10 July, 2026 - 18 July 2026 | Chicago Steelworkers Park | 8080 S DuSable Lakeshore Drive | Chicago, IL, USA
* EVENT DATES & SEATING BELOW *
•FRIDAY JULY 10th• •SATURDAY JULY 11th• •SUNDAY JULY 12th• •FRIDAY JULY 17th• •SATURDAY JULY 18th•
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CAST
Dakota Norman | Beddie Slatkoff
Trent Helton | Vim Hile
Dakota Norman | Beddie Slatkoff
Trent Helton | Vim Hile
DIRECTION & PRODUCTION
Hannah Bernhardt | Zolt Brown-Dunn
Dakota Norman
Hannah Bernhardt | Zolt Brown-Dunn
Dakota Norman
PRODUCTION DESIGN & CREW
Nick D’alessandro | Arden Allman Zane Summons | Jo Lauck | Eleanor Witt-Wardlaw
Nick D’alessandro | Arden Allman Zane Summons | Jo Lauck | Eleanor Witt-Wardlaw
“...Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance....at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say?” - Beckett (1952)
Downstream the roster of production sites for Beckett's seminal work - from San Quentin Prison, to Cape Town amidst apartheid, Bejing after Tiananmen Square, Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, to New Orleans after Katrina, we find ourselves in the midst of the Theatre of Resistance, alongside over forty organizations local to the South Shore struggling against the coming development of the Quantum Shore Project.
The site of our production -South Works- is one of cyclical extraction and dispossession, as well as livelihood. A fraught legacy is carried fourth as Chicagoans struggle against the construction of a quantum computing center in our community as part of the world's quantum arms race, alongside Americans throughout our continent struggling against the construction of data centers - in population centers. It's clear to us that such a development may irreparably pervert the character of Chicago's South Shore, turn our city into a target for foreign militaries, and decimate our lakeshore ecosystems. As data centers are being labeled as legitimate military targets in UN reports, and as our struggles against this industry erode the relevance of party lines, this production calls for the attention of the cultural stakeholders of Chicago towards this threat, and allows space to process and grieve the inter-generational struggle against dispossession in the fabric of American urbanity.
US Steel South Works, 1940s
South Works Site, 2021
Quantum Shore Rendering, 2023
Credit: Provided / PsiQuantum
Credit: Provided / PsiQuantum
Related Midwest, the new owner & developer set to transform the South Works site into the Quantum Shore, has a sort of fetish for the most fraught sites in Chicago. Related Midwest owns Parkway Gardens (O Block), redeveloped the North Lawndale site revealed in the FBI’s Operation Silver Shovel corruption sting, took over the Chicago Spire Project.
A Clean Air Act lawsuit over xAI’s operation of a gas-fired power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, threatens U.S. national security interests, a Department of Defense official said in testimony supporting the Department of Justice’s request to be allowed to intervene in the case. DOJ wants the case dismissed. “The plaintiffs in this civil action seek to enjoin xAI’s use of temporary gas-fired turbines at its Stanton Road site that powers the nearby Colossus 2 data center or supercomputer — xAI uses the Colossus 2 supercomputer to train and upgrade its Grok models, including ones used by [DOD],” said DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Cameron Stanley in the court filing.“xAI’s Grok represents one of only four proprietary state-of-the-art (“frontier”) AI currently capable of supporting national security applications.”
Costuming Cutouts
Josephine Lauck
His most famous work, Waiting for Godot, which premiered in 1953, was initially entitled simply Waiting. The play, writes Perloff, “dramatizes the tension between passivity and action that characterizes this very particular form of waiting—a waiting on the part of human beings thrust into a very particular—and wholly unknown—situation.”
In retrospect, the influence of the world war and the Holocaust seem obvious on Beckett’s work. But curiously, when Beckett became famous as a writer and playwright in the immediate post-war years, his darkly comic work was seen as addressing the universal absurdity and meaningless of existence in an uncaring universe.
As Perloff notes, this interpretation ignored the hard, obvious facts of Beckett’s war years. Indeed, the French critics who made Beckett’s name both in France and abroad studiously ignored the realism of his work. Writes Perloff, “It was preferable to read Beckett as addressing man’s alienation and the human condition rather than anything as specific as everyday life in the years of Resistance.” For this first wave of French critics, war memories were “not only painful but embarrassing, given the collaboration of the Vichy government.”
Though Beckett was given the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française, he never much discussed his Resistance work, nor his flight, hiding, and waiting, nor his volunteer work after the war building a Red Cross hospital in Saint-Lô, a city 95% destroyed during the Allied drive into of Normandy in July of 1944. Instead, he put it all into his writing. Perloff argues that his aim was to describe “not what wartime France was but how it felt.”
Or, as the narrator of The Unnamable (1953) says at the book’s end, “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
-Marjorie Perloff
We want to thank the incredible journalists at Block Club Chicago (Maxwell Evans, Joe Ward, Trey Arline) who initially brought these developing stories to the broader community’s attention, and made researching this situation a treat.
Propagate Cooperative is grateful to the arts program at Chicago First Church, which has generously lent use of equiptment and space in the execution of this community theatre production.
This Production was Directed by Hannah Ruth Bernhardt and Produced by Zolt Brown-Dunn with generous advising and assistance from Dakota Norman