It's all about Pride in 2023-24 at Redtwist Theatre.
The 19th season for this North Side black-box theater includes three very different productions, starting with Wolves, called a "gory, gay reimagining of 'Little Red Riding Hood.'" Later plays will include both Larry Kramer's classic The Normal Heart and Jacqueline Goldfinger's Bottle Fly.
Windy City Times recently talked with Redtwist Theatre Artistic Director Dusty Brown (they/them) about everything from the selection of productions to their gender-identity journey.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Windy City Times: Tell me a little bit about your role at Redtwist. Also, when did you join?
Dusty Brown: Sure. Redtwist is a very small black-box theater, so we're one of Chicago's many small storefronts. As artistic director, I really wear just about every hat possible. On Wolves, for example, I was not just directing but I was also the technical director, so I put the set together. I was also the dramaturg, so I did the research behind it. There's a lot of everything that goes into being an artistic director—and, in addition to all of that, there's everything that goes into running a theater company, so that includes raising funds so we can pay our artists and the rent, or planning the season and the shows.
This is my first full season with Redtwist. I started July 2022 but the full season had been planned, so I came on to shepherd that season to completion, and get those plays up and produced. This season was the first one in which I got to choose the plays.
WCT: Why did you decide on a season of Pride?
DB: I grew up as a little queer kid in the South, so I found my voice through media a lot of the time, having grown up in a conservative town and household. So I appreciate how much representation matters and how important it is to put out [relevant] stories.
When I started at Redtwist, I really wanted to refocus the company. Through the years, especially after COVID, a lot of our patron base has moved out of the Edgewater/Andersonville area to the suburbs or out of state. With that in mind, I dove in—and one of the first things that stood out to me was that the Edgewater/Andersonville area has one of the largest queer per capita populations in North America. Grindr statistics say it's one of the busiest areas for that app, so the area has a young and active queer population. So I wanted to select a season of plays that would cater to that particular audience—and let them see some of the exciting things we're working on there.
WCT: And that's why people go on Grindr—to look at statistics.
DB: [Laughs] Of course! Let's just say Grindr was a different experience in Chicago than Chattanooga, Tennessee. But it's great to have such a vibrant queer community here and we wanted to celebrate that at Redtwist.
WCT: You have three productions running this season. I understand why Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart is included but I'm intrigued by Bottle Fly. Please tell me more about that play.
DB: Sure. Bottle Fly is going to be world-premiere production. It was written by playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger in 2017 and it won the Yale Drama Series Prize. It's a really beautiful script. I encountered it because we produced another one of Jacqueline's plays last year: Babel, which I really loved.
I read Bottle Fly and it's an incredibly complex play about life in South Florida, and it's largely centered around two lesbian characters. It really captured the challenges and nuances of being queer in the Deep South. And with everything that's shaping in the world of politics and with what's happening in the next year, I really thought it was worthwhile to put on a story that tackled the complexities of being queer in South Florida—in an environment that's so oppressive. I feel like I knew so many of these characters, and there's one whose mentality is "Hate the sin, love the sinner," and [this production shows] how incompatible that philosophy is with the people living around you.
I thought it was easy to do a production where someone with homophobic beliefs is the outright villain, but it's so much harder to run something that tackles the complexities of a person's life—and the ways we can bridge those gaps that might bring people to the table who might otherwise just want to stay on their side. Bottle Fly is a beautiful example of how some of those incredibly challenging conversations can begin. It still feels really relevant.
WCT: And speaking of sparking conversation, Wolves has been described as a "gory, gay reimagining of 'Little Red Riding Hood.'" As a horror fan, that immediately intrigued me.
DB: Wolves is a weird, beautiful play. I saw it over a decade ago in Atlanta, and really enjoyed it then. Within the last year, I revisited it. What struck me about the play, on the other side of COVID, is that the play is about being isolated in an apartment and being stuck with someone; maybe your relationship has changed but you are both sharing that same 1,000-square-foot space. [Laughs] I talked to a number of people who were in that situation.
But in addition to that, another beautiful discovery was something I found out through the cast—how much we all deal with masks. We put on a particular persona when we go out in public. The "you" who goes out to the club at night is not the "you" who speaks to your boss the next morning. What I think Wolves does so beautifully is deal with who is wearing a mask and when someone is wearing it. As the play goes on and becomes more violent, it makes you start to question who to trust; by the time the finale takes place, things have become really unhinged and they leave you wondering. I find it a joy to go back and watch it again; it continues to deepen every time. The cast—Josh Servantez, Gardy Gilbert, Monique Marshaun and Michael Dias—is absolutely phenomenal.
You mentioned that you like horror. The cast and I just took a day of our rehearsal process to watch The Shining because Stanley Kubrick is referenced in the play. It was exciting to see how the cast was able to dive into that classic and bring back some gems for Wolves. Wolves has queer stories but it's not about the oppression of queer people; it's just about queer lives.
I hope it's a fun time. As much as it's a horror production, I hope that it's a fun romp for fans of the horror genre. It's been fun seeing diverse people, including younger fans, come in. Nationally, a lot of theatrical programming has been targeted for older audiences; we've lost connections with younger people. There's not a lack of eagerness and enthusiasm with the under-30 crowd; there just hasn't been a lot of content put on stage for them.
WCT: You've been on a gender-identity journey. Since this is National Coming Out Month, who was the first person you came out to?
DB: That would be my partner, Piper (she/her). For a long time, I had identified as bisexual. I only moved out of Georgia in 2018 but, up to that point, being queer in any way was enough of a challenge. So being fully out and discovering my own gender identity has been a process of the last five or so years—and a big part of what helped was a stop in Ohio that happened between Georgia and Chicago to go to grad school.
Even though Ohio was not particularly progressive on issues regarding sexual orientation and gender identity, I was at Ohio University—with a bunch of undergrads, many of whom have become lifelong friends—and it really opened up, for me, an ability to start having that conversation with myself, my friends and my partner. I came to the realization that, regarding gender identity, being nonbinary felt more right for me than being strictly within a male/female category. It was a journey that involved a lot of conversations.
One of the things that happened for me, in particular—especially after the #MeToo movement—was that I was having lots of conversations about what it means to be a male in a room and in our society. People would say, "Men do this" or "Men do that" or "Men fill in this gap"—and I realized, "That's not me!" Finally, I realized that I don't have to identify as male just because that's what society encapsulated me as; I have the capacity to be broader than that definition.
WCT: For you, what is it like to be part of the queer community in today's America?
DB: It's been really reaffirming and beautiful moving to Chicago. Coming out of the Deep South—and even Atlanta, which has a relatively large queer community but still has a great amount of homophobia and transphobia—it's been phenomenal to move into a city where I can have a theater company. We're doing a season of Pride and we're not worried about someone breaking a window or writing a slur on the side of the building. In Atlanta, there were areas where you would say "I'm fine here," but there were other areas; one of the theaters I worked at was in Newt Gingrich's old district so it wasn't embracing.
I hope that queer America starts to look more like life in Chicago than other areas of the country. It's scary to see how much of our political rhetoric is targeted—especially when trans kids are being targeted. It's hard enough to be a kid; it's harder to be a gay kid. I hope society becomes more accepting and has a more nuanced conversation about gender and gender identity.
Wolves will run at Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., through Sunday, Nov. 5. For more information about this production or the other plays running this season, visit www.redtwisttheatre.org/ .
