(The Plagiarists exit.)

The Plagiarists are now officially closed. Please take any remaining items with you on the way out, as we are no longer in the business and will be unable to steal them. 

When we started this company in 2007, we were largely driven by three things: a desire to have control over our work, to make work in a humane and collaborative way, and to do the kind of work we wanted to see, that reflected our interests and our ideas about what theatre could be. We wanted to enjoy watching and working on the plays we made. Though we can’t take credit for it, it is nice to see that a lot of the bad behavior that drove us to produce independently has been called out in the years since. And the artistic landscape has changed as well, with many theatres producing work with more non-traditional approaches that tries to speak to a contemporary audience.

So what did we do? We made (stole, wrote, devised, cut together, translated) a whole bunch of plays that never existed before and put them on stage. We canceled shows that no-one showed up for and crammed extra people into final weekends. We’ve performed outdoors, in quasi-legal spaces, in park buildings with no equipment, and occasionally, even in some very nice spaces. We never got reviewed by the Sun-Times or the Tribune, but we did get a write-up in Rolling Stone, which seems apt. We produced angry plays, sad plays, political plays, long plays, short plays, choose-your-own-adventure plays, science fiction plays, adaptations, mash-ups, parodies, promenade shows, musicals, monologues, even a series of fake tours. We always said that every Plagiarist show was an experiment, an attempt at a new thing, and some of our experiments were more successful than others, but we never produced a play we weren’t excited to see. Whatever they were, they were always engaged with some big ideas and at least a little funny and a little bit hopeful in the end.

So we’d like to end this the same way. There is sadness in the end here, and a lot of other big feelings, and a further sadness at how this closing seems to be part of a trend, with so many small Chicago companies that seemed to have survived the pandemic closing their doors. The arts press that would have sounded the alarm over the way things are going is just a shell of what it was when we started out, and fighting for its own survival. However, we hope this is just a fallow moment that will grow new companies and new ideas. So all that’s left is to say thanks.

We’d like to thank Jonathan Lethem, who gave voice to a lot of the thoughts we were having as we were putting the company together with his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” - and has been extremely kind in the years since. 

We’d like to thank all our company members over the years, who contributed on stage and off to keeping this thing going for as long as it did - a miraculous run for a storefront company that never had more in the bank than enough for the next show. 

We’d like to thank our collaborators, from designers who made magic out of the limited resources we had to offer, to stage managers who kept our ramshackle trains on time, to the performers who brought all our insane ideas to life. Some of the best work we’ve seen in the theatre was made by people who worked on our shows.

And last, we’d like to thank the audiences who came to our shows. You were sometimes a very very small group and sometimes an inconveniently large one, but there were always those who loved and appreciated what we were doing and were eager to see the next thing.  

All that's left is for the 2019 film The Plagiarists and the Buffalo, NY cover band The Plagiarists to finally overtake us in the Google results. Good luck to you both.

THE END