Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. may have vacated Angel Island, its longtime home in Lakeview now lost to real-estate developers. But before artistic director Richard Cotovsky and company hang up their hats for good after 30 years of rough-and-tumble storefront theater, they have a last hurrah this weekend with Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins XXVIII.
The annual orgy of fringe performance, opened and closed by Cotovsky in character as the namesake Yippie, is a 60-hour round-the-clock hodgepodge, begun to mark the 20th anniversary of Woodstock and eventually taking on its own eccentric mystique. The final Abbie Fest (as it’s colloquially known) will begin at 2pm Friday with a march from Daley Plaza to the festival’s final resting place, Wicker Park’s Den Theatre. There, 50-plus performances are scheduled to take the stage roughly continuously through midnight Sunday; they’ll range from five-minute solo performances to hourlong one-act plays to musical sets to Cotovsky’s signature wee-hours airing of grievances, “Bitch with Rich.” You can see a rough schedule of events at Mary-Arrchie’s webslte, but expect it to be fluid; the year I performed a piece in Abbie Fest, in 2004, I recall us being scheduled for 11:30pm Friday and finally taking the stage around 2am.
Day passes run $10, or a weekend pass will let you come and go for $25; they're available at TicketWeb or at the theater.