Local playwright brings seance, Jerry Garcia to upstart Skokie venue in reading of one-act comedy

Daniel Zellner’s passion for theater began in nursery school, when he first got the opportunity to run around wild on stage and make believe, he said.

He has since studied theater in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Chicago, launched his own theater company, worked under an Italian maestro of “commedia dell’arte” and coached the Renaissance-era style of improv to Northwestern University students for more than a decade.

Now, after 40 years in the performing arts, the longtime Skokie resident has written a one-act comedy and is poised to stage a reading of it in The Storefront, a village-owned venue at 4051 Main St., this weekend. 

“Waiting for Jerry Garcia,” a play about three siblings holding a seance for the late iconic singer of the Grateful Dead, will be presented in The Storefront at 2 p.m. and at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 25. Tickets are $15. 

Each of the approximately 35-minute performances will be followed by a sing-along session of Grateful Dead music with The Uke Jammers, a local ukulele ensemble. Attendees are invited to bring their own acoustic instruments to join in on the jam session. 

The production will feature a number of local artists, and Meredith Gioia, communications manager for the Village of Skokie, said it will be the first work of theater staged in The Storefront. Zellner said he’d like it to inspire other locals to engage with the space. 

“It’s exciting. It’s really great and I hope it creates more dialogue,” Zellner said. “Something that I’ve always seemed to be doing is bringing people together — it just seems to be sort of a byproduct of what I do.

“Hopefully through the reading, it not only supports the play but just sort of gets the community together and talking and thinking: ‘Hey we could do some other things, like maybe we want to do jam sessions.”

Taking it Back

While he’s long loved the performing arts, Zellner said he was always more drawn to comedy because of how it can offer a more grounded and accessible form of theater. Audiences both laugh at what’s onstage and recognize things they have experienced, he said. 

So after studying theater at Tulane University and at the University of California Los Angeles, Zellner said he came to Chicago to study under Aretha Sills, the granddaughter of Viola Spolin, an early pioneer of American improv whose son co-founded The Second City. 

There, he was introduced to and developed a passion for commedia dell’arte, a form of improv that developed out of Italy around the 18th century. Zellner even developed a working relationship with Antonio Fava, an Italian maestro of the genre, and hosted him in the United States.

But after visiting Palo Alto in 2016, where the Grateful Dead spent some of their formative years, Zellner started thinking about how the jam band employs improvisation in their music. As some of his own family grew up in California, he felt inspired to write a one-act play referencing the band.  

Here and Now

Employing techniques he learned from The Second City — including the use of characters who are family members, because that gives them a shared history — he wrote a play about three misfits who are gathered on the 20th anniversary of Garcia’s death. 

“A lot of (the play) is just about the pressure, especially in America, for success, to do the right thing,” Zellner said. “These are family members I think everybody has. A lot of us are this way, like, we didn’t quite live up to what the expectation was.”

Zellner has started his own theater company, coached a commedia dell’arte club at Northwestern for 15 years and even run a playwrights workshop in Skokie. But over the course of the past 10 years, he has repeatedly returned to this one-act comedy with the aim of bringing it to life. 

After first staging a public reading in Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music in 2022, this weekend will provide him another chance to gauge a live audience reaction to the work before going back to the drawing board, he said. 

The performance will mainly consist of the three actors holding Zellner’s script and reading aloud to the audience. Two of the actors — Becca Blatt and Tyler Skafgaard — have Skokie ties. Blatt is a resident and Skafgaard a director with the Devonshire Playhouse. 

The show’s director, Steven Yandell, also grew up in Skokie. Mitch Thomas, who directs the Uke Jammers, is a resident as well. 

Location, Location

Notably, the Skokie Village Board voted earlier this year to approve a $1.8 million investment towards beautifying the stretch of Main Street on which The Storefront resides. 

After the village acquired the property in 2024, the space has hosted farmers markets, local art exhibits, classes and workshops. 

Gioia said The Storefront’s name was inspired by the grassroots Chicago storefront theater movement, in which theater companies rented out commercial spaces to put on shows instead of worrying about selling enough tickets to break even on renting a theater. 

The Village only charges artists like Zellner a small percentage of the total ticket sales, which makes it more affordable for creators to put on shows without worrying about upfront costs.

“So that’s kind of what we’re trying to do, is let those artists starting out, or those smaller companies, or people who want to maybe break out from their traditional artistic view, to experiment without worrying about the cost so much,” Gioia said.

Zellner said he’s worked in plenty of different theaters, but he’s never had the privilege of being a 20-minute walk from where he’s facilitating a show. He sees the local incubator space as an important resource for artists like him.

“I mean that’s going to be a home base for a lot of artists around here to try out things,” Zellner said. “And I think that was the intent of The Storefront in the first place — it’s not like a full on theater, but we can try things and we can do things. So that’s just huge.”

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