PUS Theatre Company sprang to life back in 1989, born from the ecstatic wine-soaked exclamations of the garrulous and Beckett-obsessed actors Charles Pike and Scott Baker, discovering one another’s love of the arch minimalist playwright at an orphan’s Thanksgiving in Chicago. “From one day to the next,” says Vladimir to Estragon in Waiting for Godot (or could it be Estragon to Vladimir?), ”it’s never the same pus twice.”
And so, their theatrical partnership was named…
Later, in the backroom of one of Chicago’s glorious bars — was it the Charleston? or Joe Danno’s Bucket o’ Suds? fact fades into legend in the misty recesses of time — Pike and Baker, gleefully noting that “pus” was among the actually-more-than-twelve-words not permitted to be uttered on radio by the FCC, wondered what they might do to circumvent that prohibition, and thus it became re-christened as an acronym suggested by barman John Keaney: “Performers Under Stress,” he suggested, “because…you are.” Or words to that effect…
Their first production in that watershed year of 1989 was Beckett’s Rough for Radio I, scrappily promoted as Baker’s “B” rode about Wicker Park in a shopping cart beating on Pike’s “A” with a broomstick to draw a crowd for their evening performance, mounted as an offering in the inaugural season of the world-renowned fringe festival known as the Rhino, still running 22 years later. That first PUS production furthermore baptized the very first “Around the Coyote”, an annual arts and performance festival, now sadly and abruptly defunct, due to a lapse in that community’s support for the arts (emphasis added!).
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