Get busy living

Actor-playwright-illustrator: Heather Chrisler bounces back as a triple threat.

By CATEY SULLIVAN

In March 2020, playwright Heather Chrisler was holding auditions for the world premiere of her first play: an adaptation of Little Women at First Folio Theatre, where she’s an artistic associate. Actor Heather Chrisler, meanwhile, was in tech for The Last Match at Writers Theatre. In both Oak Brook and Glencoe, she recalls, everyone had a gut sense of what was coming and nobody wanted it to be real.

“The day after Broadway shut down [March 12], the writing was on the wall, but we were still in rehearsal, pretending to be normal, behaving like there’d be an opening night,” Chrisler says. “We all knew though. We knew there was this tsunami coming for us. We knew there was no way we could safely continue.”

The tsunami arrived. After both Little Women and The Last Match were canceled due to COVID, Chrisler wouldn’t work for a year.

Now, she’s watching the waters wane. In March, Chrisler’s illustrated children’s podcast Don’t Stop for Monkeys went live with its first chapter in the tale of a mouse named

“A live audience creates this electric current. You feed from it. It’s a collective e ort. Putting theater on film in some ways takes away that—the most important ingredient. The concept of filming theater was devastating to me. There were times I thought I didn’t want to be an artist anymore. I was just that brokenhearted—all of us were,” she says.

The Last Match , 4/28 -5/30, available streaming with purchase anytime, writerstheatre.org, $ 40 “solo” ticket, $ 65 “duo,” $ 85 “trio,” and $100 “ensemble” (4 +). Don’t Stop for Monkeys , dontstopformonkeys.weebly.com

“There was this guilt too, because I knew—I know—so many people had things so much worse than I did. For 11 months I lived in pajamas. And then, this March, all of a sudden, things got busy.”

First among the “things” that got busy: Chrisler herself. Initially, she found solace in Thimble. The tale of the tiny bewhiskered hero is a study in grief and resilience, voiced by some of Chicago’s finest actors and accompa-

The latter decision prevailed. Chrisler was in the grocery store parking lot when First Folio called. “I kept thinking all day that I didn’t want Little Women to close. But I understood that if it did close, there were way bigger things to worry about in society. People dying, public safety is always going to be more important than opening a show,” she says.

But understanding the grim context of the cancellations didn’t alleviate the sorrow or the anger. In March 2020, First Folio’s production of Little Women had been in development for two years. “It was an absolutely devastating day,” she says.

It was the first of many. Yet Chrisler had survived intense, incomprehensible loss before COVID-19. In 2002, Chrisler’s sister, 15, died by suicide.

“My work in general, it’s marked by loss,” she says. “I would give up all the joy of being an artist—I’d give it up in a second—to have my sister back. But her death in so many ways made me the artist I am. It was a cornerstone in my life.

“I started taking theater classes because I really just needed to be someone else. If I could take a character and share their circumstances, then what was happening to me would go away. At least for a little while,” she says.

When The Last Match rehearsals resumed in February, social distancing meant Chrisler had a cavernous dressing room to herself. That’s where Thimble and Chickpea began.

“I drew Thimble and wrote this little story