Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department alumnus and faculty member Brian Shaw ’86, a graduate of the Theatre Department’s BA Program in Theatre, is featured in Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double, a new political satire by Theatre Department faculty member Mickle Maher. Presented by the cutting-edge experimental company Theater Oobleck, Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double runs January 20-February 19 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, Chicago.

In this followup to Maher’s 2007 hit The Strangerer, legendary news anchor and presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer is now retired and sitting alone of a gloomy evening in his cavernous D.C. home, when his double, Jim Lehrer, the unsuccessful playwright, arrives home from the opening night of his first produced play. The premiere of that play did not go well and Jim Lehrer II fled the theater, chased across dark fields and streams by a violent audience strangely angered by the staging of his script. He now must convince his twin their lives are in danger and to lock and barricade the front door to stem the imminent invasion. Maher’s comic-gothic horror tale relates the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Antonin Artaud to the politics and theatre of our day.