“The best stories I’ve ever heard come from hanging out with friends over a good bottle of wine. That’s when people really start talking, really get to the meat of their experiences—the wild beauty of it all, the destruction and the hope. That's the feeling we're going for: the crowd at Webster’s Wine Bar has the intimacy of my own living room and the crazy secrets that have been told there.”
—Megan Stielstra, Director of Story Development
2nd Story is a hybrid performance event combining storytelling, wine, and music that is produced by the Serendipity Theater Collective as both a Monthly Performance Series and an Annual Festival. A typical 2nd Story evening goes something like this: you hang out with your friends and eat and drink and make merry. Four or five times during the night, the lights go down, a spotlight comes up on somebody—maybe the person sitting next to you!—and they tell you a story. It's a great time, and our hope is that if we do our job right, you'll leave telling your own stories.
We tell stories every month at Chicago’s Webster's Wine Bar and Red Kiva Lounge. In addition to these ongoing series, we do frequent special guest performances, including The Goodman, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Story Week Festival of Writers, Victory Gardens, Strawdog Theatre and Sunday Salon, among others. We’re also planning a West Coast vineyard tour, and love to travel far and wide! Please contact us if you'd like us to come and share some stories (and hopefully hear some of yours!)
2nd Story has been featured on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio; we produce 2D, an annual print publication featuring many of our 2nd Story writers; and in January of 2008, we launched our Podcast series, featuring live recordings of many of our favorite stories. Serendipity also runs a number of outreach programs, including collaborating with The Goodman on their GTS program—a 6-week intensive for Chicago Public High School students. We also have teaching artists working with multiple high schools during the regular school year, and are happy to custom tailor programs for the classroom. Our artists make frequent presentations at academic conferences including Columbia College’s Creative Nonfiction Week, Pilcrow Literary Festival, The Center for Art and Public Life in San Francisco and Associated Writing Programs.