The Gift Theatre is pleased to announce its 2022 season, launching this spring with a return to live performances with the Chicago premiere of Naomi Iizuka’s drama At The Vanishing Point, directed by Lavina Jadhwani. Also this spring, The Gift presents the world premiere of Mud City, a ten-episode radio drama written by Founding Artistic Director Michael Patrick Thornton and featuring over 20 Gift Ensemble Members and special guest stars. The season concludes this fall with the world premiere of Jennifer Rumberger’s drama The Locusts, commissioned and developed by The Gift and directed by Ensemble Member John Gawlik.
At The Vanishing Point will be presented at Filament Theatre, 4040 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago and The Locusts will be performed at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave. in Chicago. The company recently exited its longtime home at 4802 N. Milwaukee Ave. and is engaged in a capital campaign to open a new performance space in Chicago’s Jefferson Park neighborhood.
The Gift’s new Co-Artistic Directors Brittany Burch*, Emjoy Gavino* and Jennifer Glasse* comment, “Our conversations to curate this season were guided by what excited us most: Finding opportunities for different generations of Gift Ensemble to work together; ushering in guest artists who will not only challenge and inspire us,but grow alongside us; and finally embracing stories that seek the light amidst a lot of darkness. The role of the storyteller is one that has only become more sacred to us in the last few years. We believe it is a season that is provocative, hopeful and full of new poetry.”
Season subscriptions are currently available at thegifttheatre.org or by calling (773) 283-7071. The “2022 GiftFlex Subscription Package” includes a ticket to At The Vanishing Point, The Locusts, all ten episodes of Mud City, and an exclusive invitation to In The Works, a new play reading series. Early Bird subscriptions for $99 (regular $115) are on-sale through March 17, 2022.
*Denotes The Gift Theatre Ensemble Member
The Gift Theatre’s 2022 Season includes:
April 28 – May 22, 2022
At The Vanishing Point – Chicago Premiere!
- Written by Naomi Iizuka
- Directed by Lavina Jadhwani
- Performed at Filament Theatre, 4040 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago
- Press opening: Sunday, May 1 at 3 pm
How do we remember a part of our history at the moment that it's slipping away? How do we give voice to the ghosts that haunt us as individuals and as a community? This stunning portrait of a community weaves together historical fact, myth and memory to give voice to people who would otherwise exist only as faded images in an old photo album.
Spring 2022
Mud City – World Premiere!
- Written by Founding Artistic Director Michael Patrick Thornton
Mud City is a ten-episode radio drama and the largest collaboration in Gift history. The year is 1940, and Lacey McGill – once Mud City's most fearsome journalist, now a hard-drinking, down-on-her-luck private eye – finally gets a crack in the case surrounding the disappearance of her daughter four years ago. In a crooked city of mob bosses, business tycoons and secret clubs, Lacey McGill and her best friend Narrator go against them all to answer a call to an adventure that changes everything.
October 20 – November 19, 2020
The Locusts – World Premiere!
- Written by Jennifer Rumberger
- Directed by Ensemble Member John Gawlik*
- Performed at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave., Chicago
- Press opening: Sunday, October 23 at 3 pm
When a serial killer goes on a gruesome rampage in Ella’s small hometown of Vero Beach, Florida, she’s called up from her busy career in the Miami police force to help apprehend him. At home, she’s confronted with the life she left behind: her pregnant and struggling sister, her scared young niece, who like Ella, is desperate to find a life somewhere else, and the dark events of her childhood that she’s tried to forget. As the murders grow more horrific and the small community is frozen by fear, Ella realizes she has to confront the events of her dark past in order to stop him.
The Gift Theatre’s 2022 Season playwrights and directors include (top, l to r) Naomi Iizuka and Lavina Jadhwani (bottom) Michael Patrick Thornton, Jennifer Rumberger and John Gawlik.
