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Artistic Director Beata Pilch founded Trap Door with a commitment to seeking out challenging yet obscure works and bringing them to startilng life on stage. Whether it is a European classic rarely seen in the United States, an untarnished piece of American literature, or the playwright living next door, Trap Door will find these voices and present them to the public through innovative expression. We utilize old traditions mixed with the new to illustrate the absurdities of living in today’s society.
Our History Founded in 1990, Trap Door began as a nomadic troupe, thrilling the European theaters of Stockholm, Berlin, Zakopane and Paris with its grass roots, avant-garde expressionism. It was on these stages that our trademark style of myth, ritual and revolution first crystallized.
“Keep your eye on the people at Trap Door”, wrote Chris Jones, reviewing Trap Door’s inaugural production of Madman and the Nun at the Chopin Theatre in the summer heat of 1994. Since then, Trap Door Theatre took their three-year tradition of touring European Theatres and Festivals and transferred it to Chicago’s world-renowned Off-Loop Theatre scene making its Bucktown home in a former machine shop, now a 45-seat blackbox, down a long gangway on Cortland Street. Twenty five years later the company has produced 116 shows, including thirty five American premieres and seventeen world premieres, as well as ten European tours in six countries and counting.
Time Out ranked Trap Door among the best storefront theatre in the city, and The Chicago Reader asked “Is Trap Door Chicago’s greatest theatre success of the last quarter century?” The first few years lead the young theatre and its ensemble members to accomplishments and growth unexpected for such a fledgling company. Trap Door has been honored with several Jeff, After Dark, and Orgie, awards and accolades from local press. Since their inception, Trap Door’s unique work has earned ongoing support from local, national and international philanthropic and cultural organizations including The Chicago Saints, The Illinois Arts Council, The Mayer & Morris Kaplan Foundation, The Richard Driehaus Foundation, The Alphawood Foundation, The Bucktown Community Organization, The French Embassy, The Romanian Embassy, The U.S. Embassy in Romania, The Trust of Mutual Understanding, The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, The Reva and David Logan Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Goethe Institut, The Swiss Benevolent Society Chicago, Governor Jim Thompson, private businesses, and great generosity from individual giving. Trap Door’s distinct image, captured through the graphic designs of company member Michal Janicki have been featured in publications, including the cover of a book entitled Theatre of War and Exile. Chicago Sun Times journalist Lucia Mauro designated Trap Door the best avant-garde theater in the city, and in 1996 Trap Door earned its first of many Jeff recognitions for co-founder Sean Marlow as Best Actor as his powerhouse role in Jean Genet’s The Maids.
Trap Door’s company has grown tremendously and has extended artistic partnerships across the country and Europe. From playing in the park at the Bucktown Arts Festival, to the streets of Krakow, to sold-out houses in major international theatre festivals in France, Hungary, Romania, and Poland, and most recently, Trap Door was the first American company ever to play in the Republic of Moldova.
In 1996, just two years after Trap Door had made its Chicago debut, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy arranged and sponsored an excursion throughout France for Artistic Director Beata Pilch to seek out and eventually produce new texts that originate in France and to connect with local actors, playwrights and directors. On this influential visit, Matei Visiec was introduced to Pilch by The French Embassy: that day set in motion an ongoing artistic partnership with Visiec that continues to thrive and has given wings to Trap Door’s authentic international identity.
2004 marked the momentous renovation of Trap Door’s space. The notorious steeply raked stage was replaced with a more standard platform, and even more exciting, Trap Door got its very own bathroom. This year Trap Door was honored for the first time with the esteemed Étant donnés Award to manifest the US première of Fernando Arrabal’s avant-garde homage to Bosch, The Garden of Delights as part of the French art festival, PLAYING FRENCH. We were further honored upon his attendance to the production and the opportunity to meet and network with this legend of the film and stage.
