Kate Zambreno

"Would you like a finger?"

Charlie Levin offers a broken-off digit from the row of hands clenched and curled up on the floor, where dozens of wax masks also wait patiently. Nearby in this spacious South Side loft, Meghan Strell sits stirring a Crock-Pot, stretching out paraffin ribbons by pouring the warm wax into another bucket of water. "Isn't it pretty?" she asks of her new discovery. Levin beams approvingly. "Oh, wow, it's like an infinite pool." Strell shows another trick, as she holds a mask against the window, the light flipping the image like a ghostly hologram.

Levin and Strell are obsessed with wax. Over the past four years, their theater company, Local Infinities, has stretched the metaphorical limits of the petroleum product, starring it in four shows. Their newest installment "Wax and Wayne," just ended a successful run at the Oerol Festival in Holland and opens in Chicago this weekend. It features 300 pounds of candle wax and plays with the concept of cycles of identity and creativity that they see wax in all its forms illuminating.

Wax is a sticky and fickle substance, quickly hardening after the heat of the liquid moment. Temperature is the most challenging aspect of working with wax, Levin and Strell agree. In preparing for "Wax and Wayne," they learned through trial and error how to create a live wax statue, finally dipping fellow collaborator Larry Underwood into an innocuous 127 degrees. The black life-size cylinder sits waiting to be filled with the warm oozy stuff, looking a little like the cauldron the fairytale witch used to boil up sweet babies.

These artist/alchemists can wax poetic about their muse for a while. Strell, an actor by training, and Levin, an installation artist who paints with wax on Plexiglass, are a virtual talking museum of this turn-of-the-century predecessor to plastic. Details like the fact that pockmarks in ancient Greek statues were filled with wax, or that the word "sincere" originally meant the absence of wax, and so on. Levin cranks up a pre-record-era Edison wax cylinder that a musician will be playing throughout the performance. By the light, of the silvery moon... a female voice warbles.

Before wax came other obsessions: rope, dirt, water. "We were known as the light-bulb girls for a while," laughs Strell. "And the box girls," adds Levin. After their dirt phase ended, they filled all the flowerpots in the area. And after their love affair with wax has finally waned?

"I figure we'll make a lot of candles," Strell says. (2002-08-14)

Also by Kate Zambreno

STRANGER THAN FICTION
In the dark nest of the Neo-Futurarium, performance poet David Kodeski and his theatrical investigative crew scurry about. They're putting finishing touches on "The Sycamore Story," the fourth installment of Kodeski's "True Life Tales," a series of performance pieces that place the simple existences and private histories of everyday people on a pedestal.
(2001-04-19)

ENTER THE CAMP
"The Shadow of the Master" is a fight to the death (aren't they all?), with the lofty eye-rolling goal of saving the world. It's good versus evil, with evil lead by Dread Lord Andrew Vaile and his team of misfits -- ranging from the vampire Lance and Trash, a vixen villain with a potty mouth, to Vaudevillian, who clumsily attacks with balloon animals.
(2001-04-05)

FASHION SUICIDE
In "Cleansed," the hope of love still blooms underneath grim oppression, rapes, sadistic science experiments, the unlivable brutality. "It very much has this '1984' thing of can love provide freedom from oppression or is love what really cages you in?" Rothschiller says.
(2001-03-22)

BRANDING ANNOYANCE
Asked by Second City owner Andrew Alexander to take his improv schtick to the Strip, Napier departed in late February to direct a group of nine bandits in the new Second City venue in Bugsy's Celebrity Room at the Flamingo Hotel. But never fear, the mild-mannered yet mischievous Napier, who's become a Chicago improv icon, isn't ditching us for good.
(2001-03-08)

ENTERTAINING DON HALL
(2001-02-01)

GOING APE
(2000-11-23)

EAT ME
(2000-11-16)

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