ANDERSONVILLE — The Understudy is transforming from a coffee shop and bookstore into a performance venue to host its first fully-staged production this week.
The show follows two teenage ex-best friends, Ellie and Rachel, as they rekindle their friendship while workshopping an Avril Lavigne-inspired musical together. It features a live band playing an original soundtrack inspired by Avril Lavigne’s album, “The Best Damn Thing,” which the show is named after.
Filled with nostalgic 2010s references and the drama of high school social dynamics, audience members can expect to connect with their “inner 16-year-olds,” co-owner Adam Crawford said.
“The story originated from a very organic and personal place because it’s rooted in my own experience being a teenage girl who understood herself to be an artist but wasn’t taken seriously by other people,” playwright Hannah Kime said. “I wanted to write a story that took young women — and all of their creative output and contradictory, messy emotions — as seriously as possible without losing how silly and absurd and grotesque teenage life is.”
Tickets can be bought online for $25. Attendees are encouraged to join in the show’s “immersive, campy celebration of tacky moments in culture” by wearing Lavigne merch and other 2010s clothes to the performances, Crawford said.
Co-owners Crawford and Danny Fender have always intended to use The Understudy, 5531 N. Clark St., for community gatherings, so they designed the interior with flexible seating and smart lighting that can be manipulated for events.
Since opening in March, The Understudy has hosted more than 60 community events — including discussion panels, readings and drag shows — but the owners “never intended to produce something at this level,” Fender said.
Crawford and Fender originally planned to host a reading of “The Best Damn Thing,” but their “pathologically ambitious team” quickly realized the show deserved a full production, Fender said.
“When people come to see the play, I think they’ll be impressed by the scale of it,” Crawford said. “We’re in a small room together, but the world of the play is enormous.”
Through light design, Katelyn Le-Thompson was able to add “texture and shape” to the setting. Nostalgic posters for “Hannah Montana,” “Wicked” and Lavigne help to transform the bookstore and coffee shop into a 2011 teenage hangout, Fender said.
“The framing of this story suits itself so well to being told in this format,” Crawford said. “Most of the play takes place in the basement with just Ellie and Rachel, so to be in such an intimate space with them is very much in the spirit of the play itself.”
Fender and Crawford are proud to join the Chicago theater community’s tradition of using “unconventional spaces” to put on shows. They were inspired in part by the Writer’s Theater in Glencoe, which got its start in a bookstore, and other theater companies which use a variety of locations for their productions.
“There’s an inherent Chicago scrappiness to the way we put this together with the resources we have,” Crawford said. “So many theater stories start in basements or bookstores, so it’s a vocabulary Chicago audiences are familiar with. We feel proud to be a part of that, but at the end of the day, our priority is sharing the story between two girls and their relationship, and I think audiences will connect with that.”
The play follows two teenage girls who used to be best friends, but “one of them has gotten cool while the other has not,” Kime said. It’s set in summer 2011, when the “uncool one,” Ellie, pitches a musical she wrote to the “cool one,” Rachel, because she thinks she can help her convince their theater teacher to produce the show.
“It’s an exploration of female friendship, through the lens of a best friendship in adolescence that’s fallen apart,” Kime said. “It explores the heartbreak of that, and it takes it seriously, by showing the ways teen girls can get really wrapped up in each other and how devastating and world-shattering it is to lose that person.”
Throughout the show, the two girls let the audience in on the “campy, impossible world” Ellie created within her musical, by acting out all of its characters in “absurd, surreal sequences,” Kime and Crawford said.
Ellie’s musical, which is based off a book Kime wrote at 16, includes every stereotypical teen character imaginable, from popular girls to quirky teachers, but each archetype is portrayed “earnestly.”
“The play is satirical, but we’re not making fun of that kind of story in a malicious way,” Kime said. “It’s kind to Ellie and Rachel and the world they’re building, as absurd as it may be. We tried really hard not to make it feel like we’re mocking the girls at the center of it, even when they’re doing objectively ridiculous things.”
No teen drama is complete without a killer soundtrack, so Kime worked with composer Sara Geist to create original songs based on the motifs and themes in Avril Lavigne’s music, like walking in the rain, staring at a phone and dealing with fake friends.
“The whole play within the play that Ellie is pitching to Rachel, to me, has this feeling of that teenage fantasy where you’re staring out the car window and listening to the most dramatic song you’ve ever heard,” Crawford said. “We get to see inside Ellie’s world as we watch them act out her play, but you couldn’t get the full feeling without the music.”
Since posting the script online, Kime has received lots of feedback from teenagers who resonated with its portrayal of adolescence. But the play has also touched older generations, like a donors who brought five pages of compliments to his meeting with Kime, Crawford and Fender, where they discussed funding for the show.
“I think the specificity of it granted the show a universality,” Kime said. “It’s not trying to prescribe what adolescence is; it’s more grounded and singular. From that, I think lots of people can find connection points in it.”
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