After years in the making, the 2006 Romanian tour marked Trap Door’s first opportunity to take our work on the road. Matei Visniec’s Old Clown Wanted traveled to Romania to perform in three theatre festivals, and also to New York to participate in ACT FRENCH. This began Trap Door’s duel identity of siphoning work both to and from Europe, a notion that is not part of the company’s mission to produce one internationally focused work annually either going abroad, or hosting a guest director who presides in another country (or both!). As part of this, in 2009, Trap Door produced the U.S. premiere of Me Too, I am Catherine Deneuve written by French playwright, Pierre Notte, and with guest French director, Valery Warnotte. After a sold out run in Chicago, the production went on to shine on stages in Atlanta and Washington DC. Not stopping there, in 2010 the production was invited for a 5-week, 4-city tour of France realizing one of our most sought after goals. In the same trip, Artistic Director Beata Pilch was the honored recipient of Cité Internationale des Arts Program enabling her to elicit an even stronger connection to France and its performing arts scene. Meanwhile, in 2009 the company returned to Romania to present Visniec’s Horses at the Window in 2009 at the National Theatre in Bucharest and the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, and then toured the production to the Tenth National Symposium of Theatre in Academe at Washington and Lee University in Lexington Virginia. Trap Door continues to tour, for more information and highlights regard this exciting aspect of the company, please check out our TOUR PAGE.
Our increasing list of guest directors include, Romanian Radu Alexandru-Nica in 2009, Valery Warnotte from Paris in 2010 for Me Too, I am Catherine Deneuve and in 2017 for Regarding the Just, Hungarian/Romanian director Istvan K. Szabo from Romania in 2012 to lead the vision of Matei Visniec’s The Word Progress on My Mother’s Lips Doesn’t Ring True and again in 2017 for Occidental Express also by Matei Visniec. Parisian Clowning Master, composer, musician, director and Founder of Cie Umbral Theatre in Paris, Victor Quezada-Perez was hosted in 2013 to direct Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, and again in 2017 for the Jeff Award winning The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht. Artistic director of Hungary’s Maladype Theatre, Zoltán Balázs brought the work of Matei Visniec to dazzling life with How to explain the history of communism to mental patients in 2016. Aleksi Barrière from France joined us to workshop and create the work Letter of Love: The Fundamentals of Judo based on the text on the texts by Fernando Arrabal and Yves Klein. Polish playwright and musician Dorota Maslowska, visited Trap Door Theatre in 2016 with the U.S. premiere of her work No Matter How Hard we Try. Although she did not direct the production, the company was honored to have Maslowska with us to witness the event.
Judith: A Parting of the Body, produced in 2014, brought Trap Door’s long time artistic associate and principle actress, Nicole Wiesner back to our stage. Wiesner left her Equity contract to participate in the project the production directed by TUTA artistic director, Zeljko Djukic. Wiesner has gone on to direct award winning works and brought home a Jeff Award for “Best Actress” for her astounding performance in The First Ladies, also directed by Zeljko Djukic.
An ongoing project through the years, Artistic Director Beata Pilch and her production team has been manifesting “House of Gods”, a documentary following the meeting of one very special man on the Camino de Santiago de Campostela in Northern Spain. The work is in final edits and will be released soon.
The Trap Door opened their 21st season in 2015 with a project in the making since the company’s inception; an alliance with the theatre’s original inspiration, the Witkacy Teatr in Zakopane Poland. Together with the theatre’s founding member and Artistic Director, Andrzej Dziuk, they created a new adaptation of Stanis?aw I. Witkiewicz’s The Madman and the Nun entitled, John Doe. The piece was work-shopped in Zakopane, and returned to Chicago for a full run at Trap Door. That February, Trap Door was given the honor to return to perform the piece as part of the Witkacy Teatr’s 30th anniversary, an event that also celebrated the 100th anniversary of the playwright Witkiewicz’s death. 2015 also marked Trap Door’s first work produced and performed entirely abroad in Barcelona, Spain. Artistic Director Beata Pilch revisited the piece “Blood on the Cat’s Neck” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder with an English speaking cast from around the world while in residence there at the cabaret space, Tinta Roja.
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