ARTS & CULTURE

And how did the people who had been working at iO right up to the shutdown, the performers and box o ce personnel, the waiters and bartenders and cooks, find out?

“They found out from an Instagram post,” Shelby Plummer, former creative director at iO (from 2017 to 2018) tells me. “Everybody on management was under the impression they would reopen.”

“The community is really hurting right now,” Plummer continues, adding that she created a GoFundMe campaign “to help sta members of iO who are struggling. Help them get through a few more months if their unemployment benefits end.” iO’s closure triggered a deluge of social media comments and articles not just in the Chicago dailies, but across the country, in the New York Times and New York magazine. The closing was at least as cataclysmic as Upright Citizens Brigade (which grew out of iO in the 90s) closing theaters in New York and LA. It may be more cataclysmic, because UCB still exists as an organization (and still owns a space in LA it intends to keep).

U. of C., published a column in the Chicago Tribune that used iO’s closing to try out the latest right-wing echo chamber buzzword (“cancel culture”) and to blame iO’s closing on a group of uppity BIPOC improvisers, making demands in a petition (I Will Not Perform at iO Until the Following Demands Are Met) on a financially strapped Charna in the middle of a pandemic. Cammack incorrectly reported that the petition asked Charna to “step down.”

When I asked Charna if the petition circulated by five BIPOC improvisers played a role in her deciding to close iO, her answer was unambiguous: “No no no no no not at all.”

COMEDY