Rhino History
About Rhino Fest
Troy Martin from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, rhino by Sue Cargill.
The event that became the Rhinoceros Theater Festival began in 1988 as an offshoot of the Bucktown Arts Fest, and in its first year featured just two days of performances, including work by Jenny Magnus and Beau O'Reilly. When the event's founder moved away from Chicago in 1990, he asked a ragtag group of local artists (including Beau O'Reilly and Theatre of the Reconstruction’s Scott Turner) to keep the festival going, and the Rhino Fest was born. The Curious Theatre Branch went on to produce the Rhino across many neighborhoods and venues over the years, with events variously taking place in Wicker Park/Bucktown, Rogers Park, Andersonville and Avondale; at spaces including the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Café, the Neo-Futurarium, the Society for New Things, The Garage, The Firehouse, Remains Theatre and Prop Thtr. In the mid-2000s, Rhino Fest settled at Prop Thtr in Avondale as its long-term base, and Prop and Curious co-produced the festival among a shifting group of curators for many years. Following the closure of Prop's Elston Ave. space in 2020, and a year off during the height of the pandemic, the Rhino charged back, and this year will be residing in The Facility Theater, Chicago Dramatists, and Labyrinth Club space. OUr partners, Prop THTR, are developing new work and artists and communities of choice, Prop Thtr interrogates and transforms how we make, what we make, where we are making, and who is making. We encourage, mentor, develop and produce new plays, devised new plays, and other performing and digital arts work: experimental and political. In the spirit of Chicago storefront theatre, Prop is committed to championing and supporting Chicago artists in residence at our company and as they build new companies of their own.
About Curious Theatre Branch
Curious Theatre Branch has produced more than 100 full productions of world-premiere shows in 30 years, amazing audiences year after year by demonstrating how much can be accomplished for so little. Curious has developed its own recognizable style, using an economy of means and production to make deeper and deeper, rather than larger and larger, work.
In 1995, Beau O'Reilly was named one of the 50 most influential people in Chicago theater by Chicago Magazine, and in 1998, Beau O'Reilly and Jenny Magnus were named among the Artists of the Year by the Chicago Tribune. Curious is committed to producing new plays by company members, and also periodically returns to the work of esteemed writers from the broader literary world who have inspired the group, recently producing plays by Eugène Ionesco and Caryl Churchill. Curious's productions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker were named among the top five theater productions of 2006 and 2009, respectively, by Newcity. In 2007, Curious Theatre Branch won an Orgie Award for Original Theater for the year-long Samuel Beckett festival, No Danger of the Spiritual Thing: 100 Years of Beckett (best ensemble), and in 2011 Curious was granted a season-long residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art, culminating in Jenny Magnus’s Still in Play: A Performance of Getting Ready.
The Curious Theatre Branch ensemble currently includes Jayita Bhattacharya, Jeffrey Bivens, Chris Bower, Paul Brennan, Lena Brün, Stefan Brün, Charlotte Lastra, Jenny Magnus, T-Roy Martin, Beau O'Reilly, Vicki Walden, and Julia Williams.
