Here’s a good way to picture the lineage of acting companies who’ve made their mark in Our Town over the last three decades. Put Paul Sills and the fifties and sixties groups or movements he sired – Playwrights Theatre, Compass Players, Second City, Game Theatre, Story Theater – in the center as a tree trunk. Give it two branches – on one side, The Reality Makers; on the other, The Story Tellers.

The Reality Makers generally coax scripts, not ad libs, into stage life. Yet they draw inspiration from the improvisation work of such pioneers as Sills inasmuch as they want their actors’ utterances to sound as spontaneously, effortlessly real as do improvisers’. You might place among them playwright David Mamet and his St. Nicholas Theater, as well as past Goodman artistic director Gregory Mosher, who at New York’s Lincoln Center continues to direct Mamet plays; you probably should put Steppenwolf Theatre there too, even though it is widely guessed that its conceptual bent differs in basic ways from that of the Mamet-Mosher ambit. Include, also, the later Remains Theatre.

The Story Tellers are not wedded to the technique of Story Theater, which allows each player to help narrate the plot and, thus, refer liberally to his own character in the grammatical third person. But, in line with that very spirit, they are less focused upon the actor’s performance as a perfectible end and more upon it as a means to spin a yarn. Put here the Organic Theater under the regime (1969-1985) of Stuart Gordon. Also include the Piven Theatre and Workshop which has been working at Story Theater and related theater games since 1968. The techniques which were postulated by Northwestern University’s Robert Breen, called Chamber Theatre, and have on occasion been roused out of theory and into practice by former Breen student Frank Galati, also belong in this category. (Chamber Theatre actually predates Story Theater and resembles it except for the call for a traditional, solitary narrator.) Include, maybe, the early Remains Theatre. In any case, leave room for others.

For the tree’s roots put Paul Sills’ mother, Viola Spolin, and her still-in-print book, Improvisation for the Theater.

This is such a good and handy way to say in a nutshell what is being alluded to in the phrase “Chicago acting” and what’s special about it that it has been said, over and over again in print and on radio and even television. It is as near to an “official” recounting as we’ve had, though it focuses on acting troupes and so does not directly take into account the majority of Off-Loop theaters who cast shows from the available citywide acting pool.

But what comes below does not disagree with the tree image so much as seeks another way of looking at why companies take on their particular identities.

It is not a myth that once upon a time a show in town could draw just about all the audience it wanted by getting one or two decent daily reviews. A company did not have to run display ads, put its directors and actors on talk shows, sell T-shirts or even welcome its patrons in a bonafide playhouse with cushioned seats replete with backs. Perhaps it simply taped posters to walls and windows, or wheat¬pasted them to poles. These companies did not especially want or seek subscribers; they wanted to be known simply by word-of-mouth. Their producers most likely feared that any amassment of supporters – those who sit on advisory boards, those who subscribe, to say nothing of those who publicly critique – could sooner or later be a lobbying power presuming to steer the producers in directions profoundly irrelevant to the very impulses for starting a place in which to create.

In Chicago’s theater history there actually were ethereally brief, carefree stretches of time like that; and whenever I am on the verge of accusing myself of arcadian fancies I soon recall, specifically, those several plucky storefront and mom-and-pop operations that dotted the north side when I came to live on it just as the sixties were expiring. It was a non-competitive atmosphere in which companies greeted newer ones with an attitude of the more the merrier. But human memory, as lawyers will tell you, is poor.

There have been so many companies and enterprises, worthy and otherwise, that over the past thirty years have died both in body and in essence, yet most are dismally remembered or utterly forgotten. Some were formed around individuals who just happened to know each other as fellow Chicagoans. Seldom actual acting companies, they were usually producing companies whose members lacked common roots. In a few cases, they were organized with only a vague design, or whim, to stage plays.

Few theater aficionados will have heard of the eclectic Chicago Stage Guild, which during the mid-sixties drew customers to its North State Street space, now but a wisp of memory, for shows ranging from Tom Jones to Ghosts. Or Hyde Park’s Last Stage, whose artistic director Sid Passin bravely tackled material extracted from James Joyce to mount the only Chicago production ever, as far as I know, of Ulysses in Nighttown. Or Cafe Topa, a cabaret operation run by Sherry Fox on North Ashland whose last show in an also-mottled repertoire history was to be Dracula. Or the Old Town Players, which during Frank Carioti’s tenure as artistic head was the only north side community theater dedicated to the meticulously tasteful spooning up of quasi- and neo¬classical fare. Then, of course, there was the Ivanhoe under George Keathley’s steerage, the only in-city concern outside the Loop to feature name actors in serious theater whose future seemed, for awhile, quite secure.