Artist Biographies
Naomi Iizuka (Playwright, At the Vanishing Point) is a nationally recognized contemporary playwright whose plays include The Last Firefly, 36 Views, 17 Reasons (Why), Polaroid Stories, Language of Angels, Anon(ymous), Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls, Tattoo Girl, Skin, Ghostwritten, After a Hundred Years, Strike-Slip, At the Vanishing Point, Hamlet: Blood on the Brain (a collaboration with CalShakes and Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts) and War of the Worlds (written in collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company). Her plays have been produced around the United States and internationally, including at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Dallas Theater Center and Undermain Theatre in Dallas, FronteraFest at Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, Texas, Printer’s Devil Theater and Annex Theatre in Seattle, The Public Theatre, Geva Theatre Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Soho Rep and Tectonic Theater Project in New York, Sledgehammer Theatre in San Diego, Edmonton’s Northern Light Theatre and Montreal’s Alternate Theatre in Canada, and the Edinburgh Festival. Her plays have been published by Overlook Press, Playscripts, Smith and Kraus, Dramatic Publishing, Sun and Moon Press and Theatre Communications Group. lizuka is an alumna of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, a Joyce Foundation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Stavis Award from the National Theatre Conference, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, an NEA/TCG Artist-in-Residence grant, a McKnight Fellowship, a PEN Center USA West Award for Drama, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, and a Jerome Fellowship. She currently heads the MFA Playwriting program at the University of California, San Diego.
Lavina Jadhwani (Director, At the Vanishing Point) is a Chicago-based director, adaptor and activist. As a second-generation immigrant, Lavina constantly investigates the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” and through her work, she strives to expand the definition of that word to include more minority voices. Favorite directing credits include As You Like It (Guthrie Theater), Roe (Asolo Repertory Theatre), Gloria (Mixed Blood Theatre), Great Expectations (Silk Road Rising/Remy Bumppo Theatre Company), Gruesome Playground Injuries, Much Ado About Nothing, Yoni Ki Baat (Rasaka Theatre Company), Cherry Smoke (the side project) and Romeo and Juliet (Teatro Vista – BroadwayWorld nomination, Best Production for Young Audiences). Her adaptations include The Sitayana (a solo performance piece based on the Hindu epic, The Ramayana), Vanya (adapted from Chekhov) and Shakuntala: An East-Meets-West Love Story (an a cappella musical, adapted from Kalidasa). Proud graduate of The Theatre School at DePaul University (M.F.A., Directing), Carnegie Mellon University (B.F.A., Scenic Design; Masters, Arts Management) and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
Michael Patrick Thornton (Playwright, Mud City) is the Co-Founder of Chicago’s acclaimed The Gift Theatre and served as its Artistic Director for twenty years. He has appeared on stages throughout the country, most recently in The Gift’s production of Doubt at Steppenwolf. Other select productions: Will Eno’s Title and Deed (Lookingglass Theatre – Time Out “Best Actor” Award) as well as Eno’s Middletown (Steppenwolf), the inaugural premiere of Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal (Olney Theatre, Kennedy Center), Othello (The Gift, where he played “Iago”), Our Town (Actors Theatre of Louisville), and the world premieres of Hinderaker’s Dirty and Suicide, Incorporated, for which Thornton was nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award. During his 2016 performance in the title role of Richard III (The Gift at Steppenwolf), Thornton became the first actor to ever act onstage while wearing a robotic exoskeleton, pairing not only an actor with a disability with a character with a disability, but furthermore using cutting edge technology in order to theatrically complicate the character of Richard III and its discussion around disability, ableism and representation. The production has since been the subject of podcasts, published essays and academic papers. Michael won the 2006 Jeff Award for Solo Performance for The Good Thief (The Gift), an hour-long monologue that marked Thornton’s return to the stage after two spinal strokes nearly killed him in 2003. Years of physical and speech therapy thanks to The Shirley Ryan Ability Lab (then R.I.C.) put – in Thornton’s words – “Humpty Dumpty