The 2006/07 season brought the grand opening of the new Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, following more than $11 million in renovations

Annoyance Theatre (founded 1987)
“We don’t really have a regular operating budget—just plan as we go along.”
—Jennifer Estlin, President, Annoyance Theatre

The Artistic Home (founded 1998)
End of nineties: $62,000
End of zeroes: $164,500

Bailiwick Chicago (founded 2009)
End of nineties: N/A (Bailiwick Repertory is now defunct)
End of zeroes: $120,000 projected 2010

Chicago Dramatists (founded 1979)
End of nineties: $171,000
End of zeroes: $550,000

Collaboraction (founded 1996)
End of nineties: $50,000
End of zeroes: $500,000

Court Theatre (founded 1955)
End of nineties: $2.6 million
End of zeroes: $3.2 million Read the rest of this entry »

Pizza? Theater Oobleck's "Strauss at Midnight"

As part of this story, we sent a few questions to leaders of the theater community in Chicago and received about forty written responses. Here are excerpts from some of their answers. The full text will also soon be published online.

Any observations or thoughts about Chicago theater in the last decade?

“When one theater has a hit show, its not just a hit for that show, it’s a hit for Chicago.”
—Deb Clapp, Executive Director, League of Chicago Theatres

“I love the shake-ups that are happening as a result of management changes, economic pressures, and influx of new artists. It’s exciting to see the landscape shifting so dramatically, the new work that is being created as a result, and the new artists and management teams that are getting a chance at bat.”
— Kevin Mayes, Executive Director, Bailiwick Chicago

“The first SKETCHBOOK was produced in January 2000 and has gone on to create 135 world premiere short plays with over 1000 different artists for over 30,000 audience members and launching numerous careers.”
— Anthony Moseley, Executive and Artistic Director, Collaboraction Read the rest of this entry »

2000

Milestones

500 Clown, Steep Theatre, the side project and Teatro Luna are founded

Broadway In Chicago launches as a joint venture between Live Nation and the Nederlander Organization

Goodman departs its original home in the Art Institute of Chicago and moves into $51 million new digs in the North Loop

Chicago Shakespeare moves into a $24 million theater on Navy Pier

Collaboraction produces its first Sketchbook

The City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs opens The Storefront Theater

Passings

Michael Maggio, Goodman Theatre Associate Artistic Director and Dean of The Theatre School at DePaul University Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our decade retrospective, we surveyed more than forty theater companies for their observations to a couple of questions. What follows are their formatted but unedited responses.

Deb Clapp
Executive Director, League of Chicago Theatres (founded 1979)

Any observations or thoughts about Chicago theater in the last decade?
Over the last decade, Chicago has seen the downtown theater district grow and thrive, Goodman moved downtown and several theaters were re-furbished. Lookingglass moved into their new digs on Michigan Avenue and theater has flourished. Several exciting new companies have been established including The House Theatre of Chicago, Silk Road Theatre Project, New Leaf Theatre and Rasaka, among many others.

Is there a “Chicago style” anymore (if there ever was) and has it changed? What, today, distinguishes Chicago theater from anywhere else?
A number of unique characteristics distinguish Chicago theater. We have a unique ecology encompassing a wide range of theater artistry, from spectacle to culturally specific, horror to improv, houses with thousands of seats to houses with 18 seats. Our community is very collegial and collaborative, sharing ideas and resources. When one theater has a hit show, its not just a hit for that show, it’s a hit for Chicago. Our directors, authors, actors, stagehands, producers, all are Chicagoans and all create for a Chicago audience.

Outside of your own company, who or what excites you most about local theater right now?
Chicago is the best place to see and to make theater in the world. A lot of attention from other parts of the country and the world is being paid to Chicago theater right now and while that is wonderful and will inevitably lead us to greater things, what continues to happen every night in Chicago theater brings me joy. Telling our stories and the stories of others, bringing the world on stage every night, that’s what excites me most. Read the rest of this entry »

With a commanding performance by its title character, “Lucinda’s Bed” may offer one of the finest star turns ever by an inanimate object. Playwright Mia McCullough cleverly tells a woman’s tale by setting every scene in and around her bed: it’s where the dreams and prayers of childhood unfold, where the mischief of sexual awakening unfurls, where a marriage and family are cradled, where betrayal is contemplated, where betrayal is covered up. It’s a place of birth, a place of death. How could a mere actor compete with such gravitas?

A teen Lucinda prays to an absent god but meets the monster under her bed. He’s not scary, though, but embodied by a devilishly seductive Lucas Neff, who plays the monster (in all his incarnations) with a charismatic understated cool. In this world premiere late in its run at Chicago Dramatists, director Jessi D. Hill hustles us through the life of Lucinda, played with earnest vigor by Elizabeth Laidlaw, keeping the pace so crackling that we don’t think much about how empty her life really is, until Lucinda realizes it herself late in the play. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Tim Thomas

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

Writer, performer, artistic director and—given her new show at the Steppenwolf Theatre—adaptor Tanya Saracho would like you to know she’s on “hiatus.” And yet, after spending just a few minutes with this vivacious 33-year-old life force, I wonder just what she’s on hiatus from.

