BY Jenn Q. Goddu

Asking someone to describe a typical Redmoon Theater show could be construed as posing a trick question. Even when the query is put to members of the company’s artistic staff they profess to be stumped, at least momentarily.

“I find it very difficult to describe what Redmoon does,” said Jim Lasko, the company’s artistic director.

Associate artistic director Frank Maugeri embraces the challenge.

“That’s always fun to do because, the truth is, it always changes a little bit,” he said. “Redmoon works a little like, ‘we publicly present a dream and then you get to interpret it,’ and that’s very powerful for people.”

Yet there are at least some common elements one can expect from one show to the next with Redmoon.

For one, there’s always an emphasis on the visual. Maugeri describes it as “telling stories through big, broad beautiful pictures.”

Audiences can also expect the exploration of mechanical objects or puppetry as a means of conveying character. “It has to do with creating a rich visual language that requires the actor to communicate with the audience through objects,” Lasko said.

Plus there’s the investigation of space and the effort to transform indoor spaces or unusual outdoor locations into a spectacular setting. “I think what Redmoon ultimately does is transform spaces with a kind of theatrical celebration,” Lasko said.

But it’s always done with a different aesthetic or context in mind. Currently the company is staging its first-ever musical, The Golden Truffle, in its permanent home in a converted ink factory at 1463 W. Hubbard St.

The show, running until June 18, is a “full-on experience,” Lasko said. The performance space has been converted into a cabaret in which “highly arched” characters vie for the prize Golden Truffle in an American Idol-esque contest. During the interactive show, audiences are also treated to a tasting menu of four truffles created by Vosges Haut-Chocolat.

The production, created by Lasko with original music and lyrics by John Fournier, and co-direction from Maugeri and choreographer Vanessa Stalling, “swirls around the audience” and “plunges into every sense,” Lasko said.

Exploring song, spectacle and object as well as audience interactivity, it’s a show that very few theatres could do so well, Maugeri said. “It takes a very particular mind to sit in a room and kind of defend ourselves against the practical, conventional theatre conceits someone would probably put on themselves.”

The result is a show that is unlike the traditional musical, dinner show, or interactive production. Really, Maugeri said, it’s “a comment and investigation of all of those things at the same time...in a very surprising fashion.”

Yet the production remains true to the core interests Redmoon has been exploring in all different manners since its start in 1989. Redmoon started out with Blair Thomas and Laurie Macklin at the helm of small shows, spectacles or parades being performed for limited runs. In 1991 the first Winter Pageant was held in what Lasko, who joined the company that year, describes as a “principal defining moment.”

While still incorporating the puppetry and object work, Lasko says the company’s aesthetic has broadened. “Part of it is an interest in the medium...and wanting to expand our understanding of what’s possible with theatre, and what’s possible in public space,” Lasko said. Constantly asking the “What’s possible?” question has kept Redmoon fresh. That, and its “willingness to call upon whatever tools we need to in order to create the show that we want to create, create the atmosphere we want to create and create the transformation we want to create.”

Redmoon also continues to adhere to a civic mission “to create community through theatre,” Lasko said. Doing that in public and private spaces “through a sort of rich populist aesthetic is just something that I think people respond to on an instinctive and emotional level.”

It’s the community-centric mission that appealed to Maugeri, who joined Redmoon first as a volunteer in 1996. All of Redmoon’s shows have a “ritualistic interactivity” and are based in celebration, collaboration and participation in a way that is atypical for Chicago theatre, he said. “The ritual component is enormously powerful for people because people are more and more driven to isolation, to be alone, and our work is about the opposite to being alone.”

Redmoon doesn’t present “really concentrated subject matter,” instead preferring to look at “fairly honest truthful human stories that we hope are pretty universal to our audience,” Maugeri said. “They’re dealing with emotional experiences, or spiritual journeys, or quests, or encounters—whatever they might be—that we hope many, many different types of people can relate to. The themes that we are surveying are often fairly populist, in the most positive sense, in that we’re trying to get at something that anybody can look at and have their own personal interpretation. That’s powerful for them because they are reviewing it with their eyes only.”

As an extension of its populist leanings, Redmoon has no core ensemble. Many people—including artistic staff such as Lasko, Maugeri and co-associate artistic director Kristin Randall Burrello—have worked with the company for years, but the community of creators working with Redmoon is “constantly in flux,” Lasko said. “It never seemed a natural conclusion of our work to have a group of people who were creating a kind of performance vocabulary who would be at the center of what we were doing,” he added.

Nor does Redmoon have a subscriber base. “We’re trying to find ways of doing things differently,” Lasko said. Redmoon does have a number of “very dedicated fans,” but the theatre doesn’t provide a consistent product on a consistent schedule.

The company’s last show, From Nothing, was an indoor site-specific piece that ran for four weeks. The Golden Truffle is a musical running for 11 weeks. Next up is a two-person spectacle in Millennium Park that will be played for eight free shows.

But the company has, over the years, added an institutional structure with Redmoon Central (consolidation of offices and performance spaces in one location), a staff and board of directors. The staff currently numbers 15 and Redmoon’s budget rose to $1.7 million in 2005—up from $1.1 million just two years before. That puts it among Chicago’s 10 largest theatres, in terms of budget.

To help pay for that, they’ve started a for-profit, corporate arm. Redmoon for Hire charges anywhere from $5000 to over $100,000 for site-specific, private event spectacles. When it was started in 2003, Redmoon for Hire contributed about 5 percent to Redmoon’s budget. In 2005, it contributed 20 percent.

The establishment of an infrastructure for the theatre actually worries Lasko. While he is not at all concerned with Redmoon running out of new boundary-breaking ideas, he’s definitely bothered by the anxiety that Redmoon might lock itself into something “because we know it works and we know that’s what our public wants, or our public will want more predictability.”

He said his biggest fear is falling into a trap of feeling the need to feed the infrastructure instead of impulses to be creative. “It could be that needs arise out of [having that infrastructure in place] that begin to compromise our ability to do the kind of experimentation and discovery that I’m really most interested in.”

The key for Lasko is to retain Redmoon’s commitment to continuing to find new answers to the question of “What’s possible?”

“The adventure of working with Redmoon is a never-ending one and it’s really exciting,” Lasko said.

The company’s future, Maugeri hopes, will hold massive outdoor works integrating the audience. “Without the audience those giant spectacles wouldn’t really happen.” But he is also looking for “tiny, intimate shows.” Ultimately, he said, “we’ll keep shifting to surprise both us and our audiences.”

Redmoon’s first-ever musical The Golden Truffle runs Wed-Sun until June 18 at Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard St., Chicago. For tickets call 312/850-8440 x 111 or visit www.redmoon.org. The $35–$45 price includes four-course truffle tasting from Vosges Haut-Chocolat.