You're Being Ridiculous: Girl, Bye lets performers take out their personal garbage - Chicago Reader

Like so many other newly minted theater grads, Jeremy Owens moved to Chicago in 2000 intending to become an actor. (Owens, a native of Stuttgart, Arkansas, graduated from the University of Arkansas.) But after earning his MFA in performance at Roosevelt University, Owens found himself “just sort of overwhelmed . . . I kind of felt lost.” Then, like so many other theater and theater-adjacent people in Chicago, Owens found a niche in the city’s burgeoning live lit scene.

Owens says, “After a little bit of just sitting around, going, ‘Why aren’t I auditioning? Why aren’t I being an actor?’ I was like, ‘I’ll make this thing, and we’ll do monologues. It’ll be like a monologue show, and that’ll make me feel like an actor. And then I will have had my little thing, and then I can move on with my life.ʼ”

You’re Being Ridiculous: Girl, Bye
8/14-8/16: Thu–Fri 8 PM, Sat 3:30 and 8 PM; Steppenwolf 1700 Theater, 1700 N. Halsted, steppenwolf.org and yourebeingridiculous.com, $30

That was in 2010. Fifteen years later, Owens hasn’t moved on—but the latest incarnation of You’re Being Ridiculous (YBR) is all about letting go of what holds us back. The storytelling show where, as the website cogently explains, “real people tell true stories about their lives,” returns to Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater for a three-day, four-performance stand this weekend as part of the LookOut series, with the phrase, “Girl, Bye” providing the prompt for 29 performers, each of whom will read a new ten-minute story. (Owens will perform at each of the shows, but otherwise, each installation will feature different performers.)

The lineup includes Gift Theatre founding ensemble member Maggie Andersen, whose memoir No Stars in Jefferson Park will be published by Northwestern University Press in October; Chicago novelist Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers); and several vets of other storytelling shows around town, including Nestor Gomez of 80 Minutes Around the World: Immigration Stories, Keith Ecker of the late Guts & Glory series (cofounded with Samantha Irby), and Corrbette Pasko, producer of Write Club (created by Ian Belknap). In one way or another, they will all, as the program description promises, be talking about “saying ‘so long’ to all the garbage holding us back (we’re lookin’ at you 2025).”

As the cheeky title and theme suggest, wit is prized by Owens and his coproducer and husband, Andy Fine. “I wanted to do stand-up, but I was not brave enough,” says Owens. “When I moved to Chicago, everybody was like, ‘Go to Second City, do these classes, do this thing.’ And then that also just scared the crap out of me. So I was never brave enough to take the classes or do the stand-up thing. So this was like my super controlled and safe way to try to do all of those things.”

Jeremy Owens performing in You’re Being Ridiculous Credit: Jeremy Williams

But there’s also room for poignancy in the show. When I talked to Owens last fall about his late friend, critic and arts journalist Kris Vire, he cited a pair of 2015 pieces that Vire and his college girlfriend, Kelly Gilbride-Loris, performed about Vire coming out to her as one of his favorite experiences with the show.

Vire influenced the theme of this latest incarnation in some way. “It’s not a funny story, but this year has been—so Kris died and our dog died. There’s been a lot of loss lately. And so I was like, ‘How do I have a theme that to me says grief, but in a way that doesn’t sound like this show is You’re Being Ridiculous: The Funeral?’ You know what I mean? Where it can encapsulate something other than sadness. It could be the end of a relationship. It could be a death. It could be some other kind of thing you’re letting go of.”

In the first years, Owens had a small group of people who would read the submissions for YBR, but now it’s just him and Fine making the final decisions. “Sometimes it is a fight because there are things that he will like that I don’t necessarily love or like. You know, he is more touchy-feely, and I’m like, ‘But I don’t want to cry.’ We’re just like duking it out together. He really has a big part and a big say in how it’s curated.”

I ask Owens if he’s seen a different kind of voice coming out in submissions since the 2020 pandemic shutdown and the nation’s slide toward fascism since the election last fall.

“I’m thinking of one essay that will be in the show, which is pointedly directed at politics. I think a lot of that has to do with the current person living in the White House. I don’t like to say his name because then it’s like Beetlejuice, and he’ll suddenly appear. I know that I personally feel like I want to speak out and have my voice heard. But that’s also pandemic-related. It feels like, ‘You know what, anything can happen.’ I think there is an urgency to connect with people and to be your brave, bold, truest, most authentic self.”

More recently, Owens has started facing one of the fears that led to the creation of the show in the first place. “This is also connected to Kris. All that time just made me reevaluate, like, ‘Why are you afraid of whatever you’re afraid of?’ And I auditioned for a play for the first time in literally 20 years.”

What Owens treasures with You’re Being Ridiculous is not just the variety of voices onstage, but the supportive audiences, which matters even more in these fraught times. “You’re telling things from your journal, things you would only tell your best friends, but in a public forum. So it feels so brave, but also so protected because the audience is really the opposite of a stand-up audience. Everyone’s rooting for you. They are warm and lovely and excited to see people expose themselves in this way.”