This interview almost doesn’t happen. Everyone seems to want a piece of Saracho this weekend, and I’m lucky to get an hour with her on the day of the premiere of “The House on Mango Street,” the play she has adapted from the book of the same name by novelist Sandra Cisneros. And so it is 2pm on Saturday—an hour before the press performance—and we’re whisked away to a conference room on a lower floor by David Rosenberg, the Steppenwolf’s indefatigable publicist who, travelling down the stairwell, skillfully yet gently asks Tanya if she will condescend to a phone interview with another journalist on Monday. “The day of the Jeffs,” inquires an alarmed Saracho, who will be up for three Jeff Awards that evening and who has just picked up a dress for the occasion (“Nordstrom” she had told me earlier, as if on the red carpet).  When at last we get to talking, and she rattles off her projects in her rapid-fire Span-English-hybrid lingo (something that has become a trademark of the dialogue in her plays), it’s a vertiginous experience:  along with “Mango” she has been revising and restaging “Lunatica(s)” for its November 18 premiere at Chicago Dramatists, where the show is scheduled to run for an ambitious three months (“we’re going to trust that Latinos want to see it for three months”).  She’s workshopping a new piece about queerness, culture and race—in collaboration with About Face Theater—for next year’s Latino Theatre Festival at the Goodman. She’s single-handedly heading Teatro Luna, the ten-year old company she founded with former co-Artistic Director Coya Paz, and working on a strategic plan. She has a draft due in January for an adaptation of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” for Teatro Vista (“I have to go away for a week and finish since everyone knows more about Chekhov than I do”).  And although Saracho could not confirm exactly the circumstances under which she may be working on the book of a new musical, she does tell me it’s about “hookers at the turn of the century.”  I’m subsequently serenaded with a few bars from the opening number to “Pippin,” a show she did in high school when she was a real musical-theater geek.

I’m sorry, but did someone say something about being on hiatus? Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Chicago Dramatists:
CHICAGO DRAMATISTS 2009-2010
Production, Development & Education

Chicago, June 10, 2009 After a massively successful 30th Anniversary Season, Artistic Director Russ Tutterow announced Chicago Dramatists’ 2009-2010 season of programming today, featuring world premiere productions and a slate of programs engaging over five hundred playwrights throughout the year.

Programming will include collaborations with Chicago  institutions such as  Stage Left, The Second City, and the playwriting programs of DePaul and Northwestern University; four quarters of Playwrights’ Studio Classes; the distinguished guests of the Visiting Artists Program (previous artists have included Jeff Daniels, Paula Vogel and Sarah Ruhl); and signature developmental programs such as The Saturday Series, Script Lab and The First Draft Series. World premiere productions of Lucinda’s Bed by Resident Playwright Mia McCullough and Jade Heart by Senior Network Playwright Will Cooper will represent the culmination of plays that have been developed and fine tuned in many of those same programs.

As the only theatre in the country that is both a playwrights’ workshop and a full producing theatre, Chicago Dramatists’ programming focuses on the three major stages of a new play’s life: Production, Development and Education. Working with playwrights at every step of the writing process, Chicago Dramatists will continue its thirty-one-year old mission of developing new plays and playwrights for the American theatre. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When the Robert Taylor Homes are torn down, a resident family of the projects is displaced to a motel on the South Side of Chicago, where they enact their seemingly inevitable self-destructive tragedy. While the story centers around the child Hope, who escapes into an imaginary friendship with Whoopi Goldberg, it’s the tragedy of her fearsome mother Queenie that drives the play. The show is worth it just to see Du Shon Monique Brown’s performance as Queenie, abusive, damaged and desperate, and the tension as other characters respond to and eventually confront her. The other characters—a saccharine grandmother, shiftless father and uncle, and a dangerously sexy babysitter—are less interesting and often the bearers of cliché. “Hope VI” is full of astutely pointed moments, such as a scathing satire of black TV families as seen through Hope’s fantasy of her “TV mom,” but there’s also a lack of tightness to the show that makes some scenes that should be heartbreaking simply awkward, and sometimes more like a read-through than a final production. There’s a momentous play in there, though, if inconsistent and sometimes occluded. (Monica Westin)

At Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, (312)633-0840. Through July 12.

Unadulterated farce that spirals downward in tone from running gag to cheap trick. A dweeby educational-film-strip editor attempts to enact a self-help book’s rules in order to seem more interesting and instead becomes entangled in a Harold-and-Maude relationship with his eccentric landlady and in the mystery of her late husband’s death. Unfortunately, despite director Russ Tutterow’s shrewd impulse to make the play as much of a spectacle as possible, complete with strobe lights and a male stripper performing in a g-string apropos of nothing, he can’t overrule the show’s tired parade of cliché. While some blame can be shared with the actors, who undeniably ham it up, hitting the same situation-comedy note for more than two hours straight, the problem lies in the writing itself, which consists of never-ending sexual innuendo, stereotyped characters and tropes overworn to the point of numbness (joke about a gun-collecting postal worker, anyone?). There are some effective comedic moments—the geek attempting to set the mood for seduction with Gregorian chant, for example, and a well-timed description of a character who looks like “a young Oliver Laurel with a mustache or an obese Adolf Hitler” (this is also one of the least-offensive lines in the play)—but more often than not the jokes feel spelled out for the audience, and long after we’ve anticipated them. (Monica Westin)

At Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W Chicago, (312)633-0840. Through February 22.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »