For as long as this planet has been flat, humans with verve have been milling and seething amongst us. But what even is verve? Well, verve is verve. Those with verve are typically magnetizing, which unearths a whole new question: How does a person possess so much vigor and spirit that it becomes intoxicating, rendering the everyday plebeian totally susceptible to Human-With-Verve's charms?

Tyler Anthony Smith's "I KNOW YOU NEED MY VERVE" is a raw, focused, challenging, questionable, bold, fresh, dated, futile, dazzling, timely, grim, obscure, pretentious, snappy, wicked, tremendous, fishy, exhausting, and exciting piece of theatre. Smith says, "I'm honored to be back at Rhino Fest, premiering my new show that talks about things like warmth, coldness, and how all homosexuals engage in tax evasion. See back page for details."

Written & Performed by Tyler Anthony Smith
Directed by Stephanie Shaw
Stage-Managed by Jenna Raithel

image credit: Tyler Anthony Smith

A BeauTown Cabaret event curated by Curious co-founder Beau O'Reilly. Victor Sanders and Rae Novich, T-Roy Martin, Dennis J. Leise, Lena Brün, Heather Riordan and Beau O'Reilly will perform songs and readings by Bob Dylan, in celebration of the songwriter's 82nd birthday.

A ship made of eyes, a sea with a lousy case of ennui, and two captains who wish they were one. 

A king has built the greatest, most terrifying, and most beautiful ship in the world, but can it even stay afloat? 

No. 

It can't. 

Written and Directed by Chris Bower
Performed by Kristy Lockhart, Andrew Schoen, Vicki Walden and Penny Lou Zimmerman
Stage Manager - Marz Allswede

A woman searching for her missing twin brother is haunted by their history of confict.

Starring Lisa Stran as Hannah and Jeff Broitman as Adam.

Written by Amy Crider and directed by Amber Mandley.

STARDOG is a new play that utilizes immersive storytelling in hopes of answering the question “how do we use storytelling/narrative/myth to process pain?” Divorcees Nick and Vivian, and their adult child Maxy, each host a get-together with friends in their own homes, represented by separate corners of a shared theatrical space. The audience is separated into three groups, each group acting as dinner guests visiting briefly with one member of this disjointed family unit, before moving on to the next. Each audience group gains a unique perspective on a traumatic event shared by this broken family, and the ways each character is processing their own experience. In moments of heightened storytelling, the disparate family members interact with one another across the stage, bending time and space to briefly become scene partners before resolving into their own living rooms once again.

Story by Jessica Wright Buha and Amanda de la Guardia

Her family isolates together during the pandemic. She often thinks, “Didn’t I already serve this sentence when they were babies?” Wait. Did she manifest a global health crisis to keep them from leaving? 

We enter the bunker to find that things have gotten out of hand. Escape is going to take choreographed distance and closeness, the fanciest of footwork, and words felt but not understood.

How did they survive? Through K-Pop? Surely, not. And yet. 

This is not a show about motherhood, or the pandemic, or isolation, or letting go, or finding a common language in pop culture … It's the opposite of all of that.

Written by Kristin Garrison
Directed by Jayita Bhattacharya
Performed by Kristin Garrison, Lola Zimmerman, Penny Lou Zimmerman

When a disgraced journalist is assigned to write the weekly horoscope column for the Pennysaver, he does research by seeing an astrologer, and finds himself cursed with "the gift of prophecy." A comedy about the temptation of power.

WRITER - Amy Crider
DIRECTOR - Amy Crider
Producer - Beka
Performers - Pete Blatchford and Beka

This is about how problems sometimes work out themselves and how people overdue themselves when trying to impress. Synopsis. Mrs. Pringle is preparing to host a dinner party to introduce her daughter, Elaine, to the city's most eligible bachelor, Oliver Farnsworth. Illness and a blizzard force some guests to cancel and the three characters are compelled to try to salvage the evening and the dinner-table layout.

Director - ALKA SHARMA.
Cast : JIYA PANDEY, AAYESHA ALANG, and SHRAVANI KHAKKAR
Stage Manager : Jasraj, Pooja and Awanti
Technical support : Alka Sharma

For as long as this planet has been flat, humans with verve have been milling and seething amongst us. But what even is verve? Well, verve is verve. Those with verve are typically magnetizing, which unearths a whole new question: How does a person possess so much vigor and spirit that it becomes intoxicating, rendering the everyday plebeian totally susceptible to Human-With-Verve's charms?

Tyler Anthony Smith's "I KNOW YOU NEED MY VERVE" is a raw, focused, challenging, questionable, bold, fresh, dated, futile, dazzling, timely, grim, obscure, pretentious, snappy, wicked, tremendous, fishy, exhausting, and exciting piece of theatre. Smith says, "I'm honored to be back at Rhino Fest, premiering my new show that talks about things like warmth, coldness, and how all homosexuals engage in tax evasion. See back page for details."

Written & Performed by Tyler Anthony Smith
Directed by Stephanie Shaw
Stage-Managed by Jenna Raithel

image credit: Tyler Anthony Smith

A woman searching for her missing twin brother is haunted by their history of confict.

Starring Lisa Stran as Hannah and Jeff Broitman as Adam.

Written by Amy Crider and directed by Amber Mandley.

A neighborhood of Starrs celebrates the work of poet and writer John Starrs with brand new neighborhood stories, by Starrs himself, KellyAnn Corcoran, Jennifer Moniz and Kathy Cunningham. The evening is framed with Starrs's "Suburban Poems" set to music by KellyAnn's folk band, Salt Creek School Board. Come sing along!

