Amy Matheny and Jerre Dye have been in each other's lives on and off since the age of 15. First friends, then partners, then friends again, Matheny is perhaps one of Dye's biggest fans. When she stopped off to see his show in Memphis, she put her foot down … he would have to relocate it to Chicago—end of story. Three years later, Cicada is scheduled to open to theatergoers in the Windy City.
The play is essentially about Matheny's character, Lily, her life and her 17-year-old son, Ace. Matheny plays an elderly role in the haunting tale. The ghosts of her mother, grandmother, great-aunt and her big sister reside in the home with them. The story presents the question: How we are haunted and helped by those that passed on and who came before us? Although it's an all-ages show, the topics are profound.
"There's definitely a conversation about sexuality and the way people talk about sexuality in the 1970s in Mississippi," Matheny said. "It's something that gay men will really relate to—this extremely attached and connected relationship to a mother, because the character of Ace, he's ready to go. He's ready to go be a man and at the same time, his mother is kind of his life partner like they are—it's just the two of them, right? And so they're like best friends—it's like the Gilmore Girls for a guy and his mom.
"The most interesting part of this story that I think people can probably relate to is that my high school boyfriend [Dye] and I both happen to be gay and still be in each other's lives," Matheny added. "We met at the age of 15 on a blind date. We were set up by somebody who knew [both of us] when he was moving to my hometown of Cleveland, Tennessee—which is a very small, conservative—the reddest county in the state of Tennessee, which is a very red state. It's also a very big religious community."
Was it love at first sight?
"Jerre and I really found each other when he moved there and we both were cast in high school opposite one another in My Fair Lady," Matheny said. "He was a year younger than me. I was Eliza Doolittle and he was Henry Higgins, and we were both play-acting and playing grownup and he had shoe polish in his hair and we just had this wonderful time in high school of being—going on scavenger hunts, pep rallies, staying up late working on spirit pep stuff, and just being high school kids. Now, being all grown up, I see what an amazing gift that was—that as queer kids we found one another."
As often occurs at the end of one's high school years, students part ways, best friends become strangers, life goes on and many paths cross into unknown directions.
"We both went off to college—I went off a year earlier to Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. A year later he came to the University of Memphis, and we were both in theater departments there. We broke up because Jerre knew his truth before I did," Matheny recalled.
For Matheny, Dye's revelation affected their friendship in a substantial way: "It was awkward because he was my best friend and we were really, really close, but we were growing up."
Something shifted when Matheny joined the Memphis theater community. "It was a very wonderful community for me to come out in as a young lesbian in the early '90s when it was all lesbian chic—the cover of Newsweek was like, 'Lesbian Chic,' I swear to goodness like a month after I came out. I thought I was really on trend because I was this Southern good girl, leading lady, debutant lesbian … ."
Almost 25 years later, Matheny and Dye are back on the same stage for his play, Cicada, in Chicago. Matheny laughed, "It's really like our silver anniversary."
Three years ago, Dye was the artistic director of a theater in Memphis called Voices of the South. Matheny had made Chicago her home for a solid 19 years and urged her oldest friend to come out to the Windy City with his work, but he refused. "He loved his Memphis community and he had purpose there, so I went down to see the play he had written that was having a production in Memphis, and it was called Cicada," she said.
Although Matheny knew nothing about the play before seeing it, she was smitten and kept pushing Dye to reconsider moving to Chicago: "After seeing that production I said, 'Jerre, I think we should bring this play to Chicago, and I want to help you do that, and I really want to be in this show.'"
The rest, as they say, is history.
Matheny's connections in the Chicago theater community aided in the production finding its legs. She started with an outfit close to her heart. "I've worked with two different theater companies in Chicago—one that I founded with a group of other people in 1994-95 called Greasy Joan and company, which is a reference to Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost," she said. "I left that company in 2000 after I created and produced a show called Xena Live, based on the popular show Xena: Warrior Princess."
Xena Live was a huge cult hit in Chicago and started out as a late-night show in 2000. It ran for approximately six months in different incarnations. A second episode was created after Sept. 11, 2001, to help cheer up the community. Xena Live: Episode Two: Xena Lives the Musical was born.
The second location Matheny approached was About Face Theatre, which was the nation's largest gay and lesbian theater company back in 1999-2000. Matheny was a member there for a decade.
Finding the perfect match for Cicada was a personal mission for Matheny: "This production I really just wanted to help shepherd. I really wanted to find the right people, the right director, the right team, the right home for this play to live and thrive here in Chicago."
It took two years to find said home, but it happened.
"We were invited to be a part of Route 66 Theater Company's monthly reading series in July 2013. I had actually kind of given up hope. ... I had met with a lot of people and tried to seduce some directors to love the project, because I knew that I just wanted to be an actor [and not direct]. What ended up happening was that the woman who is the associate artistic director of Route 66 [Erica Weiss] was directing our reading, and I just watched her—and I saw her really fall in love with the play in the one rehearsal that we had. Then we had so many people come to the reading—we were packed. We had about 85 people show up in a room that holds about 45 or 50. Erica said, 'I don't care whoever does this, I want to direct this play.'"
With Route 66 squared away as the host, it was time to get the show on the road—so to speak. Now that the balls were all in her court, Matheny dug deeper into the storyline and pulled out the facets that meant the most to her and, she envisioned, for the audience.
"[Cicada] is a play about mothers and sons, and I don't have a child. But it's so much more than that … . The basic storyline is about rural Mississippi 1974—so obviously the Southern aspect of it is relatable to me, being from the South," she said.
Would she ever move back to the South again?
"You know, you may be tapping on something that's my reason for wanting to do the play," Matheny said. "I can't ever see that I would live in the South again full-time. But I know that as soon as I moved away from the South, I started claiming my Southern heritage more and more," Matheny said. "I remember early on when I moved to Chicago, I started listening to the country music station, and I had never ever listened to country music when I lived in the South. I bought my first pair of cowboy boots after I moved to Chicago. So I think there is an ache for the South. I have to go back to Southern mountains and smell that air and walk.
For her, the South is a family affair. "I mean, my family is all in east Tennessee, my grandmother is still 105, and she lives in her home that my mother was raised in and has been in that home for 70 years now and it definitely is a house that was built during the Civil War, so if you kind of wanted the most stereotypical Southern upbringing, I had it," she said.
Matheny can visit the South every night in Cicada: "A luxury of this play is that I get to live [in the South] five shows a week and share something that I think is universal and poetic and sensitive and incredibly strong about the Southern spirit, incredibly enduring—especially Southern women."
Cicada goes into previews April 9 and the play runs through May 25 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.Tickets are available online: www.cicadatheplay.com . Amy Matheny is host of Windy City Media Group's Windy City Queercast show, and she is a senior account representative for the company.
