The Drinking & Writing Brewery

The Play

The Drinking & Writing Theater at Haymarket Pub & Brewery Opening In August

CHICAGO, March 8, 2010 - The Drinking & Writing Brewery announces the opening of The Drinking & Writing Theater at 123 N. Halsted along with its 2010 season of plays, radio shows, festivals, and workshops.

In August, The Drinking & Writing Theater will open its doors. "We’ve been working on opening our own theater for 7 years and now we have a perfect space that is part of the new Haymarket Pub & Brewery." said Steve Mosqueda, who created The Drinking & Writing Theater with fellow Neo-Futurist Sean Benjamin. According to Benjamin, The Drinking & Writing Theater "will have a full season of shows including a new show each fall, our holiday show Drinking & Writing Volume IV: The 12 Steps of Christmas, Volume III: To Cure A Hangover, and each season will end with an outside theater company that we commission to write a show in the drinking and writing aesthetic." Benjamin added, "Steve and I have been with The Neo-Futurists since 1996. We will always have a connection with The Neo-Futurists but Drinking & Writing has become its own beast and you've got to feed the beast. We hope to have all the Neo-Futurists involved in our new space."

Construction is currently underway on Haymarket Pub and Brewery at 737 W. Randolph. The pub and brewery is a partnership between Pete Crowley, senior brewer at Rock Bottom Chicago, and John Neurauter. Crowley said that Haymarket will focus on "classic Belgian and contemporary American ales and lagers paired with hand made sausages, pulled pork, pizza and rotisserie chicken." There are plans for an outdoor beer garden, full bar, dining area with pool tables and games. Pete Crowley has worked with Drinking & Writing as the Radio Brewmaster on The Drinking & Writing Brewery Radio Show since 2003. The show, hosted by Steve and Sean, airs the first Sunday of every month with Crowley providing his expertise on all things beer. Crowley, Benjamin and Mosqueda have been working on creating a brewpub with a theater since their first beer together.

The Drinking & Writing Theater is a separate room with its own entrance on Halsted Avenue. It is connected to Haymarket Pub & Brewery by a hallway that allows you to see the kitchen and brewery in action. The theater has its own bar with all of Haymarket's craft beers on tap and a few beers brewed by Pete Crowley available only at the theater bar. With craft beer, wall of books and free Wi-Fi, the space is made for drinking and writing. Other programming will be scheduled throughout the year and the room will be available for private events and rehearsal space.

The Drinking & Writing Theater's 2010-2011 Season - Plays, Festivals, Workshops

April 14-May 12, 2010: The Drinking & Writing Experience: Belief & Technique

The first workshop developed by The Drinking & Writing Brewery, Drinking & Writing: Belief & Technique is a 5 week long interactive experience that will meet Wednesday nights from 7:00 to 9:00 at various Chicago breweries and bars. Both drinking and writing will be done. Each meeting will focus on a drinker/writer including Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Raymond Carver.

May 22, 2010: Beerfly Alleyfight

The Beerfly Alleyfight happens at Rock Bottom Brewery, 1 W. Grand. Local artists, homebrewers, and amateur chefs are put together for the fourth year of the "tri-pairing". This year homebrewers will brew a wheat beer and pair it with a food. They will then be paired with an artist who will create a short piece based on the beer and food pairing. The day of the event, people will have a chance to taste the beer and food and see the artists present their work. Artists in the past have included dancers, performance artists, videographers, potters, and musicians.

June 12, 2010: The 6th Annual Drinking & Writing Festival

The 6th Annual Drinking & Writing Festival takes place at the Hopleaf Bar, 5153 N. Clark. Past festivals have focused on Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and the City of Chicago. This year's focus is Chicago's own Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, best-selling author, and man of the people Mike Royko. Royko wrote for the Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Tribune.

August 2010: The Haymarket Pub & Brewery presents The Drinking & Writing Festival

A special second Drinking & Writing Festival will be held to inaugurate the festival’s new location and the new brewpub and theater. The festival will focus on the neighborhood of The Drinking & Writing Theater at Haymarket Pub & Brewing, Haymarket Square.

September 11-October 16, 2010: Drinking & Writing Volume V: The City That Works - World Premiere

For the first show in The Drinking & Writing Theater, the team from Drinking & Writing, Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda, set their sites on Chicago...corruption, crime, riots, drinking, writing, and bars.

November 20-December 18, 2010: Drinking & Writing Volume IV: The 12 Steps of Christmas

The true Christmas Spirit comes out when it's drunk. Sean and Steve explore the addictive, destructive holiday called Christmas.

January 1-February 5, 2011: Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover

The folks at Drinking & Writing are so committed to curing a hangover they did vast amounts of research and experimented on themselves to bring this show to you.

April 2-May 7, 2011: To Be Announced

The last show of the season will be an outside theater company or group of performers selected to create a new show in the vein of Drinking & Writing.

A Short History of The Drinking & Writing Brewery

The Drinking & Writing Brewery was founded in 2002 after Neo-Futurists Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda had great success with their site-specific show Drinking & Writing. Since then there have been four volumes of Drinking & Writing performed in bars and theaters all over the U.S. and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Drinking & Writing Brewery Radio Show on WLUW 88.7FM, The Beerfly Alleyfight, and The Drinking & Writing Festival. Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda most recently wrote the successful Neo-Futurist show BEER set in the Metropolitan Brewing and also performed at The Breckenridge Brewery in Denver during the Great American Beer Festival.

Read our TimeOut review online.

Read the Chicago Reader review below.

Highly Recommended

DRINKING & WRITING VOLUME IV: THE 12 STEPS OF CHRISTMAS Steve Mosqueda and Sean Benjamin's celebration of literature and inebriation defies categorization. They don't really play characters. And it's not a staged reading, though they do deliver selections from the works of great alcoholic writers. It's kind of performance but without the arty baggage or the art crowd. It's almost a party but a very structured one, where the hosts dominate an evening that's relaxed, entertaining, and unpretentious. Mosqueda and Benjamin give out gifts, read aloud, and tell some funny/horrifying stories from their own pasts about drinking at the holidays. Terrific hosts, they keep things light and seem to genuinely enjoy themselves. And they don't flinch when audience members walk by to get a refill. --Jack Helbig

The Drinking & Writing Brewery presents Drinking & Writing Volume IV: The 12 Steps of Christmas. The true Christmas Spirit comes out when it's drunk. Phil and Steve explore the addictive, destructive holiday called Christmas.

Where did all of this start? With the play Drinking & Writing. A show written and performed by Steve Mosqueda, Sean Benjamin, and Diana Slickman. It explored the connection between creativity and alcohol. We sat at the bar and drank and talked about famous drinkers and writers, our drinking and writing, the effects of alcohol on the body and mind and family, and we drank...more. We performed it originally at T's Bar-Restaurant in Chicago and since then wrote another volume, Drinking & Writing Volume II: The Noble Experiment. Once again, Sean and Steve with the addition of Chloe Johnston, performed the show in bars everywhere. Volume II focused on Prohibition Era writers, and there were a lot of them (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker, Millay...). And then came Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover. We offer to the world our in depth research we conducted (on ourselves) in our attempt to cure the hangover and we offer up some writing on hangovers by some of the greatest hungover writers including John Cheever and Charles Bukowski. Read our review and Critic's Choice from the Chicago Reader below.

We've performed our shows in bars throughout Chicago; at Dad's Garage Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia; Beaver Creek, Colorado; Des Moines, Iowa; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and in Edinburgh, Scotland at the Fringe Festival.

And we'll keep doing the show as log as there are bars to sit at.

Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover

Read the Chicago Reader review for Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

DRINKING & WRITING VOLUME III: TO CURE A HANGOVER Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda explore possible morning-after cures in this goofy, unflinching lecture-cum-performance about the unpleasant consequences of the bibulous life. Self-loathing prose from John Cheever and Charles Bukowski--two monumental drinker-writers at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum--is intertwined with tales of the writer-performers' experiments in thwarting a hungover "poor sense of well-being" (quite unlike the "false sense of well-being" that gets an overimbiber in trouble). Cures involve cabbage, Pedialyte, sex, and various combinations of chorizo and eggs; audience-participation bits are rewarded with free drinks. Benjamin and Mosqueda neither glorify nor repudiate the hard-drinking life--after all, shit-faced happens. --Kerry Reid Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda explore possible morning-after cures in this goofy, unflinching lecture-cum-performance about the unpleasant consequences of the bibulous life. Self-loathing prose from John Cheever and Charles Bukowski--two monumental drinker-writers at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum--is intertwined with tales of the writer-performers' experiments in thwarting a hungover "poor sense of well-being" (quite unlike the "false sense of well-being" that gets an overimbiber in trouble). Cures involve cabbage, Pedialyte, sex, and various combinations of chorizo and eggs; audience-participation bits are rewarded with free drinks. Benjamin and Mosqueda neither glorify nor repudiate the hard-drinking life--after all, shit-faced happens.

Read some reviews for

The Neo-Futurist show BEER,

written by Sean and Steve

(and check out the at D&W TV)

Chicago Sun-Times Highly Recommends BEER

For all you do, this show's for you

THEATER REVIEW | At working brewery, Neo-Futurists do a musical full of fizz

BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic / hweiss@suntimes.com

Perhaps only in Chicago. And perhaps only from the yeasty imaginations of those wacky, wayward theatrical engineers, the Neo-Futurists. Really, who else could have devised "Beer," a full-fledged musical about the complex process involved in the creation of one of man's oldest beverages? And who else could have found the ideal spot in which to stage the show -- amid the giant brew tanks and kettles of the Metropolitan Brewery, an artisanal, all lager-making operation housed in a brick warehouse just a few blocks from the company's Neo-Futurarium home?

"Beer" is one of the freshest, funniest and altogether ingenious shows to emerge from the Neo-Futurists in a long time, and it not only should prove a big hit for the company at its present address, but might easily become a phenomenon on the touring circuit. Just pinpoint every U.S. college town with a sizeable microbrewery in the neighborhood (a place game enough to put up with a troupe of seven actor-musicians and, yes, puppeteers) and you can see the future.

Intriguingly, "Beer," which has been penned by Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda, directed by Dan Kerr-Hobert and brilliantly music-directed by Laura McKenzie, arrives just after "Wicked" flew off on its broomstick, and playfully picks up on an Ozlike story.

Boon (the goofily boyish Ryan Walters) is a 10-year-old who takes a drink from his stepdad's can of mass-produced beer and gets violently ill. In his stupor he makes the acquaintance of Puke (Eliza Burmeister, sensational, especially in her breakout grunge rock number) -- a stunted woman with skin like head-cheese. -- and together they take a journey to discover the true art and chemistry of beer-making. For if Boon is to return home, he must learn how to make the handcrafted form of the brew, defending the art against the fast-and-easy Bud Miller (funny, wiry Kurt Chiang), the rich and evil purveyor of the characterless commercial stuff.

The road to beermaking is richly musical, with an ace band (Mike Pryzgoda, Curtis Williams, sax player Brandon Campbell, and McKenzie and Chiang) doubling as performers and pumping out a delicious score that is a rich amalgam of Latin, jazz, swing, country western, hard rock and more. Meanwhile, puppetmakers Kerr-Hobert and Bernie McGovern have used recycled materials to create wonderfully whimsical creatures representing everything from milled grain to hard and soft water.

The final 15 minutes of the 90-minute production sag a bit (cut that metaphor stuff), and the show needs a bang-up final musical number in keeping with the rest of the evening. But otherwise, even for a non-drinker like me, this "Beer" could not be more satisfying.

NOTE: Located at Ravenswood and Winona, just off Foster, the brewery lacks signage. Dress warmly as it's quite cold inside. No beer can be served or brought with you, but Metropolitan's brews are on tap at the nearby Hopleaf Bar.

The Reader Recommends Beer

When: Through 3/7: Thu-Sat 8 PM,
Phone: 773-275-5255
Price: $10-$15, pay what you can on Thursdays and during previews
neofuturists.org

Like the beverage, this Neo-Futurist show ain't classy. But it just may be the feel-good experience of the year. Ten-year-old Boon and his puppet sidekick, Puke--the nickname comes from an unfortunate encounter with piss beer--embark on a Wizard of Oz-like quest to learn the art of craft brewing and vanquish Bud Miller, evil purveyor of Millweiser. Along the way they meet beer ingredients in puppet form. In one of many ingenious touches in a lovingly crafted show, plastic jugs slung together create Hard Water, a bodybuilder, and Soft Water, a little old man. A talented five-piece band plays original songs and various roles. The only thing missing from this show--written by Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda of Drinking and Writing fame, and directed by Dan Kerr-Hobert--is actual beer. Dress warm for the chilly setting, a working brewery. --Laura Molzahn

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