At Refracted Theater Company, no topic is off-limits

The new play Coronation explores a United States 300 years in the future where women still can’t become president. So a new form of government arises: a monarchy with a queen.

The play, to be staged in Chicago by Refracted Theatre Company this fall, was written before Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential race and Kamala Harris formally accepted the Democratic nomination. As history evolved in real time and the real-life political drama played out in front of America via news outlets and social media, Coronation director Tova Wolff worked alongside playwright Laura Winters to bang out new pages.

The rewriting is still ongoing, even as the play opens on Oct. 11.

“Laura and I are wrestling,” Wolff said recently with a chuckle. “We just had an hour-long check-in the other day, where we were like, ‘Well, the script has to adapt to this new time. So in this script, did Kamala win?’ If this play takes place in the future, we have to make a decision. Doesn’t scare me, but it’s different.”

Wolff likes plays that tackle tough questions. It was politics, actually, that led her to start Refracted with her friend and business partner, Graham Miller, in New York City in 2019. Two years later, they moved the theater company to Chicago, where Wolff was born and raised.

The duo often saw plays together and were struck by the number of liberal-leaning shows that took a myopic view of society.

“All the characters, all the audience members, think exactly like us,” said Wolff, sitting one day recently in a swanky shared workspace on the top floor of the East Bank Club — a 350,000 square foot luxury gym in River North. “It’s like confirmation bias on stage. You walk away and you’re like, ‘OK, I can, like, pat myself on the back for thinking the way these characters think, which is the right way to think.’ I find that so boring.”

Wolff, who is in her early 30s, started her career as an actor, but quickly moved to director and eventually a producer.

“I’m not a normal actor. I don’t thrive on applause, or like the lights and all the attention on me on stage. I’d much rather be the leader of the rehearsal room,” Wolff said.

“I did my 20’s in New York, and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Wolff. “I had a great time. But, I turned 30 during the pandemic, and it’s at that moment where you look around at your tiny apartment in Brooklyn that you share with one other person, and you say, ‘Oh my God, I need more space’. And I knew if I moved to Chicago, I could, at the very least, have my own apartment.”

But more space wasn’t the only factor in the move. At the end of 2019, Wolff was pushed in front of a train at a subway station, and it completely changed her relationship with New York.

“I thought that I was an inscrutable New Yorker,” she recalled. “I was tough. Nothing ruffled my feathers. And then that happened, and I realized that this city doesn’t give as*** about you. I was pushed in front of an oncoming subway train, and I survived.”

Fortunately for Wolff, the driver saw her and stopped 10 feet before colliding with her body. She escaped with a broken foot, but also on a path back toward Chicago. She launched Refracted nine days after the attack while she was still on crutches, and decided to bring it to Chicago in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic set in.

Last season, the small company made a big splash with Tambo & Bones — a show written by Dave Harris, a West Philadelphia native who won the LA Film Critics Association’s “Outstanding New Play” award in 2022 for the script. The story follows two Black artists who find themselves stuck in a minstrel show and must rap themselves out. The show led the awards haul at the spring non-equity Jeff Awards, landing 10 nominations and eight wins, including honors for best production, director and principal performers.

A high school theater company

Wolff’s bold take on theater started in Chicago. She grew up in Lincoln Park and attended the Latin School of Chicago from kindergarten through high school. During her senior year, she founded her first theater company.

“I wanted to create a student-run company where we picked the show, one of us directed the show, we acted in the show, and the set was designed and created by students,” recalled Wolff.

Wolff named the venture “Car Seat Company” after an actual car seat that was in the school’s green room. The faculty supported the idea. The show they staged, The Wisdom of Eveis a theatrical adaptation of the award winning film, All About Eve. The ambitious Wolff both directed and starred in the production.

Nick Baer, ​​her drama teacher there, remembers Wolff as a driven student who was dedicated to theater, and says her idea to produce a student-led production back in 2009 sparked a new tradition at Latin.

“That program still exists today,” said Baer, ​​who is now Latin’s Upper School Director. “We have a student run play every year. And it started with that show.”

Earlier this year, Baer brought Wolff back to Latin School to direct the school production of Shrek the Musical.

“We reached out to her for it and to see if she even had the availability to do it,” said Baer. “And it was perfect. I knew in Chicago storefront theater, she wasn’t directing a lot of large-scale musical comedies, but I just felt like her sensibilities and professionalism would work great.”

Back at the East Bank Club, Wolff recalls her experience with the teens with a smile. She enjoyed her time back at her old school, but the musical comedy was a skirt from the usual tone of her productions.

Challenging the audience

In 2023, during Refracted’s fourth season, Wolff directed a workshop production of A Play About David Mamet Writing a Play About Harvey Weinstein — a dark comedy about institutional misogyny, predators and the complic role of white women in storytelling.

“What’s interesting,” said Wolff, “is going to a show where you connect with people and characters who think differently than you, and in doing so, challenge the way you think and make you look at your own biases, and say, ‘ Huh? Am I open to expanding my worldview in order to approach theater and these divisive issues with a sense of curiosity instead of combativeness?’”

Coronationwhich Wolff refers to as her “dream project,” also surfaces larger questions and attempts to tackle them.

“It is asking these questions about female autonomy and AI autonomy and the systems that we belong to, the constructs that we are stuck in,” said Wolff. “It is asking questions about all of those things that I don’t have answers to. That no one has answers to. And these questions demand not just conversation, but debate. And that debate comes from a place of people having different opinions and different experiences.”

Mackenzie Jones, a Coronation producer who grew up with Wolff in Lincoln Park, said the play directly reflects the theater company behind it.

“It asks questions like, ‘can we work within a system that was never meant to work for us?’” Jones said. “That is very in line with what Refracted is, and what their mission is. They always want to reflect back on the audience. The cool thing about the plays they pick is they don’t answer the questions for us.”

If you go: Coronation will run at The Den Theater from Oct. 11 to Nov. 16. Tickets start at $31.

Mike Davis is WBEZ’s theater reporter.