Idle Muse Theatre Company presents JANE

September 18, 2023
2 mins read

Transporting. Timely. True.

That’s Idle Muse Theatre Company’s tagline and the criteria they use to decide which works they’ll produce in a given season. This fall, they transport their audience to the South Side of Chicago between 1969 and 1973 in Jane: Abortion and the Underground, by playwright Paula Kamen.

The production transports the audience to the period via immersive audio, mesmerizing projections, period costumes, and authentic speeches delivered eye-to-eye with the audience.

From the Idle Muse website:

Based on actual accounts from the fight for freedom

“Jane” was the code name for an underground service in Chicago, run by a collective of housewives and students, that brought safe and affordable abortions to 11,000 women from 1969 to 1973. Based on interviews with the women who ran this legendary organization before Roe v. Wade, Jane: Abortion and the Underground tells the stories of the fight for freedom over their bodies that continues today.

Director Morgan Manasa stated that the HBO documentary The Janes had inspired her to consider this project, saying:

This story is relevant in a way I wish it didn’t need to be. I wish we could just be sharing American history most folks might not know about, but this production is going up at a time when body autonomy, reproductive rights, and the lives of people are in jeopardy. Again.

Morgan Manasa, director

Photography and Editing

For the past two Idle Muse productions, I’ve shot with a wide angle lens in order to squeeze in set elements and at times exaggerate the action with the lens’s perspective. For Jane: Abortion and the Underground, I wanted to make sure I captured all of lighting designer Laura Wiley’s projections of historical footage on the background.

In keeping with the period, I borrowed elements from film: raised black levels, grain, and colors adapted from ISO 800 Kodak film stock. I didn’t attempt to replicate film from the period in the production photos, merely to suggest it.

A mix of selections, official and unofficial, from Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of Jane: Abortion and the Underground.

The Production

Jane: Abortion and the Underground runs Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m., through October 15, 2023. It performs at the Edge Off-Broadway theater in Chicago. The show details can be found here.

Idle Muse’s production of Jane: Abortion and the Underground opened on September 16, 2023, and is Jeff Recommended and Chicago Reader Recommended!

Cast and Crew

CAST: Caty Gordon (Sunny), Jennifer Mohr (Ruth), Elizabeth MacDougald (Alice), Jamie Redwood (Nancy/Jane 2/Prosecutor), Joel Thompson (Reverend), Meghann Tabor (Judith), Kristen Alesia (Jody), Troy Schaeflein (Doctor C), Jillian Leff (Heather), Catarina Evans (Micki), Laura Jones Macknin (Playwright/VO), Aleta Soron (Lory), and Understudies Katy Crow, Lauren Paige, Boomer Lusink, and Elina Walchuk.

CREATIVE: Morgan Manasa (director) Shellie DiSalvo (production manager), Kayla Menz (intimacy designer), Laura Wiley (lighting & projection designer), L.J. Luthringer (music & sound designer), Elizabeth Monti (costume designer), Tristan Brandon (properties designer/health safety officer), Wynn Lee (scenic designer), Roxie Kooi (stage manager), Line Bower (technical director), Beth Bruins (assistant stage manager), Michael Dalberg (literary director), Evan Jackson (artistic director), Mara Kovacevic (treasurer/box office manager), Kati Lechner (director of fundraising/health safety officer) and GinaMarie Hoskins (marketing).

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

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I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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