This week, we’re kicking off a new occasional series, Stages of Survival, spotlighting theater companies that are, despite the pervasive gloom-and-doom narratives about the performing arts, still producing. The plan is to eventually encompass a broad range of companies: Equity and non-Equity, those that are itinerant and those that have their own spaces, and companies from all different geographic locations in the Chicago area. But since the idea for this series came in part from a Facebook post by Curious Theatre Branch’s Jenny Magnus asking where the attention was for companies that are still alive and kicking, it felt appropriate to start off by talking to Magnus about Curious, now in its 35th season.
Cofounded by Magnus and her then-romantic partner Beau O’Reilly, Curious began as a “branch” of their cabaret rock band, Maestro Subgum and the Whole. “Both Beau and I wanted to do more theatrical things in the band,” Magnus says. “I remember one time, in one song, I just wanted the whole band to lean to the left physically, as a visual aesthetic thing. And a couple of people in the band were like, ‘No, we’re playing music. That’s what we do. We’re not interested in these other things.’”
They dipped their toes into a couple of Brecht pieces first, but the real start of Curious as a theater company came with 1988’s musical (featuring Maestro Subgum songs) Careening Is a Skill, starring Jenny, her brother Bryn Magnus, and O’Reilly, and directed by Stefan Brun (cofounder of Prop Thtr who would later marry Jenny—emblematic of the deeply entwined families of affinity that have dominated Curious’s shifting ensembles over the years). “That was the first time we used music and theater,” says Magnus. “We were doing [Maestro] songs in the context of a show. And that really was like, ‘OK, this is the direction we’re going to go in.’
“Both coexisted quite a while in different iterations and the band eventually fizzled out, but the theater company sustained. I remember being surprised that the theater company sustained and the band ended.” (Magnus and O’Reilly still perform with others occasionally in another band, the Crooked Mouth.)
The company bounced around to different venues and neighborhoods, from Wicker Park to Lincoln Park to Rogers Park to Avondale (where for several years they were a resident company with Prop, before the latter gave up their building in the early days of the pandemic). They almost always did new work, most of it created, especially in the early days, by the triumvirate of O’Reilly and the Magnus siblings. (Bryn’s latest, Moon at the Bottom of the Ocean, kicked off their new season this month.) Early on, Curious also became the key producer for the annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival, the city’s oldest celebration of fringe theater. But the creative output initially far outpaced administrative function.
Magnus, who worked with Madison’s experimental Broom Street Theater before moving to Chicago, notes that neither she nor O’Reilly had much interest in hierarchy. “Let’s just do it through discussion and decide together. Let’s not have these labels of artistic director and all this stuff that we didn’t actually understand very well.” They also committed to working day jobs and paying out of pocket for production costs—made easier in the early days because storefront rent was far more affordable than it is now.
Curious, along with several other small performing arts groups, including Theater Oobleck and now-defunct Redmoon, received a three-year grant in the early 90s from the MacArthur Foundation. The amount seemed small: $10,000 per year. But Magnus says, “For us, that was absolutely game-changing. Because suddenly we had a nut. We could produce off that money.” Magnus also notes that MacArthur provided “grant bait” for other funders who began supporting Curious.
But Curious’s production model never really took into account paying artists in the early days.
“I really think the idea of saying, ‘We must have pay equity or we shouldn’t be doing it’ is just patently absurd,” Magnus says. “I as an artist am never going to be paid what I’m worth. And I just know that’s true. I’m doing it because I’m compelled to do it.” But she adds, “I think it’s good to work towards. I think it’s crucial actually, to work towards being paid for labor and recognizing artistic output as labor. I think those are all very interesting and important ideas that must rise to the top. But with a small company like ours—I think that’s actually why some of these companies are folding. Because they simply cannot pay a living wage to people and continue.”
Curious (which “will never be Equity,” according to Magnus, and operates on an annual budget that’s hovered around $50,000 for years) has evolved to where they do offer stipends to all artists. “We can’t afford to pay a living wage or market rate. But what we do is we’re always trying to up the ante, pay more than we did before, and also pay everyone equally. So the woman running the tech gets paid the same as the writer.”
Along with Oobleck’s “more if you’ve got it, free if you’re broke” model that helped pioneer what we now call “radical hospitality” in Chicago theater ticketing practices, Curious also always worked on a pay-what-you-can model, which is another form of economic justice. Magnus notes, “We recognized that the people who were going to come and see our shows were our peers. They weren’t different from us. They were us. They were all working jobs. They were scroungers, basically. So we better find some kind of strategy to deal with the fact that if you price yourselves out of the ticket, people won’t come.”
For Magnus, what’s lacking in the current scene is a funding commitment to companies like Curious that are devoted to sustainability, rather than growth for its own sake.
“When you’ve still been at it a really long time but you’re no longer sexy or young or emerging, it’s much much harder to get attention. Middle-aged people are kind of invisible. Middle-aged concerns are not as interesting. But in the funding realm, I’m finding in talking to other people that it’s a lot harder than it used to be.
“Why wouldn’t the fact that we’ve survived and sustained ourselves all this time, why isn’t that a high value just the same as a new company? Being able to sustain through everything, through economic downturns, through deaths in your company [longtime Curious managing director Matt Rieger died in 2021], through people having children and you still sustained? I think personally that is so much more difficult than being young and fresh out of school—‘Yeah, we’re going to do the sexy stuff!’ Anybody can do that, I feel like.”
She adds, “I’ve been selling for years the idea of ‘We don’t want to get bigger. We want to get deeper.’ That’s my big tagline to all these people and I still don’t think they’re hearing it. They want quantitative proof of growth. It’s just a fundamentally flawed paradigm to me. Arts organizations shouldn’t be scrambling around trying to get bigger so they can get more money. I think that’s completely self-defeating, really. Give smaller amounts of money to more people. How about that?”