Friday, January 09, 2026
The audience is howling and drooling over Filament Theatre’s latest show, literally
Chicago Sun-Times: Portage Park’s Filament Theatre is trying a novel approach for their latest show: The audience is allowed — even encouraged — to howl, take over the stage, drool, snooze if they wish.
A couple of audience members on Wednesday even burped, prompting cooing from the actors.
To experience this spectacle for yourself, you need to be of an age at which walking is still a future aspiration — or be the carer of someone at that stage of life.
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3 comments:
This is the kind of performance I love to hear about, something interactive for the sake of creating community. I love a production that challenges our concept of the audience and who and where. I love to see the humility of these performers willing to be upstaged by their audience of infants, performing for them. I think this is especially necessary in our digital age, in which we all love to neglect this age group by shoving an iPad in their faces when in fact, this is the ripe old age they need every sensory experience available. I will say the title of this article had me a bit worried for a second, very thankful it’s not the parents crawling around and burping. Performances of this nature are a high necessity for many, I love their dedication to taking the people usually deemed as the worst audience members and creating something just for them. This is the kind of inclusivity I love to see in theater.
Theater, and art in general, that focuses on calm has been something that I have been increasingly running into. I feel as though this focus reflects an ever-increasing awareness of the insanity that is our world. While there is still a large amount of art that means to connect people through shared oppressions or inform an audience, there is still a significant change. I feel like this form of political art was used to create community or to call the uninformed to action. Again, this definitely still exists today, and maybe even in surplus, but it seems that there is a new genre making space for the informed. Instead of creating community around resistance, a focus on calms seems to recognize that the audience is informed, and gives them respite from that knowledge. I find a lot of value in continuing to ease one’s mind in favor of coming back to the world refreshed and able to make more change. I do worry, however, that this focus on calmness ignores community values and the lives of people actually struggling through the issues we hear about on the news.
So I’ll admit that this title really grabbed my attention. When I read the first lines, I really thought that they had persuaded adult humans to howl and drool and I did not think I was a fan of that. However, now that I know this is an experience for babies, I’m more intrigued. I think we need more places for babies, young children, and also their parents to go. A lot of times new parents have such a hard time getting out of the house and they feel trapped, and I think providing these types of things where babies are actually given something to do is really good for society. Also, parents can meet other new parents and its like baby group but with theater, which I think is awesome. I would be really interested to know what kind of special design considerations had to be taken into consideration considering their audience.
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