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-What: "Coloring Potential"
-Where: Chicago Dramatists Workshop, 1105 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago -When: Opens Sept. 6 with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays -Parking: free street parking -Tickets: $12, $10 students and seniors. Call (312) 409-8393 Tim Clue and Marco Benassi don't produce a show very often, only once every two years or so. But every time they do, they create a winner.
Their first production, "Greek Streets," a stage adaptation of the stories of Chicago writer Harry Mark Petrakis, opened and played for 16 weeks to sold-out houses at the Royal George Gallery.
"When we started everyone was telling us, you can't make money doing this," Clue laughs. "You're going up against 250 other shows. No one is going to review you. No one is going to see you. You're going to lose money. And then all that happened."
Their next show, "The Jewish Melody and Other Definitions of Confinement," based on the autobiographical writings of persecuted Soviet author Dmitry Stonov, earned the theater company the kind of press attention money can't buy. Suddenly, they were being interviewed on radio and television. And this was before the laudatory reviews started pouring in. One notoriously hard-to-please critic even called the show an "uncompromisingly theatrical" and a "masterstroke."
Sadly, audiences were less enthusiastic about a moving, sublime, but ultimately very serious show that soberly explored the underbelly of Stalin's gulag system.
Still the show was successful enough that a mere two shows after its founding in 1992 Short Story Theatre suddenly found itself on the short list at several prestigious foundations. (None of these grants come through, but to be on the list at all is an honor in itself.) Not bad for a two-man operation...