Chicago Premiere of SIX MEN DRESSED LIKE JOSEPH STALIN to be Presented at A Red Orchid Theatre

A Red Orchid Theatre has revealed second show in its 32nd season, the Chicago premiere of Dianne Nora’s SIX MEN DRESSED LIKE JOSEPH STALIN, directed by Ensemble Member dado and running May 18 - June 22, with previews running May 8 - 16, 2025, at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St. Season subscriptions are now on sale. Individual tickets ($35-$50) go on sale in Spring 2025.

When Soso is left for dead on the Eastern Front, he’s taken in by the Kremlin due to his shocking resemblance to a certain someone. Koba is tasked with training him to perform the role of a lifetime: Stalin’s body double. While Soso is a performer—trained to dance, juggle, and tour the countryside entertaining peasants—Koba is an actor’s actor, a student of Stanislavski himself (maybe you’ve heard of his System?), committed to the pursuit of perezhivanie, or experiencing a character’s reality. Together, the doubles prepare for the Conference at Tehran, when three so-called Great Men (or were they merely players?) decided the fate of the 20th century. 

About the Artists 

Dianne Nora (she/her; playwright) is a playwright, dramaturg, and comedy writer. She’s a headline and features contributor at The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, and her humor writing has also appeared in Funny Or Die and The Hard Times, where she was previously Head Writer of Breaking News. In 2019, an abbreviated version of her play Monica: This Play is Not About Monica Lewinsky premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe, where The Spectator listed it among the “Best of the Fringe.“ Her play for young audiences, Journey Around My Bedroom, was produced at New Ohio Theatre in 2020, and recommended by The New York Times, America’s second finest news source (Top 5, Weekend Section). She has been very lucky to assist her mentor, the playwright and actor Tracy Letts, on seven productions and workshops, at Steppenwolf Theatre and on Broadway. She has been a winner of Inkwell Theater’s Lerner Fellowship and Playhouse on the Square’s New Works at the Works Playwriting Competition, and a recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement grant. She was selected for Utah Shakespeare Festival’s Words Cubed program, and she was a member of Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, where she was commissioned to write Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Living Document. She was a runner-up for the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Award, a finalist for The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, the Ingram New Works Lab at Nashville Rep, and Rough Magic Theatre’s SEEDS program, and a semi-finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and the Princess Grace Award for playwriting. She is a co-host of Streamageddon, a podcast about streaming television. She is thrilled to be working with the brilliant artists of A Red Orchid Theatre, where she previously worked as dramaturg on Jen Silverman's The Moors. 

dado (she/her, director) has been an A Red Orchid Ensemble Member since 2007. She was most recently seen onstage at AROT as the Moor-Hen in The Moors, the Ancient in Grey House, and Karla Stock in Traitor. At AROT, dado has directed In Quietness, Act Five, The Malignant Ampersands, Killing Game, The Room, The Mutilated, Celebration, Red Handed Otter, Simpatico (which moved to McCarter Theatre), Megacosm, The Unseen, The Hothouse, The Sea Horse, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, and The Grey Zone. Other recent directing projects include Edward Allan Baker’s Rosemary with Ginger (Habakkuk Theatre), Harold Pinter’s The Lover (Facility Theatre), and Catherine Anne Toupin’s Right Now (Facility Theatre). Dado is the recipient of the Edes Prize from the University of Chicago and produced David Lang's chamber opera little matchgirl passion (Facility Theatre) with this award. She is also the director of Erik Satie's surrealist Ruse of Medusa (Facility Theatre) and the original vacuum cleaner opera, which was produced at the MCA and Prop Thtr. Dado holds an MFA in visual art from the University of Chicago. 
 

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