Jewboy Cain

Dorchen portrays Jewboy Cain, an Orthodox Jewish socialist folksinger from the south. With gallows humor and a patchy knowledge of just about everything, Cain recounts the triumphs and failures—mostly failures—that made him a rootless rattle bag of profane and profound musings.

And lookee here: a very nearly unprecedented TWO Critics Choices from the Chicago Reader.

So here you have it, your dueling Critics Choices.

On your left, Justin Hayford.

On your right, Jack Helbig.

Gentlemen... start your choosing!!!

“Whenever Jeff Dorchen returns to Chicago from his current home in Los Angeles, I'm reminded of the enormous hole he left in our performance scene. Keenly intelligent and politically audacious, he's an actor, singer, musician, and writer, creating everything from full-length plays to folk tunes. All these talents come together in his ‘one-man play with songs,’ The Life and Times of Jewboy Cain, which premiered here in 1995.

“The title character is an aging, cranky, disillusioned singer waiting in his shoddy home for the arrival of the great folk historian Alan Lomax. Instead his visitor turns out to be a ‘skinny little greasy teenager’ named Albert Lomack, who's rented Cain's apartment out from under him. Awaiting eviction, Cain serves up ‘tequila sensitives’ and recounts the story of his life, marked by a constant struggle to find his roots as a folk musician and an Orthodox Jew. These dual passions often collide, especially when he's playing gigs on Shabbat. ‘We're supposed to welcome Shabbos like a bride,’ he says. ‘Now how happy am I gonna be to see her if when she comes she takes away half my revenue?’

“A committed but toothless socialist, Cain grasps at any protest song, rewriting the Phil Ochs classic ‘Love Me, I'm a Liberal’ to label Dick Gephardt, Carol Moseley Braun, and Bill Clinton ‘two-cent butt whores.’ Once he even warmed up the crowd at a Joan Armatrading concert with a rendition of the Last Poets' ‘Niggers Are Scared of Revolution.’

“An ingenious satire of one-man biographical dramas, The Life and Times of Jewboy Cain is packed with as much musical entertainment as political venom.” (Justin Hayford)

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Jeff Dorchen has spent his career goring sacred cows. And when he runs out of victims, he gores himself, as he did in his brilliant 1995 one-man show, The Life and Times of Jewboy Cain.

Cain delivers his rambling confessional monologue—which Dorchen insists has “12 percent new material” in its Rhino Fest incarnation—to a callow young man who’s about to evict him. The sad irony is that at first Cain believes his persecutor is famed music historian Alan Lomax, come to document Cain’s work and revive his flagging career. On the one hand the show’s caustic, alienated, highly opinionated but very funny main character is a vicious and convincing caricature of Dorchen himself. On the other, Jewboy Cain lashes out at artists who exploit identity politics.

Dorchen implicitly compares Cain to other musicians who loved to tweak their fans’ sensibilities. But unlike Phil Ochs or Bob Dylan, Cain has found only obscurity—and even, Dorchen hints, oblivion.

Then again, as Jonathan Swift proved centuries ago, you can’t be both popular and a successful satirist. (Jack Helbig)