The Hypocrites is an award-winning Chicago storefront theate company founded in 1997 by Sean Graney, Brandon Kruse and Christopher Cintron. Graney has been artistic director of the company since its founding. Megan Wildebour serves as their current Managing Director. The company travels around various theaters in Chicago including Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Tony Award-winning Chicago theatre company founded in 1974 by Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry in the basement of a church in Highland Park, Illinois. It has since relocated to Chicago's Halsted Street, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Its name comes from...

, Goodman

Goodman Theatre

The Goodman Theatre is a professional theater company located in Chicago's Loop. A major part of Chicago theatre, it is the city's oldest currently active nonprofit theater organization...

, Museum of Contemporary Art

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary art venues...

, Chopin

Chopin Theatre

Chopin Theatre is an American for-profit cultural organization located along Polonia Triangle in Wicker Park within the West Town community area of Chicago...

, and the Building Stage.

Emerson College

Emerson College

Emerson College is a private coeducational university located in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a "school of oratory," Emerson is "the only comprehensive college or university in America dedicated exclusively to communication and the arts in a liberal arts...

 graduates Graney, Kruse and Cintron moved to Chicago in 1995 and created a new theatre company focusing on the work of the Absurdists, underrepresented in the realism-centric 1990s Chicago theatre world. They began performing the basement of Café Voltaire, a vegetarian restaurant in Lakeview

Lakeview, Chicago

Lake View, or Lakeview, is one of the 77 community area of the Chicago, Illinois, located in the city's North Side. It is bordered by West Diversey Parkway on the south, West Irving Park Road on the north, North Ravenswood Avenue on the west, and the shore of Lake Michigan on the east...

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The word “hypocrite” means “actor” in Greek or someone who pretends to be what they are not. However, the company's name is actually inspired by Eugene Ionesco’s Notes and Counternotes. According to the playwright, a person cannot be held to one idea. Ionesco consistently contradicts himself throughout the book, hence its title and The Hypocrites' name. The company's logo is an abstract rhino head. It is another homage to Ionesco.

In its inaugural season, the company presented Eugene Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...

’s The Bald Soprano

The Bald Soprano

La Cantatrice Chauve — translated from French as The Bald Soprano or The Bald Prima Donna — is the first play written by Franco-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco. Nicolas Bataille directed the premiere on May 11, 1950 at the Théâtre des Noctambules, Paris...

, Georg Buchner

Georg Büchner

Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany...

’s Woyzeck

Woyzeck

Woyzeck is a stage play written by Georg Büchner. He left the work incomplete at his death, but it has been variously and posthumously "finished" by a variety of authors, editors and translators. Woyzeck has become one of the most performed and influential plays in the German theatre...

 and Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

’s Endgame

Endgame (play)

Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. It was originally written in French ; as was his custom, Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the...

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Since then, the Hypocrites have been mounting larger-scale productions around Chicago. In 2001, the company launched company memberships, formalizing a group of actors and designers involved. Productions of Marat/Sade

Marat/Sade

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade , almost invariably shortened to Marat/Sade, is a 1963 play by Peter Weiss...

, Blood Wedding, Machinal

Machinal

Machinal is a play written by American playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell, inspired by the real life case of convicted and executed murderess Ruth Snyder...

, Equus

Equus (play)

Equus is a play by Peter Shaffer written in 1973, telling the story of a psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horses....

, Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman is a 1949 play written by American playwright Arthur Miller. It was the recipient of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. Premiered at the Morosco Theatre in February 1949, the original production ran for a total of 742 performances.-Plot :Willy Loman...

, 4.48 Psychosis

4.48 Psychosis

4.48 Psychosis is a play by British playwright Sarah Kane. It was her last work, first staged at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on June 23, 2000, nearly one and a half years after Kane's February 20, 1999 death...

, and Mud

Mud

Mud is a mixture of water and some combination of soil, silt, and clay. Ancient mud deposits harden over geological time to form sedimentary rock such as shale or mudstone . When geological deposits of mud are formed in estuaries the resultant layers are termed bay muds...

 garnered the company critical and popular acclaim. Their production of Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,...

’s Our Town

Our Town

Our Town is a three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It is a character story about an average town's citizens in the early twentieth century as depicted through their everyday lives...

, directed by David Cromer

David Cromer

David Cromer is an American theatre director and stage actor. He has received recognition for his work Off-Broadway and in his native Chicago. Cromer has won or been nominated for numerous awards, including winning the Lucille Lortel Award and Obie Award for his direction of Our Town...

, transferred to the Barrow Theatre in New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, after a successful run in Chicago, in 2008.