A Laboratory for Musical Theatre
Developing a new musical requires substantial resources—time, space, funding and more. It’s a lot to ask for, and all the more so in a precarious arts landscape. The creators of Out Here are so grateful to have developed this new musical through several partnerships at the University of Chicago.
Indeed, this production’s development is an experiment in creating new forms of support for the arts at the University of Chicago. Over the course of the past four years, Out Here received decisive developmental support from a variety of institutional partners: first, from the Richard & Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry and the Mellon Foundation, then through an extended partnership between Court Theatre and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. The Neubauer Collegium is a research incubator on campus that brings together interdisciplinary teams for collaborative work. Out Here is one of several projects underway as part of the Collegium’s Arts Labs initiative. Launched in the 2024–2025 academic year, Arts Labs helps to support the creation of artistic work at and beyond the university. As faculty artists and scholars along with visiting artists and scholars develop a range of collaborative projects, the teams are gathering essential insights into how artistic practice can thrive at a research university. The ultimate ambition is to reshape the culture of arts research and practice on campus.
Arts Labs projects span various genres, including dance, theater, opera, literature, and the visual arts. One project involves the creation of a dance-theater production that explores contemporary forms of masking through the use of social media, AI, and other mediated versions of self. Another brings together creative writing scholars, editors, and poets who are looking at ways to broaden access to the world of contemporary literary publishing. The Movement Theory lab is hosting a series of movement workshops and reading groups for faculty and graduate students interested in practical and conceptual questions about dance. The Opera Lab is supporting a series of workshops at which acclaimed director Yuval Sharon, the inaugural Global Solutions Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium, is working with a small group of collaborators to develop the concept for his upcoming production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
What unites these seemingly disparate initiatives is a commitment to investigating how arts practice engages a variety of research disciplines. “Creating an artistic work is a form of research,” said Out Here creator Leslie Buxbaum, an Associate Professor in the University’s Committee on Theater and Performance Studies. “You have a question, you have a hunch, you have a set of tools, but you actually don’t know what you’ll find.”
In the case of Out Here, Buxbaum began with a question of how to integrate music into an early draft of the script. The first round of support came from the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, which brought composer Erin McKeown to campus in 2022–2023 for a Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship. McKeown began working with Buxbaum and dramaturg David J. Levin on compositional experiments across talking and speaking. The three of them also co-taught a seminar in Theater & Performance Studies on
“(Re-) Queering the American Musical,” which gave them opportunities to explore the history of the form while considering ways that Out Here could playfully engage that history. The launch of Arts Labs in 2024 enabled the team to continue workshopping the piece, and supported generative residencies with actors, musicians, a director, and university colleagues.
“This all started from a place of questioning,” Buxbaum said. “David, Erin, and I never felt the pressure of a certain kind of success. We enjoyed the extraordinary luxury of being able to slow down and be stuck in a problem, and emerge in an unexpected place, rather than rush to the next marker of achievement, which speaks to a way that artistic practice is research.”
The research process for Out Here does not culminate on opening night. Live theater becomes what it is through its relationship with audiences, performance after performance. That’s where a whole new phase of learning and discovery happens. More broadly, the teams on all five Arts Labs projects are convening regularly to share notes about common challenges they are facing and opportunities they have been able to seize.
For Buxbaum, being part of Arts Labs makes her wonder, “Is there a summation of what we’re learning about supporting the arts on campus, or is this really a set of different case studies where each project has very specific needs?” she asked. “That is an open and active question as we move into the final year of the project.”
Mark Sorkin is the Associate Director of Communications at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
Out Here is on stage at Court April 10 through May 10, 2026 → Get tickets.