In a typical musical, it’s normal—expected even—for someone to burst into song. But in Out Here, an original production premiering at Court Theatre, the Tony Award-winning theater on the University of Chicago campus, characters don’t take a single note for granted.
Under the beautifully lit frame of a house (one that feels purposely under construction), characters meditate on when, why and even how they sing.
Out Here, which celebrated its world premiere on April 18, follows Dawn, a 50-something-year-old who wants to divorce her husband Brian, reunite with her ex-girlfriend Robin and have everyone be ok.
“This musical aims to adapt the complexity of ‘changing scripts’ mid-life into an equally complex musical-theater form,” said bookwriter and lyricist Leslie Buxbaum, a professor of the Practice in the Arts on the Committee on Theater & Performance Studies at UChicago.
Incubated at UChicago with support from the Neubauer Collegium, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and within the classroom, the experimental work purposely plays with form—testing boundaries between singer and actor, musician and character, audience and performer.
Though the production takes on modern and classic themes—family drama, rekindling old love, a coming out story—its creators hope to deconstruct, “queer” and rebuild them in a brand-new way.
“There's room for art to become more dialogical, more complex,” said Out Here dramaturg Prof. David Levin. “And I think the University of Chicago is the perfect laboratory space for precisely that kind of exploratory work.”
Out Here runs through May 10 and tickets are on sale now.
Making a UChicago ‘Undo-sical’
In 2019, Buxbaum started writing with no expectations. Inspired by events in her own life, and accounts of other mid-life folks living their own, a play began to take shape.
“This is a story that hasn't been told a lot,” said Buxbaum. “It’s about a woman confronting their role as a mom, their sense of belonging to their home and what they've built.”
At an early point in the creative process, a thought popped into her head: What if I put music to this? What would it do?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Buxbaum participated in Zoom workshops with other theater professionals where she met composer and musician Erin McKeown. As they began to collaborate, McKeown was struck by something unusual in Buxbaum’s script. Typically, lyrics in musical theater are capitalized or italicized. But here, it wasn’t clear what was sung and what was spoken.
This initial formatting gray area inspired a years-long creative experiment.
“We developed a process for deciding where the songs should go, which was totally different than anything I'd ever done before,” McKeown said.
The two joined up with Levin and brought the project to UChicago with support from the Gray Center, which has since 2011 been a forum for experimental collaboration between artists and scholars. Levin and Buxbaum jointly directed the Center during its first five years.
After securing a year of Mellon Fellowship funding in 2022-23, the trio—known affectionately by members of the production as “the tripod”—began to tinker, dubbing the project not so much a musical as an “Undo-sical.”
“‘Undo-sical’ seemed like it captured the energies of invention, of reimagination,” said Levin, a scholar of German opera, film, theater, dance and performance. “We were taking on the form of the musical, playing with it, and, ideally on the other end, reassembling it.”
The lack of pressure around a production timeline enabled the tripod to fully experiment. McKeown created a soundscape with dog bones and typewriters. The margins of Google Docs filled with overlapping comments. Through a series of workshops and staged readings, the tripod brought in other artists, actors, musicians and students.
They wrote and rewrote.
In 2024, the project received additional funding from the Neubauer Collegium’s Arts Labs, another program invested in nurturing innovative arts practice and research on campus.
“Historically, universities have been a really big player in the incubation of new work,” Buxbaum said. “To write something and then gradually get all of this participation, support, enthusiasm and investment, I can't even describe how powerful that is and how grateful I am for it.”
Students on set
As part of the Gray Center Mellon fellowship, the tripod co-taught a new UChicago course called “(re) Queering the American Musical.” Jo Selmeczy, then a first-year student in the College, had never taken a Theater and Performance Studies course before they joined.
“The course was a combination of intense performance theory that David was spearheading, on-your-feet exercises that Leslie was leading, and Erin was having us devise these mini songs,” said Selmeczy, now in their fourth year. “All of these things were entangled in this one class. I loved it. I thought it was so awesome.”
After the course, Buxbaum invited Selmeczy to participate in a workshop for Out Here. They were responsible for reading out the stage directions alongside a company of professional actors. It was the first time they’d seen professional theater in action, which they found both “exciting and inspiring.”
Selmeczy’s college career continued in tandem with Out Here’s development. As they participated in more staged readings, got deeper into theater studies, the musical continued to morph. During the show’s run, Selmeczy will help facilitate the public programming.
“The conceptual work we were doing as a tripod was always in dialogue with not just our colleagues, but also our students,” Levin said. “The students have been essential, utterly central, to the ethos of the work that we've been doing.”
Selmeczy says Out Here was also their first introduction to dramaturgy. Now officially “dramaturgy-pilled,” Selmeczy is currently an intern at Court and has served as dramaturgical assistant for several productions. After graduating this spring with a joint B.A./M.A. in the arts, they will spend this summer at the Oak Park Festival Theatre as a dramaturg.
“It's really been a big turning point for me in terms of how I'm thinking about my career post college,” they said.
Levin says the role of the dramaturg in Out Here is to help the work stay true to the original vision. For the tripod, this means making formally complex, amusing, and imaginative art that lives in “the here and now,” a near-constant process of remaking—even in front of audiences.
“I make theater as a live art form,” Buxbaum said. “This is happening in this moment, with these people, in this room. Yes, the show will be repeated night after night, but it always changes.”
—Tickets for Out Here are available for purchase on the Court Theatre website.
