Fillet of Solo Festival pieces hit close to home

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Julie Ganey wrote and performs “Love Thy Neighbor ... Till It Hurts.”

Updated: October 27, 2011 12:33AM

This season’s 15th annual Fillet of Solo Festival — the project created and produced by Sharon Evans for the now-defunct Live Bait Theatre, but happily revived and amplified by Lifeline Theatre, where Dorothy Milne has teamed up with Evans — comprises 11 different shows. I caught two of them at Thursday’s opening night — Chicago-based actress-writer Julie Ganey’s “Love Thy Neighbor...Till It Hurts,” and New York-based writer-actress Jenny Allen’s “I Got Sick Then I Got Better.” Each was a superb, highly individualistic example of the art of the personal monologue — written with wit and passion, and performed with polish. And each made the personal ideally universal in the most seamless ways.

Ganey’s piece, directed by Megan Shuchman (with deft accompaniment by percussionist Dan McNeil), is a bristling, thoughtful, heartfelt response to a National Public Radio piece by Ira Glass about real estate and the recession — a story that essentially dissed the Rogers Park block where Ganey, her husband and their young daughter lived in a modest house. Incisively echoing Glass’ hourlong “four-act” radio show structure, she deftly suggests the nature of her neighborhood —a gumbo of races, social classes and lifestyles — and the changes that have taken place there since she first moved into her house eight years ago.

Ganey, with her girl-next-door appeal, winningly chronicles her various “Kumbaya”-like efforts to come to terms with neighbors who see her middle-class presence as both irritant and threat. While leading a summer drama camp for teens, she tries to break up an adult fight on the street, only to be told “you can’t do that” by one of her insightful male students. When her husband puts up a privacy fence, and complains about car honking, it offends neighbors in the adjacent rental building — a property eventually emptied for a luxury condo conversion that tanks with the recession.

Ganey’s efforts to plant an Edenic vegetable garden are undone by her neighbors’ feral cat. And finally, a ragtag block party on her busy city street becomes a prism through which the entire neighborhood — for better and for worse — comes into brilliant relief. By the end, Ganey’s edgy yet curative storytelling turns into a welcome rebuke to Glass’ stylish negativity.

It has been more than six years since Jenny Allen — successful magazine writer, quintessential New Yorker, considerably younger wife of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and mother of two daughters — was first diagnosed and treated for endometrial and ovarian cancer. After listening to her altogether frank, sometimes wistful, often surprisingly funny account of the ordeal that inspired this wonderfully conversational and revealing piece, you may find yourself most appalled by the crass indifference and/or ineptitude of some members of the medical establishment.

Allen is a woman of considerable access and means, and while she ultimately received life-saving treatment, you can only respond to her encounters with certain doctors with a mix of stupefaction, rage and dread. As it turns out, however, the terrors and miseries of the actual disease almost paled in comparison to the aftershock. And Allen’s richly detailed portrait of her shifting relationships with her husband, her children, her friends, her mother and herself is pitch-perfect and unsparing from start to finish.

James Lapine and Darren Katz get directing credits here, but it is clear Allen has a natural gift for turning the stage into an extension of her kitchen table.

NOTE: Ganey repeats her show July 31 and Aug. 5; Allen returns July 28 and 29.