A few years ago, Don Hall and Shaun Himmerick were talking at one of Don's summer cookouts. Shaun likes playing poker and wanted to develop a show where he could just sit on stage and play poker (there have been worse artistic impulses). Don had just seen The Weir, where the characters just sit around in a bar and tell ghost stories. It'd be great, Don said, to do a show like that, only WNEP-style, so they'd be gross stories.
Before you could say "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter..." they had created a new show, "The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard". (The asterixes are part of the title. I loooove swearing, but Don and I both think it's funnier that way.)
The show is a simple idea: five people sit on stage, drink real beer, smoke real cigars, play real poker for real money, and tell real stories from their lives. Which, you know, tend to be gross.
It's so simple and so compelling, that we've produced the show for three seasons and it's been performed in Boston, Memphis, New York, Seattle, and Toronto. And tomorrow night at midnight is your last chance to see this show in Chicago.
The Around Midnite Series, which has been Sickest's home for the last years, is wrapping up this month (Your Little Ponies next week, Cinema 2.0 the week after, and the Gong Show Finals on May 15). And so is The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard.
We've had dozens of guest players over the years, but for this final one we're bringing it back home to WNEP. The cast will be me, Don Hall, Shaun Himmerick, Amanda Cohen, and Rebecca Languth. I've got a couple of stories I've been saving up...