Among the more innovative theaters now scarcely recalled is the Kingston Mines Theatre Company on Lincoln Avenue, where seminal, off-beat pieces by Jean-Claude van hallie, Megan Terry, Susan Yankowitz, Maria Irene Fornes, Michael McClure, Charles Ludlam, John Guare, Edward Bond, and Joseph Heller received Midwest premieres. Where, lest we forget, Grease originated. Or Lincoln Avenue’s Body Politic – not as it is now, but as it was in the late sixties, when the Reverend James Shiflett and troupe staged their audiences’ and their own nocturnal visions and called the result Dream

Theater, and when Paul Sills was developing Story Theater. And where, into the seventies, countless experimentalists came and went as renters. Some will know well, from still earlier in the sixties, of the illustrious reign of Bob Sickinger over three Hull House spaces (Jane Addams, Uptown, and Parkway), who included in his juggling act highly touted productions of everything from Jack Gelber’s The Connection to the musical Take Me Along; but the knowers’ ranks are with time thinning to a snapping point.

Those companies did need organized help, proof of which is the fact that all either died for its lack, or were altered, often irreversibly, by accepting it. Just about every time a theater caved in to the pressure of well-meant urgings from outsiders, it transformed into an enterprise not so much beyond its original dreams as within the field of what it had once consciously rejected. Whether it stayed in business – perhaps to flourish – or not, it did in some way, and in someone’s view if not in its own, die. If we believe that it is slightly twisted, if not the height of irony, to lay all the blame at the helpers’ feet, we believe so mainly because it’s obvious that every tale of the birth, rise, and fall of a company has its unique wrinkles, which reflect the company’s particular fortunes and innate failings.

My “once upon a time” means more than a framed bit of the past. It refers to any period of time when Chicago gave an emerging group of theater artists a chance to find and air their own special voice, and sent to them the populace’s adventuresome and curious. This gentle time, with a group in the creche of its creative promise, may be when Chicago is kindest, or most open, or most indulgent. It is when the big town behaves like a small one – as if grateful for, boosterish about, its new cultural acquisition.

For a fledgling acting troupe, however, this is greatly a self-nourishing infancy. Women and men who probably majored in theater and knew one another on some college campus somewhere, who by election or plain happy fluke wound up here, are sustained by an often unarticulated belief that from mutual experience, and from the hoary precepts of some beloved faculty mentor, has alchemically arisen a viewpoint, sensibility, sense of humor plus configuration of talent the likes of which Chicago has surely never before encountered. What that is exactly is not the point; the point is that it’s bound to be, if not earth-shaking, Chicago-shaking. Sometimes – in no small way due to this vital arrogance – it is. And this arrogance propels new groups into self-¬promotional campaigns of the before-we-got-here-¬there-was-nothing type that helps blur our, and their, sense of heritage.

More than its general public, Chicago’s theater folk, who include its writers on theater, are ever a transient lot of arrivistes and imminent departers. Don’t scold the former too harshly for believing that our theater scene got underway sometime coinciding with St. Nicholas Theater’s inception in the mid-seventies, or with Steppenwolf’s surfacing in the late seventies; for though these are opportunistically convenient beliefs to adopt, they were no doubt also circulating as the newcomers arrived. Nor, perhaps, should we even be too hard on the members of arriving troupes who assume that the scene is only underway now that they are here.

Fueled by this chutzpah, they come with the idea of Chicago as a new home, as a cultural wasteland awaiting their fertilization and, most fascinatingly, as a thing to be overthrown. What’s to be overthrown simply consists of the prevalent kind or kinds of theater they see when they get here. The older theaters and, often, the actors they are fond of using are liable to be seen by the hungering new kids on the block as media-sanctified, overrated, bloated. In short, seen in a cockeyed way as the Establishment ¬never mind that in fact they are probably struggling just as hard to stay in business as are the newcomers to open theirs. Above all, the older companies are perceived to be obsolete, irrelevant and dead, “dead” with the force of meaning Peter Brook gave the word when he decried the suffocating psychic baggage commercial theater imposes on Western culture.

It is not a question of fairness but of survival. The newcomers must commit to this posture of aggression, if only to force themselves to declare who they are, what they’re made of, what they stand for in theater and why finally they are distinct – for if they’re not, how can they expect to arouse the interest of playgoers? Or of critics?

A company’s image is fermented by its background and, in Chicago, distilled by necessity; and, also by this necessity, all this happens rapidly. What we see on its stage comes to be called, if it’s made an impression, its “style.” But just as likely, and often more accurately, it’s the company’s approach to theater, its collective response to what else is established here, and its declaration as a new alternative, that are what we’re really seeing demonstrated.

