Under shifting colored lights, Molly Gloeckner stands alone with nothing but a stool and a story. The audience roars with laughter as she plays out a dream scene, part of her one-woman show, “Modern Butchood.” The Columbia alum’s show mixes movement, humor and queer storytelling – and it’s coming to Chicago’s Annoyance Theatre for the first time.

The show follows “Butch,” the girlfriend of a semi-famous lesbian TikToker who becomes dissatisfied by her relationship and begins to sneak out of her apartment at night, setting off a chain of chaos.

Gloeckner got the idea for “Modern Butchood,” while visiting her girlfriend’s family in New Hampshire. 

“I was like, ‘drop me off at the library, I’m going to write something,’” she said. “And then as I was sitting there, I was like, ‘I’ve got it.’” 

Gloeckner graduated from Columbia in fall of 2020 with a degree in acting after initially majoring in comedy. She made the switch her sophomore year, wanting to become what she called a “well-rounded actress.”

Growing up in Oxford, Ohio, she was drawn to theatre early on, performing in community productions and watching musicals with her mom and grandmother. 

“It just kind of felt like this was always what I wanted to do,” she said.

Shows like “Saturday Night Live” fueled her dream of performing on screen, but when it came time for college, her parents wanted her to stay closer to home.

“I knew I wanted to be in a city,” Gloeckner said. “What really drew me to Columbia was I loved that it was just an art school, so everyone there was like doing something creative. I didn’t want to be on a traditional campus with Greek life and just the regular campus stuff.”  

At Columbia, Gloeckner took full advantage of the school’s “choose your own adventure vibe,” trying everything from comedy and movement to on-camera work. Wendi Weber, associate director and associate professor in the School of Theatre and Dance, taught Gloeckner in Character Ensemble and Advanced Acting on Camera. 

“Her senior year, she was taking my own camera class, and then she was taking physical theater with Michael Brown, who’s very movement forward,” Weber said. “She was talking about how it was hard because it was working really almost opposite ends – physical comedy being really bigger and eating up space and on camera work being much more nuanced.”

Ric Walker, associate professor in the School of Theatre and Dance, directed Gloeckner in the comedy play “The Servant of Two Masters” where she played the lead. He recalled how adaptable of a performer she was, and especially thoughtful. 

“Even though it might look effortless when you see it, what she is doing is actually quite thoughtful,” Walker said. “She has the ability to pull it off physically with what she set her mind to.” 

After graduating, Gloeckner moved to Los Angeles in 2022 to pursue film and television acting. The shift from stage to screen was an adjustment, she said, but it opened new creative doors — including improv, which she hadn’t explored before leaving Chicago.

Aside from acting, Gloeckner works as a bartender at a restaurant, which is where she met her friend and eventual “Modern Butchood” director, Charlie Towle. When Gloeckner began developing her script, she asked Towle — also an actor — to help bring her vision to life.

“She’s really courageous as a queer person with putting herself and her queerness and her identity out there in such a way that can be a little bit exposing and can be a little bit– I hesitate to say ugly at times, but she’s not always trying to present the most flattering version of herself as a performer,” he said.

Gloeckner said that the show is meant to show complex queer stories with complicated characters that are not meant to be representative of the whole community, which is something that she said is hard to come by in most queer media.

“I think that’s really liberating because in a non-queer story, you’re not thinking of the characters as representatives of the whole straight community,” she said. “They are just like that character.”

For Gloeckner, the goal is simple: make people laugh, think and find catharsis in the chaos.

“It asks you to have a reaction to it, and I think it can spark conversation,” she said. “The show’s not preaching an opinion at you. I’m not asking you to believe anything, but I am asking you to watch and then think about it.”

“Modern Butchood” will be premiering on Nov. 5 and 7 at 8 p.m. at the Annoyance Theatre & Bar, 851 W. Belmont Ave. Tickets are available through the theater’s website.

Copy edited by Manuel Nocera