‘Words in Motion’ fest at 16th Street Theater

Tony Fitzpatrick

Updated: July 4, 2012 5:04PM

One of the goals artistic director Ann Filmer’s goals for the 16th Street Theater when it opened five seasons ago making it a showcase for good writing that didn’t necessarily come with a script and stage directions.

Filmer launched the theater’s annual Words in Motion series in 2008 “as a way to theatrical-ize works that people wouldn’t ordinarily expect to see on stage.

So that first season, the theater hosted a production of The Scarlet Ibis (a complete volume of poetry by Illinois Poet Laureate Susan Hahn), an adaptation of Elizabeth Berg’s novel The Pull of the Moon and the first two installments in an autobiographical trilogy by award-winning Chicago storyteller Arlene Malinowski.

Malinowski will close out this season’s Words in Motion series August 9 with “All Kinds of Crazy,” the final installment of her trilogy, following “Nickel Heat,” Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick’s July 19 follow-up to his acclaimed 16th Street solo show “This Train” and Julie Ganey’s July 5 series-opening solo show “Love Thy Neighbor. . .Till It Hurts.”

Audiences work

All three productions calculated, as Filmer says, to make audiences “invest in their imagination.”

“There are so many types of media and entertainment where everything is provided for the audience, where they’re really nothing more than passive observers,” said Filmer, who also adapted and directed Fitzpatrick’s “Nickel Heat.”

“With Words in Motion, instead of providing audiences with a fancy set and a bunch of characters acting out a story, we ask them to be participants in a sense,” she said. “They have to invest their attention and their empathy and their imagination in the stories that are being told, and make a connection with the storytellers. And we’ve heard again and again that they find the experience very rewarding.”

That doesn’t surprise Filmer, since storytellers and storytelling have been around as long as people could speak and understand each other.

“I think it’s an essential need for human beings to share stories — to tell them and hear them being told,” she said. “It will never go away. It’ll take many different forms, but it will never go away.”

Not so long as Arlene Malinowski has anything to do with it, in any case. In addition to writing and performing her own autobiographical shows around the country, she teaches students how to transfer their stories into performances at Chicago Dramatists, where she is a resident playwright.

Filmer notes that Malinowski became a storyteller at an early age because, as a hearing child of deaf parents, she became the translator between her parents and the hearing world.

“She constantly had to be communicating between two worlds,” she said. “That makes her view on the world very special and her work very full of life and touching and so is her performance, because she incorporates sign language into every show.”

For all that, Malinowski came to solo performance fairly late in her career, after working as an actress on stage in Chicago and Los Angeles and on TV during the ’90s. (Her bio claims the distinction of being the only actor ever to appear in “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “Measure for Measure” within 24 hours.) Frustrated by frequent lapses in TV employment, though, she turned her attention to solo performance and never looked back.

Personal story

“It was natural for me to be attracted to it because, in the deaf community, storytelling is a revered art,” she said, noting that because there is not written form of American Sign Language, “stories and histories of the culture are passed down, literally, from hand to hand to hand. I also knew I had a story to tell, so I got up on stage and started with what I knew best — the story of my family.”

The first two installments in Malinowski’s autobiographical trilogy dealt with her experiences as a child explaining the hearing world to her parents (“What Does the Sun Sound Like?”) and encounters with the medical world and the world of faith as her mother contended with cancer (“Aiming for Sainthood”).

“All Kinds of Crazy” deals with the shame and secrecy surrounding the suicide of her grandmother, who from depression. It is an illness Malinowski also struggled with in secret until she learned the truth about her grandmother. That was halfway through her own serious bout with depression, and she came to see her granmother as a totem, a spiritual resource that helped pull her through.

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