This is suggested by glimpses at the early careers of three companies – Organic, St. Nicholas, and Steppenwolf.

When Stuart Gordon and other University of Wisconsin alumni brought the Organic Theater Company here from Madison in 1969, he saw what he later described as “plays where people were just walking around in apartment settings, smoking cigarettes and carrying on, I dunno, stupid conversations.” His was a negative view of one strain of representational theater that to him seemed prevalent here, the sort of show that gave you no more than sort of real-looking sets and costumes, acted sort of realistically under pedestrian direction from scripts that in the end had nothing whatever to say that distinguished them from television. These shows, above all, were boring; they didn’t grab Gordon. The theater’s full resources to create illusion – lights, sound, make-up, costumes, the set itself, the actors themselves – were woefully underused. Each actor played only one part, in itself an aspect of the prevalent producers’ lack of imagination, plus their underestimation of the audience’s willingness to “buy” whatever you put in front of them so long as you were clear about what you intended them to make of it.

The success of any evening depended upon whether within the first five minutes the actors and audience had tacitly agreed to the show’s rules – in the spirit of playing a game. If you saw any of the episodes of the Organic’s sci-fi trilogy WARP! in 1972, you sensed this immediately. Actors changed personae rapidly, often back and forth, from drab earthlings to exotic extraterrestrials. The “acting style” was akin to Second City’s: actors were not trying to create various characters, they were simply assuming them – throwing on and off such things as hats and eyeglasses, at least for the earthlings, and keeping vocal indications of “character” to a minimum. If an actor could do a funny caricature, certainly he could run with it; but telling the WARP! story in stage pictures, even as costumes for the dimensions beyond the Third became wilder and wilder, had little to do with convincing spectators that the actor playing Character A was not also the one playing Character B. Unless, of course, the illusion is desired.

At bottom, Gordon felt that the prevalent theater was wasting its time and that of audiences trying to replicate, or represent, the real world onstage. If theater stood for anything, it was make-believe. Yet he was never so dogmatic about this that he opposed at least one ideal of naturalism – that the actor believe that whatever is happening to his character is simultaneously happening to him. Indeed, Gordon was trying to practice naturalism as he understood it from reading Stanislavsky, prior to and palpably by 1982, with his theater’s last big hit, E/R (Emergency Room) .

By the late seventies, nevertheless, the stock of naturalistic theater had so enormously risen with the vogue of Mamet’s plays that Gordon and the Organic – despite having in 1974 premiered Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago – had come to be perceived in many quarters as its die-hard dissenters. Also lacking taste and awareness of, or proficiency in, different styles. And lacking adult-ness: the same critics who in the still-sweet afterglow of the Age of Aquarius had cited Gordon’s “child-like” vision in contexts of unmistakable praise had started to pan his productions as “childish” – also “immature,” “sophomoric,” “puerile.” By the early eighties, some Organic trustees were enjoining him to revise the company’s image along Steppenwolf lines. Nevermind Organic’s long-standing commitment to creating shows from scratch, or close to scratch – or that Bloody Bess and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had toured Europe, or that Candide, WARP! and Bleacher Bums went to New York, or that E/R became a TV series. He left town for Hollywood in 1985 to make films.

Soon after Mamet and his Goddard College student-¬cohorts descended on the city from Plainfield, Vermont, to found St. Nicholas, they made no secret of their aim to usurp Organic’s eminence as Chicago’s white-haired Off-Loop company. Son of a Chicago labor lawyer, and himself a student of Sanford Meisner in New York, Mamet was to spearhead two kinds of thrust.

Operationally, St. Nicholas set a new standard for Off-Loop theaters. Once in the Halsted space today occupied by Steppenwolf, it announced scheduled seasons – certainly not a new idea, but still an agenda most small companies had always been skittish about committing to. The theater culled an unprecedented number of subscribers, grants and money givers through the diligent, painstaking phone and mailing efforts of a largely unsung heroine named Patricia Cox. It offered theater classes as revenue-raisers. It hired experts to speak to its staff on subjects like audience-building, command-structure and cashflow. (It is ironic to recall this dazzling flurry and then remember that it was a bad business decision – the for-profit production of The Enchanted Cottage in late 1979, that eventuated the demise of St. Nicholas a couple of seasons down the road.)

Artistically, Mamet as a playwright and a man-of-the-¬theater brought to town a recommitted realism laced with dogma. Much of it bore the stamp of Meisner’s regimen; indeed, James O’Reilly recalls once having applied to teach acting at St. Nicholas and being told he couldn’t because he was not a Meisner practitioner.

