Voting Day / "Bottle Fly" by Redtwist Theatre

As theatre-makers, we wait not only to see our own names in programs and on posters, but the names of people close to us in the community, our friends who we root on and support. So when a familiar name lit up the social media of the storefront theatre world, my desire of live entertainment narrowed to Bottle Fly at the Redtwist Theatre. My acquaintance with the play’s director, Eileen Dixon, has been relatively brief, but I have proclaimed (privately, and hopefully enough personally for her to know it) my admiration of her presence in performing arts administration of Chicago. She’d supported me in the past as an actor during a staged reading, my first as a playwright, and she’d let me direct her, and so I had to see more of what Redtwist Theatre had to show. 

I was offered a selection of malbec upon arrival, which was already a great start, but when my partner ordered a beer, we both squinted when told that he could get it from the bartender on stage. Her name was Rosie, and she shouts across to the audience, welcoming my partner and I to Florida, though we’d just stepped out of the Chicago autumn. When I give him cash to tip her, she insists that I tell her my name rather than just being called “the bank”. She picks up whoever will catch her eye, demanding, “Where are you from?!” 

Logistically improbable for a black box venue, we are transitioned to narrative setting immediately and irrevocably, a transportative voice and Rosie’s pre-show candor bringing us right into the center of the characters’ storm. But our conciliation feelings sour quickly as we are reminded of the themes of homophobia in this play, in Eileen’s written words, “queer folk living openly and authentically without fear or judgment or persecution… This is a beautiful reality of living in a big city like Chicago. This is, however, not the reality for queer and trans people across the United States.”

The outspoken Rosie who had charmed us before show start immediately spews hate across her bar at Penny and Ruth, a wlw couple renting her loft and land for beekeeping. She threatens and antagonizes them, and then in the same breath will dote on and kiss her daughter, because to her love between girls is only for family; even though the heterosexual affection between her and her husband Cal makes the audience much more uncomfortable than the same between Penny and Ruth; even though she, too, experiences and struggles with social discrimination. An antagonist that we sympathetically, protagonistically aligned with somehow. Despite the the divide between progressive and conservative, the story truly unfolds in the cracks that emerge within each side respectively, another theme surfacing, a reminder that humans are not as different as they think. Strained relationships, longing and expectation, power disparities, self-doubt, toxic masculinity all span across the characters of Bottle Fly, gender and sexualities be damned. As one character aptly describes, “I’m not better than you, there’s some dust on my shelves on the inside.” As a drop in the audience, I immediately see the care put into the seamlessness of the production, and the effort that has been put in by the acting team and director alike. They pop and shell real peanuts, using them to emote and ignoring stage cleanliness. Floridian expressions sparkle without being hokey. Scene changes are slow and organic, the heavy lifting done by vocalizations, lights, and a fog machine. And too, the actors reset the stage the way we do in our daily lives – a break in conversations, loud breaths, labored movements on bad joints. They take their time with bar closing tasks, home closing tasks, getting their things together, as we do normally. It was a set that would only possibly be made better by Smell-O-Technology.

The next day later I write this, while waiting in line at the poll to vote in the 2024 general election, I come back to this unwellness within both the conservative and progressive sides of this play. Women who are not encouraged to be intimate flaunt their love, yet become insecure and defensive to each other at the slightest provocation. Do they really love each other, or do they love what the other represents? Communication dissipates ineffectively between Cal and Rosie, a woman who was big and bad in one scene reduced to mewling and begging in the next. Yet another groundbreaking election slowly rolling over us all, and this Floridian narrative has not left my mind. As backward as the characters become, betraying the audience of mind and soul, so too have we been treated in the circus of American democracy. Laura Sturm, Rebecca VanderBros, Shannon Leigh Webber, Shaina Toledo, and Johnny Garcia appropriately provide for us a broken set of people thrown to the dogs. These kinds of struggles are always present and therefore always applicable, but particularly for this season of our history, so much so that I ponder if it was intentional.

I have already scanned my calendar for an opening to see Bottle Fly at Redtwist Theatre a second time, to no avail. If I were to, I would look for more beautiful little handcrafted secrets in the dramaturgy of it, like the rings on chains around the Palmettos’ necks rather than on their hands, or the melodic and entrancing song choices for K’s renditions. I’ve voted to the importance of growth, culture, and sustainability of our community, as we all vote with our time and dollars every day. What and who we choose to support affects the world around us and have real weight, as does a lovely scored dramatic production in a black box in Edgewater. Theatres like Redtwist with plays like Bottle Fly is how we keep the conversation ever-moving, how we use our performing arts superpowers for good, and in all honesty – how we keep our world worth living in.

Goldfinger, Jacqueline. Bottle Fly, 2018 Stageplay.

World premiere performed at Redtwist Theatre, directed by Eileen Dixon, starring Johnny Garcia, Laura Sturm, Shaina Toledo, Rebecca VanderBos, and Shannon Leigh Webber.

This production closes November 23rd, 2024.