For nearly four decades, the Rhinoceros Theater Festival has been the closest thing Chicago theater has to a controlled burn: a month or so each year when dozens of new, strange, half-finished and fully-formed works by local artists are set loose in front of paying audiences, with nobody much minding whether they're ready. The 37th edition runs September 20 through October 26 at four venues across the city, and on October 24 the festival settles into Facility Theatre at 1138 N. California Ave. for a full day of performances.
The festival is produced by Curious Theatre Branch, one of Chicago's original storefront fringe companies, with co-producers Chicago Danztheater Ensemble, Chicago Dramatists and Labyrinth Club. It opens with a special "afternoon tea" edition of Full Moon Vaudeville on Sunday, Sept. 20 at 3 p.m. at Facility Theatre, headlined by the art/folk/cabaret act The Crooked Mouth and other special guests. From there the schedule fans out across Facility, Chicago Dramatists at 798 N. Aberdeen, the Labyrinth Club at 3658 N. Pulaski, and a fourth venue, with shows running through late October.
The origins of the thing are modest and slightly accidental. What became Rhinofest began in 1988 as an offshoot of the Bucktown Arts Fest, and in its first year it was just two days of performances, including work by Jenny Magnus and Beau O'Reilly — artists who would go on to become the festival's enduring stewards. When the event's founder left Chicago in 1990, he asked a ragtag group of local artists — O'Reilly among them, along with Scott Turner of Theatre of the Reconstruction — to keep it going. That handoff is where the Rhino Fest, as an ongoing institution, was born.
Curious Theatre Branch has produced it ever since, and the festival has drifted around the city with the fortunes of Chicago's storefront scene. Over the years it has landed in Wicker Park and Bucktown, Rogers Park, Andersonville and Avondale, in spaces including the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Café, the Neo-Futurarium, the Society for New Things, The Garage, The Firehouse, Remains Theatre and Prop Thtr. In the mid-2000s it settled at Prop Thtr in Avondale as a long-term base, with Prop and Curious co-producing among a shifting group of curators. When Prop's Elston Avenue space closed in 2020, and after a year off at the height of the pandemic, the festival charged back — now residing at Facility Theatre, Chicago Dramatists and Labyrinth Club.
What has stayed constant is the festival's economics, which are unusual and deliberate. Artists pay no fee to apply or to produce their work at Rhinofest, and every ticket is pay-what-you-can, with a $25 suggested price. That structure is the whole point: it lowers the barrier for both the people making the work and the people taking a chance on it. It is why a festival this size can exist at all without a institutional budget behind it, and why its audience has historically been willing to follow it from neighborhood to neighborhood.
The range on offer reflects that openness. This year's lineup includes Headless, Death Defying, A Gardener's Almanac, My Thoughts be Bloody, Credo/How to Be a Person, How I Wonder Who You Are, Make Out the Words, Child Protection, Mierstein Wolf, Bad Ink, The Blue Bird, Foundling, Disambiguation, Forty, Apparently, Among the Spirits, The Magic of Ladym, Is This Your Wheelchair?, and Chicago Danztheater Ensemble's Solos and Stories, alongside works in progress and Curious's own productions, among them Jenny Magnus's The Good, an exploration of virtue and the common good. There is dance, devised theater, solo performance, music and variety, and a certain amount of material that resists categorization entirely.
One logistical note for anyone planning a crawl: the Labyrinth Club is a private club rather than a public venue, so visitors sign a guestbook on arrival, which confers a 24-hour membership at no extra charge beyond the ticket. The space is on the ground floor with an accessible entrance and no stairs, and it sits a short walk from the Addison Blue Line stop. Chicago Dramatists is near Ogden and Chicago Avenue in West Town, also off the Blue Line; note that mapping apps sometimes list it as 1105 W. Chicago Ave, which is the opposite side of the entrance from the theater door at 798 N. Aberdeen.
Tickets and full show details are available at Rhinofest.com. For a festival that has now outlasted most of the small companies that inspired it, the through-line remains what it was in 1988: a group of artists putting up work in whatever room is available, for whoever shows up, at whatever price they can pay.