Slow is excited to partner with Sideshow Theatre Company to present don’t trust the floor, an art exhibition based on—and theatrical reading of—Clare Barron’s new play in development Dirty Crusty.

Jeanine and Victor are accidentally reunited on the street. Apparently it’s been a while. Victor makes masks. Jeanine is a slob. Jeanine admires Synda dancing through a window. Synda is a ballerina. Something terrible happens. Granddad’s still there. Granddad is giant and prickly. Wild and vivid stage directions portray a hilarious, sometimes frightening scene definitely not for kids.

Artwork inspired by the play including video, sculpture, drawing and performance by Claire Ashley, Tony Balko, Meg Duguid, Jason Dunda, Max Byron Garett, Kevin Jennings, Chuck Jones, Julie Potratz, Rebecca Walz and Ryan Michael Pfeiffer is now on view at Slow.

The reading, directed by Sideshow’s artistic director Jonathan L. Green, will take place on June 21, 2014 beginning at 7:30 pm. Doors open at 6:00 pm.

Clare Barron is a playwright and performer from Wenatchee, Washington. Her plays include Baby Screams Miracle (Clubbed Thumb Summerworks); Solar Plexus (Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Marathon of One-Act Plays); Dirty Crusty; and You Got Older. She is the 2014 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. She is also a current member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and Youngblood at EST. As an actor, Clare recently appeared in the world premiere of Heidi Schreck’s The Consultant at Long Wharf Theatre directed by Kip Fagan. In 2013 she traveled to Beirut to play Mae in an Arabic-English production of María Irene Fornés’ Mud.

From Sideshow Theatre Company’s first production, 2008’s Dante Dies!! (and then things get weird), to its Jeff Award-winning productions of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Idomeneus (named one of the best plays of 2012 by Time Out Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times) and Elizabeth Meriwether’s runaway robotic hit Heddatron at Steppenwolf Theatre, Sideshow has consistently produced engaging, transcendent works across Chicago. Sideshow is a resident at Victory Gardens in the historic Biograph Theater.