back together again.” On camera, Thornton has acted opposite Oscar winners Hilary Swank and J.K. Simmons. For two seasons, he played the love interest of six-time Tony Award-winning Audra McDonald on Private Practice. As a writer, Thornton recently scribed The Gift’s radio series Mud City. His plays have been workshopped in New York through Young Playwrights, Inc. and in Chicago through The Second City and American Theater Company. His play The Princess And The Bear was performed at Western Michigan University and published in excerpt along with his creative non-fiction in Third Coast Press and The Packingtown Review. He was a staff writer for The Paper Machete and has written a novel called A Low Hum. Thornton has directed dozens of productions, including the world premieres of fellow Gift ensemble member David Rabe’s Good For Otto (Jeff Nomination – Director) and Cosmologies; the 75th Anniversary production of War of the Worlds, the Chicago premiere of fellow Gift ensemble member Will Eno’s Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations) and Rabe’s Hurlyburly, all at The Gift; Of Mice and Men (Steppenwolf) the world premieres of Sean Graney’s IS N UR B1UDS7REEM and Mark Harvey’s LA 8AM (Collaboraction) and Picasso at the Lapin Agile (Noble Fool). Thornton also served as assistant director for Steppenwolf’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning production of August: Osage County. In addition, his acclaimed improv show, You & Me premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre and has since played on stages throughout Chicago, in Louisville and in Dublin, Ireland. The Chicago Reader called the show and Thornton’s improvisation “masterful.” Thornton is one of many co-authors of the cultural plan for the City of Chicago. Michael has taught at Second City, Acting Studio Chicago, Black Box, Green Shirt Studio, Columbia College, DePaul, Roosevelt and Northwestern University. He was the Improvisation instructor (with mentor Sheldon Patinkin and comedy-partner-for-life Susan Messing) at The School at Steppenwolf for a decade.
Jennifer Rumberger (Playwright, The Locusts) is a Chicago playwright and essayist. Recent productions include Night in Alachua County with Wildclaw Theatre, Open Blue Sky at Stella Adler/Tisch School of the Arts and The Bride with the Living Room Playmakers and Chicago Fringe Festival. Her play, A Little Ghost Story, was a second time selection for the 2019 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference; her play Night in Alachua County was also developed there in 2014. Night in Alachua County was recommended for consideration for the 2018 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award. Jennifer was a nominee for the PoNY Fellowship and a semi-finalist for the P73 Fellowship. Jennifer’s work has also been developed or presented in New York, Houston, Chicago and Florida by The Lark Playwrights Center, id Theatre Company, The Gift Theatre Company, Black Box Acting Studio, The Living Room Playmakers, Commission Theatre Company, Wordsmyth Theatre Company, Mildred's Umbrella Theatre Company, White Rose Miami and Northwestern University. She performs at live storytelling events in Chicago with You’re Being Ridiculous and GiftLIT. She is a founding member and associate playwright with the Living Room Playmakers. MFA: Northwestern.
John Gawlik (Director, The Locusts) has appeared with or helmed productions for many Chicagoland companies. Recent projects include directing Doubt and the world premiere of The Royal Society of Antarctica at The Gift Theatre. Favorite acting credits include: Bill Sykes in Oliver at Drury Lane, Blizzard ‘67 with Chicago Dramatists, The Lonesome West and Beauty Queen of Lennane with The Gift Theatre, A Skull in Connemara at Northlight (After Dark Award, Ensemble) and The Great Society with Famous Door. Additional directing credits include When the Rain Stops Falling at Circle Theater (Jeff Award for Director and Production), The Ruby Sunrise (Top Ten shows of 2009: TimeOut Chicago), the Jeff Award-nominated production of W;t and the Jeff Award-winning The Good Thief for The Gift Theatre. John is an ensemble member of The Gift Theatre. Television and film credits include: Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, The Chi, The Last Shift and The Trial of the Chicago Seven.
About The Gift Theatre
Since 2001 and over 70 productions, The Gift Theatre has been dedicated to telling great stories onstage with honesty and simplicity by being the most intimate professional Equity theatre in the country, leading to national acclaim for both the theatre and ensemble and creating a cultural revolution on Chicago’s northwest side.