocious. Horace and Doris, two normal, nervous applicants, each haunted by loss, ...Read More
From the press release...
Hot on the heels of its unanimously praised premiere production of "Kennedy's Children," Four Humours announces its even more daring follow-up, the regional premiere of Beau O'Reilly's comedy-drama, "The Third Degrees of J.O. Breeze." This "exploration of the limits of compassion and love" [Chicago Reader] is directed by its cast, and features Jennifer Growden, Keith Launey, Michael Martin, and Joseph Dominick as "The Captain."
The structure of "The Third Degrees of J.O. Breeze" is as simple and stark as its content is comic and ferocious. Horace and Doris, two normal, nervous applicants, each haunted by loss, are interviewed for a mysterious position--one that has something to do with saving all mankind--by the troll-like J.O. Breeze: part circus freak, part private investigator, all relentless. The strange, charming Nietzschean bores into Horace and Doris, testing not their fitness for the job, but their humanity itself. Assisting Breeze... the monstrous Captain, an ogre with a foul mouth and a manual typewriter, taking notes and spewing invective.
"The Third Degrees of J.O. Breeze" is a comic depth charge, profound and profane.
A repeat member of the "100 Most Influential in Chicago Theater" list, Beau O'Reilly is co-founder of Curious Theatre Branch, one of the Windy City's longest-lived all-original fringe troupes; also a lauded solo performer, and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His plays, suffused with Beat influences, are as loving of language as they are of the human heart. Prolific like Robert Patrick and other artistic true believers, O'Reilly has nurtured dozens of theatermakers throughout his long career, both at Curious and in the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. He sidelines as a regular contributor to NPR's "This American Life."
Still a local hero, though, so it's rare for his work to be seen outside his hometown. Beau O'Reilly will attend the opening night of Four Humours' production of his 1994 hit. In honor of the Curious's roots as an artistic collective, the show is directed by its cast. No top-down decision-making for a fringe theater classic.
|