BLAKE MONTGOMERY (creator and performer)

Founder and artistic director of The Building Stage, Mr. Montgomery is an actor and director whose approach to theater reflects his training at L'ecole internationale de theatre Jacques Lecoq (as well as its scenographic wing, Le Laboratoire d'Etude du Mouvement), the Dell'Arte School of Physical Theater, the Margolis-Brown Movement Theater Lab and with master clown Ronlin Foreman. Montgomery has conceived and/or directed The Building Stage productions: Hamlet, Dustbowl Gothic, Moby-Dick (originally in 2006 and revised in 2011), Noir, Dracula, The Franklin Expedition, Hansel und Gretel, and Life is a Dream; with Joanie Schultz, he co-directed The Ring Cycle. Montgomery played Halvard Solness in The Building Stage production of The Master Builder. He has appeared as Dr. Prentice in What the Butler Saw at the Court Theater and as Drosselmeyer in The House Theatre of Chicago's The Nutcracker (2010). Previous to founding The Building Stage, he worked with Redmoon Theater with whom he performed in Seagull, Nina, and Salao: The Worst Kind of Unlucky.

This is the second time in his career that Mr. Montgomery has performed a solo show. In 1999, soon after having made Chicago his home, he performed as the Victorian author Wilkie Collins in a solo performance adaptation of Collins' novel The Woman in White. Charles Dickens played a key role in that production as the offstage villain whose looming presence — or more precisely, whose absence — was the driving force behind the action. In many ways, Charles Dickens Begrudgingly Performs... is the companion piece to Montgomery's The Woman in White.