The creative life is a risk-reward endeavor and few know that better than playwright/composer/performer Amy Engelhardt, who told me earlier this week, “I would characterize my career as crazy amazing,” adding a peasant laugh.
She was speaking by telephone from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, the storyteller/writer Alex Stein, and their two cats Hekla and Beetles. She was talking about herself as a little girl, growing up in New Jersey.
She talked about being raised by a single mother, who “was as supportive as could be of my energies,” about performing shows for her babysitters, taking all manner of dance and theater classes and once starring opposite the young Anderson Cooper in “Romeo and Juliet,” traveling to New York City any chance she got, attending Syracuse University and majoring in theater, singing in a wide variety of places, and on and on and on.
Her journey brings her here with her one-woman show “Impact,” which is part of the Chicago Circus & Performing Arts Festival. This event, now in its third year, takes place March 21-24 at Burning Bush Brewery, after two previous years at the Den Theatre.
“I met Amy over Zoom,” says Amancay Kugler, the festival’s executive director and also executive director of Yes Ma’am Circus, the festival’s producer. “We eventually met at the APAP (Association of Performing Arts Professionals) conference in New York in January and she then sent me samples of her work and I could not have been more impressed. Yes, the festival has a number of circus-related performers but we also strive for diversity and to bring all manner of performers together and Amy’s solo show is a perfect fit.”
It’s an intriguingly ambitious gathering, which will also include family-friendly circus acts and late-night adult burlesque shows, live music, and a market featuring local artisans and vendors.
Englehardt is excited to be part of it.
“Impact” was born of tragedy and of death, specifically the deaths of 243 passengers and 16 crew members who perished in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Eleven Lockerbie residents also died. Five of those people — Miriam Wolfe, Nicole Boulanger, Theodora Cohen, Tim Cardwell and Turhan Ergin — had been Engelhardt’s friends and classmates at Syracuse. She first heard about the deaths from newspaper headlines while standing on a subway platform in Boston and that jarring news has remained with her, a shadow intensified because, as she says, “I was sort of obsessed, read all the books and watched the documentaries. It was always there in the background, haunting the things I did.”
It was with her when she became the sole female member of the Bobs, the acclaimed Grammy-nominated a capella quartet that she toured with in some 100 cities yearly from 1998 to 2011.
It was with her when she was a guest performer with the popular and long running Harry Shearer and Judith Owens “Christmas Without Tears” show (performing a couple of dates at Space in Evanston).
It was there when she performed house concerts, taught all sorts of classes from arts administration to vocals, and performed with the Flying Karamazov Brothers
It was with her when she wrote the lyrics in the successful off-Broadway musical “Bastard Jones” (with playwright Marc Acito) which won awards and was called by the New York Times in 2017 “high-spirited (and) good-hearted … (with) a brash desire to entertain.”
And it was most profoundly there in 2019, when she traveled to the United Kingdom when cast as a nun in a promotional campaign for the Amazon Prime series “Good Omens.” While performing there, she decided to travel to Lockerbie as a “trip to honor lost friends.” For reasons she did not expect but welcomed with awe and delight, it became so much more, sparking new relationships and giving a deeper meaning to the tragedy and its aftermath.
All but overwhelmed, emotionally and creatively, she talked about her feelings with friends and the idea for a show began to form. After getting positive feedback, she worked shaping the show over the pandemic years, collaborating with theaters in Michigan and New York, paring it down from 90 to its current 60 minutes. She has performed it in a few places, usually one-night stands, but had her longest run of 26 shows as part of last summer’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
This will be her first “Impact” show in Chicago, so I have yet to see it, but here is a sample from a small mountain of praise it has received, from critic Michael Barbieri: “A multimedia scrapbook … ‘Impact’ unfolds through photographs, video, storytelling and soul-stirring original songs as Engelhardt’s previous and newfound connections to the tragedy unexpectedly yield a renewed hope for humanity. … Moving, sorrowful, hopeful and ultimately enlightening.”
Engelhardt says, emotion obvious in her voice, “It is an experience for me. It is an exploration of grace, kindness and simplicity. It speaks to people’s desire to be kind, to show up for one another. It is not about me. It attempts to honor these people who died and in that way I see it as hopeful and reverential.”
You can, of course, read more about Engelhardt at www.amyengelhardt.com and you can even hear some of the lyrics from one of the five songs in “Impact.”
Here is part of her “Deep Blue Sea”:
We locked eyes and I knew in an instant
As clear as the sky could be
I was there to get people to care
But you took care of me
You took care of me.
“Impact” will be 6:30 p.m. March 23 as part of the Chicago Circus & Performing Arts Festival in River Room in Burning Bush Brewery, 4018 N. Rockwell St.; www.ccpaf.org
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
