Theater Oobleck’s Martha Bayne sounds overwhelmed when we talk by phone. Over the August 4 weekend Oobleck will be producing Closed Casket, which she describes as a “music project being put on by a theater company that involves a visual art form no one understands.” She adds that the event is huge and logistically complicated. Also arcane, eccentric, and moody—a three-day celebration of angst. “The moral” of Closed Casket, she says, “is despair and folly.”
Baudelaire “was depressed, but he found in his depression a way to make new beauty—and found that beauty in the horror of stasis and the horror of existence and the horror of death and the horror of trying to live together.”Closed Casket‘s doom seems appropriate then: “I picture us all in that room together on Sunday,” Buchen says, “finishing off some sort of wake for the Baudelaire and just drinking a toast and saying, ‘Now we’re done. Good-bye.’” v
Fri 8/4, 7 PM; Sat 8/5, 11 AM-5 PM and 5-11 PM; Sun 8/6, 6 PM Links Hall at Constellation 3111 N. Western 773-281-0824theateroobleck.com $15-$50
