Blewt! had what will probably be its last show at The Playground on Saturday.  We’re moving Blewtenanny over to The Strawdog starting in October, where we’ll hopefully play the first Friday of every month.  The show is being re-tooled a bit, it’ll be a little sharper, more focused, and we’re excited about trying out the new space.

I should be a little more melancholy about leaving The Playground.  The space has been very good to us, in that “it is what you make of it” sort of way.  Renting from The Playground was sort of like renting one of those storage lockers.  You got the keys, the space, and could fill it with whatever sort of crap you wanted.  This had its ups and downs.  It was nice to have free reign over the place, but we missed the standard organizational support that we enjoyed when we played at more established places like Metropolis in Arlington Heights, and any of the theaters we played while we were on the road.  But that was a fair trade-off, and pretty important to Blewt!’s early development.

So now we begin a more transient era, with a show over at Lakeshore Theater, and now Blewtenanny over at Strawdog.  I think it’s all part of a search for a theater that will embrace our brand of stuff and give us a legitimate home.  There was no such vibe from The Playground, and most definitely no such vibe coming out of IO after Apes 2.  The Lakeshore has been the most receptive to that sort of arrangement, but it’s a lot of work to consistently fill a 300-seat theater.

One truth I was quick to learn is that nobody really gives a shit about your shit except for you.  I don’t mean that in a negative way, I mean that in an optimistic and realistic way.   You can bring an audience to laughing nirvana, but they’ll likely think of your show only once or twice more for the rest of their lives.  So there is no real home for the stuff we do other than the home we build ourselves.  There is no theater out there willing to fully embrace and promote our crazy shows other than the theater we build ourselves.

But man, that’d be way expensive.  So for the foreseeable future, Blewt! will be hopping from space to space like a dirty hobo, hungrily seeking out our next can o’ beans.