Director/Producer: KellyAnn Corcoran

Performers: KellyAnn Corcoran, Jennifer Moniz, Cathy Cunningham & John Starrs

Musicians, Ian Covington O'Kelley, KellyAnn Corcoran, Matthias Leisen, Pat Pouska, Penelope Leisen & Stephen Covington-O'Kelly

STARDOG is a new play that utilizes immersive storytelling in hopes of answering the question “how do we use storytelling/narrative/myth to process pain?” Divorcees Nick and Vivian, and their adult child Maxy, each host a get-together with friends in their own homes, represented by separate corners of a shared theatrical space. The audience is separated into three groups, each group acting as dinner guests visiting briefly with one member of this disjointed family unit, before moving on to the next. Each audience group gains a unique perspective on a traumatic event shared by this broken family, and the ways each character is processing their own experience. In moments of heightened storytelling, the disparate family members interact with one another across the stage, bending time and space to briefly become scene partners before resolving into their own living rooms once again.

Story by Jessica Wright Buha and Amanda de la Guardia

Her family isolates together during the pandemic. She often thinks, “Didn’t I already serve this sentence when they were babies?” Wait. Did she manifest a global health crisis to keep them from leaving? 

We enter the bunker to find that things have gotten out of hand. Escape is going to take choreographed distance and closeness, the fanciest of footwork, and words felt but not understood.

How did they survive? Through K-Pop? Surely, not. And yet. 

This is not a show about motherhood, or the pandemic, or isolation, or letting go, or finding a common language in pop culture … It's the opposite of all of that.

Written by Kristin Garrison
Directed by Jayita Bhattacharya
Performed by Kristin Garrison, Lola Zimmerman, Penny Lou Zimmerman

Calvin Renner is THE SURVIVALIST, a “survival engineer,” a doomsday prophet/profiteer with a very special pitch for surviving the coming crisis. Don’t be the last on your block.

The Survivalist by Robert Schenkkan, produced and performed by Dakota Pariset.

A ship made of eyes, a sea with a lousy case of ennui, and two captains who wish they were one. 

A king has built the greatest, most terrifying, and most beautiful ship in the world, but can it even stay afloat? 

No. 

It can't. 

Written and Directed by Chris Bower
Performed by Kristy Lockhart, Andrew Schoen, Vicki Walden and Penny Lou Zimmerman
Stage Manager - Marz Allswede

Welcome to DreamFactory LLC! Our workers are busy dreaming up other lives for themselves as they pass time in the break room. Each scene is a snippet of an imagined life and alternate persona for our four dream-workers, a kaleidoscope of possible identities. You might laugh. You will cry. And just wait'll we get our Hanes on you!

Directed by: Kevin Sparrow

Performed and Devised by: Kelsey Chigas, Morgan-Eliza Cooper, Howard Friedman, Wanda Jin, and David Nesbitt Taylor

Props by: JI YAng

Its as if it knows how insidious it is. The way it lolls like a broken neck with two bulbous eyes that stare at you upside down. The everlastingness of its gaze is impossible to bear. Up and down. Sideways it crawls. Those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.

Script by Ramona Rotten
Directed by Ramona Rotten
Produced by Ramona Rotten and Grant Carroll
Stage Management by Denver Hoffman
Performed by Tori DeLaney
Understudy: Ramona Rotten
Collage by Ramona Rotten

Monster girl was afraid of everything. Until she learned to make friends with the demons that possess us all!

Written by Dan Taube
Directed by Taylor Pasche
Stage managed by Megs Flannery
With: (performers) Haylee Pasche, Dani Pike, Elyssa Treviño and Asa Wallace

It is the 1920s in Chicago, and The District of Lake Michigan is thriving. Led by Cap and Ma Streeter, the lakefront plot of land that houses The District is occupied by a ragtag group of Chicagoans living outside the law. They have been allowed to live there, pretty much undisturbed, for decades, but now they are in the way of millionaire Potter Palmer's master plan to expand his holdings onto Lake Shore Drive. Not one to do his own dirty work, Palmer sends his puppets (The Judge, Sargeant O'Malley, and N.A. Warpbank) to remove Streeter and his followers from the land once and for all in this DaDa adaptation of a Chicago legend. "Streeterville won't never have a chamber of commerce until it has a cabaret. This is a frontier town and its got to go through its red-blooded youth. A church and a WCTU branch never growed a town yet. Yuh gotta start with entertainment." -- Captain George Wellington Streeter

Playwright: Leah Roth Barsanti
Director: Kristin L. Schoenback
Design: Rachael Nuckles
Performers: Kylie Anderson, Kelsey Busboom, Vivian Delgadillo, Keenan Odenkirk, Ryan Tang

Sarah is fired up to play in a social soccer league after sixteen years away from the game — if only she could move past her memories of high school soccer and kick the ball.

Director: David Fink
Playwright/Performer: Sarah Bowden

image credit: Aphiwat Chuangchoem from Pexels.com

A series of stories and hypothesis and enticements, all about being human in a body. It'll be strange, also rapturous, and definitely a little scary. Bring your own body into this one and we'll be an organism together. And don't worry: there's candy.

Jenn Biddle: writer, performer
Stefan Brun: directed, assisted by: Kristen and Scott Vehill

photo credit: Ben Gonzalez (www.gopho.com)