Inhabit Theater will perform two simultaneous plays at Crystal Lake's Muse Art

Always about the unique, Inhabit Theater will perform what is believed to be a first – two plays happening at the same time in two different rooms.

The pop-up theater group, known for “inhabiting” spaces throughout McHenry County and beyond to both showcase theater talent and venues, will perform the new comedy, “The Callback,” throughout October at Muse Art, 135 Beardsley St., Crystal Lake.

Written by Inhabit’s founder Kellee Stall of Crystal Lake and Janelle McHugh of Janesville, Wisconsin, the show will take place in two rooms at the art studio, with characters leaving one room and entering the other, still in character.

One room will feature a waiting room where actors are preparing for their callback, while the other will be the audition room where they are performing their callback for the directing team.

Audiences will swap rooms after intermission, basically seeing two different versions of the same story.

“I don’t think it’s ever been done,” Stall said.

Performances will be at 6 p.m. Sundays in October at Muse Art, an art studio and gallery that hosts guided paint sessions and other events.

Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. with live music – “Inhabit always does live music very differently than you expect,” Stall said. “Some of the characters of the play will perform right outside of Muse, playing like street vendors. We pipe their music into the studio space.”

Tickets cost $20 in advance at www.inhabittheater.com or $25 at the door. The studio has a capacity for up to 50 people in each room of the two coinciding plays.

“The Callback” tells the story of musicians and actors auditioning for a play they don’t realize hasn’t been written yet. The producer doesn’t want the director, a girlfriend he broke up with the night before, to know he hasn’t written the play yet.

Stall wrote the production, along with McHugh, after seeing the studio space. Inhabit regularly collaborates with area businesses, causes, actors and musicians to tell stories, having last inhabited The Other Side, a sober bar in Crystal Lake, for a production of “A Vaudeville Fiasco!” last March.

The rooms inside Muse were ideal as waiting and auditions rooms, Stall said, and the idea for the comedy flowed after she saw them. She and McHugh wrote the production in about two months, asking well-known area actors to participate and wrote to their strengths.

Among the cast are McHugh, John Barnett (Woodstock), Jenny Olson (Lake in the Hills), Brandon Morales (Fox River Grove), Tania Gibson (Fox River Grove), Amanda Spenner (Palatine), Randy Peterkort (Algonquin), Sheri Warren (Inverness), Karen Neidlinger (St. Charles), and Adam Moxness (Elgin).

While writing the production, McHugh focused on the audition room side of the play, while Stall wrote the waiting room side.

It wasn’t until first read-throughs they realized how well they had timed the two.

“When one of the characters exits the waiting room, the play continues as they walk into the audition room side,” Stall said.

“The timing of it is nothing short of miraculous. … Now, it’s seamless. It’s really the most amazing feeling when those actors walk into the room on time.”