Frank Maugeri had been with Redmoon Theater for 23 years when it collapsed in December 2015. He’d worked his way up from volunteer to producing artistic director at the Chicago-based company, known for its inventive urban spectacles performed everywhere from neighborhood streets to the White House and involving everything from an otherworldly river procession to a fantasia built around a nonexistent Norwegian pop star. And he most definitely loved it. Redmoon, the 49-year-old Maugeri told me during a recent phone interview, “fit my spiritual nature, it fit my emotions, it fit my community-galvanizing impulses, and it fit my need and desire to create ritual. Losing that felt, at the time, massive.”
Maugeri resisted that thought at first. But as even a brief conversation with him makes abundantly clear, he’s a constitutional optimist with a near-mystical confidence in everyone’s ability to access and address the universe. About a month into his mourning he was offered a job as community programs artistic director for the Chicago Children’s Theatre, and accepted it in part, he says, because the theater was moving into a renovated police station: “Take an old police station and transform it into a site of hope,” he says, “it’s perfectly aligned with who I am as a person on this planet.”
“I’m working with a lot of fractured-glass sculpture, building a giant disco ball that a person can sit inside of. Right now it’s the shape of a moon, oddly enough, with this moon character who lives inside its belly.” Among the other attractions he has in mind: “ritual creatures” on stilts, swathed in light-shifting plastic and crowned with car lights; a “futuristic elotes cart” for dispensing s’mores; aerialists wearing refractive costumes; and “a team of mobile chandelier carriers” with generator backpacks, who “can go to different spaces in the party and create moments of intimacy for one or two people.”
