About this Event
Join us at the American Writers Museum for a special live reading of a new play in production from Painted Pistachio Productions, Cold Was the Ground. Enjoy a full staged reading with the cast (80 mins), followed by a discussion and Q&A with playwright Doug DuBrin, director Eileen Tull, and Dr. Andrew Johnston, VP of Museum Experience at the Adler Planetarium.
About Cold Was the Ground:
The play's title is derived from the seminal early 20th-century blues artist Blind Willie Johnson's tune "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground." The song itself is one of the numerous cultural ambassadors from Earth to the cosmos engraved on both Voyager spacecrafts’ Golden Record.
In the play, a boy, Tanner, shortly after enduring extraordinary trauma, starts to mumble seeming gibberish in his sleep and elsewhere. His single, similarly traumatized father, Sean, frantically, gradually, begins to decipher that the "gibberish" has a legitimate source: The Golden Record of the Voyager II. What follows is the untangling of the mystery.
CAST:
Sean: Stef Brundage
Tanner: Aurie Henry
Dr. Roy: Rory Jobst
Monica: Amanda Winston
Chad: Jonathan Crabtree
Assistant Director: Jo Hoagland
About our speakers:
DOUG DuBRIN is a full member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the co-founder and president of Painted Pistachio Productions, a Chicago- and NY-based 501(c)(3) theater ensemble. DuBrin’s plays have been produced at NY's Midtown International Theatre Festival. Doug’s Intestinal Pulchritude ran in July-August 2025 at the Off-Broadway Chain Theatre One Act Festival and at Indianapolis’ IndyFringe Festival. Doug was also a full playwriting fellow at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in August 2025 and at Georgia's Hambidge Center in November 2025. This year The Spinnerets enjoyed a complete run at the Newtown Theater in Astoria, Queens, New York, and Persephone? and Altered Egos were virtually performed in March at Northport Plays, Long Island, and his Would I Slug A Nun? is to be publicly staged at Northport in mid-September.
EILEEN TULL is a Chicago-based storyteller, theatremaker, poet, educator, and one-woman-show person. Directing credits include Kassandra at the Top of the World (Fat Theatre Project/The Terror Cottas), Household Spirits (Theater Wit), STEPS (Improv Playhouse), No Exit, Happy Days, The Alice Gerstenberg Play Festival (2023-2025), SpongeBob Squarepants: The Musical, and The Tempest of Penzance (Chicago Park District), Funny, Like An Abortion (Fat Theatre Project/Chicago Danztheatre), The Ostrich (The Terror Cottas), and The Mark (Assistant Director - Babes With Blades). She has performed throughout the country, from San Francisco to New York City, including in the New Seeds Festival, United Solo, Dallas Solo Festival, Inverse Performance Art Festival, The Marsh, and Fringe Festivals in Chicago, Cincinnati, Minnesota, Elgin, and San Francisco. She is the founding artistic director of Fat Theatre Project, an artistic collective that tells stories by/about/for/with fat people.
DR. ANDREW JOHNSTON, VP of Museum Experience & Collections, Adler Planetarium. Johnston leads the Adler’s efforts in development of museum experiences, exhibitions, theater productions and operations, public observing, history of astronomy research, and conservation of and outreach with the Adler’s world-renowned collections. Andrew has worked in science museums since the late 1980s, conducting research and developing public programs. He earned his Ph.D. in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Event venue & nearby stays
American Writers Museum, 180 N. Michigan Avenue, 2nd Floor, Chicago, United States
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