In the Mamet lexicon “theatrical” – which denoted the Gordon forte – was a bad word meaning about the same as “phony.” And those who saw the Mosher-directed Goodman Stage 2 premiere of Mamet’s American Buffalo were probably struck, as I was, by the actors’ studied flatness and anti¬-musicality of delivery: a signature of both dramatist and director that with repetition in later shows threatened to suggest a style, thus a theatrical ism, all its own. Still, it was meant to be honest; and this intention was not, contrary to impressions still widely held of Mamet, in the name of a style – “American naturalism” – but in the name of approach. The goal of all art being to reveal truth, the goal of theater was to reveal its most available and important truth, that obtaining in the actor’s own “soul.” The soul was mined by the actor as he went about discovering among his character’s wants his primary one, and his character’s action was his struggle against obstacles to get at it.

“Acting is Action” was among several placarded slogans found on the walls and bulletin boards backstage at the Goodman during the Gregory Mosher years. For the persons in Mamet’s recurrent acting company in time vaulted the confines of St. Nicholas’ identity to become those Mosher hired for Goodman productions of both Mamet and non¬-Mamet plays. They included many who would later act in Mamet films, like Colin Stinton and, though still off-and-on Organic actors, Jack Wallace and Joe Mantegna.

In the summer of 1977 I was surprised to hear a much-liked Organic actor being scorned and ridiculed by a few members of the then just emerging Steppenwolf. I was in Highland Park directing rehearsals for Steppenwolf’s first show to open in Chicago, Wallace Shawn’s Our Late Night, and during our breaks they often amused themselves by picking this actor apart. It seemed crucial, essential that they pick out a few visible quarries, like this local guy or like, of all people, Elizabeth Ashley (then starring in Vanities at one of the Drury Lanes), and chew and worry at them – hound like – without let-up. For they had to forge within themselves the will to justify what their negativity was presupposing, that they were and would prove themselves to be better. I imagined they saw themselves as a sort of lever turning on a fulcrum, one end moving negatively so that the other might go positively. And we know now that this self-hypnosis, or whatever the principle underlying their auto-psychology was, paid off.

Putting aside the press bouquets to come, what was most impressively positive about these actors early on was their Can Do attitude in the face of all sorts of financial, logistical and technical obstacles. It was a sharply refreshing attitude for a then non-Equity company, for most non-Equity companies’ idea of getting things done was simply to follow the lines of least resistance.

And it infused their acting. They were into no-frills stuff: no shtick, no winks to the audience, no laughing at your own jokes, no heed to the dead, weighted and received authority of stage conventional wisdom. An exchange of slaps was to be the real, unstagey thing, as I in uneasy awe discovered watching Terry Kinney and Moira Harris belt one another in the Our Late Night rehearsals. I thought that to critics it might look like the director’s touch and waffled over whether I wanted the credit, which was entirely theirs.

I don’t think they cared much for rules at all, which is why I doubt whether their theatrical beliefs -whatever most of them are alleged to have learned at the feet of Professor Ralph Lane at Illinois State University – were ever, like the Mamet camp’s, schematic or stated in tones of ideology. Their procedure was an article of faith in raw, moment-by- moment instinct rather than in plotting action-lines. It has not served them well when they have tackled continental European fare – e.g., Exit the King, Three Sisters, Ring Round the Moon – but in almost all other cases it has. And they above anyone else so far have made “Chicago acting” an object of national focus and international interest.

These next words are seventy years old and from the typewriter of H.L. Mencken on the subject of writers, but think actors as you read them:

Draw a circle of two hundred miles radius around Chicago, and you will enclose four-fifths of the real literature of America – particularly four-fifths of the literature of tomorrow … My notion is that it would pay to ship forty or fifty head of young New England authors to Chicago, and let them breathe the ozone of the stockyards; it might electrify them as it electrifies the young peasants of Indiana, Iowa and Illinois, and there would be something in them that was … worth electrifying.

The stockyards are gone and we might say it’s the audiences, of course, whom actors wish to be electrified. But they wish it so hard they can’t do without it, and they need it so badly they must bolster themselves by expecting it. So the arrogance of the actors does not necessarily emerge from real confidence, and I think the most promising of them do come here, singly or in clumps of comrades, to see if anything’s in them that is worth electrifying. If their actions as companies suggest dog-eat-dog, as I with some angst have hypothesized, reassuring words, this time Tennyson’s, arise: “And God fulfills himself in many ways. Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gary Houston has been performing in, directing and writing about Chicago theater nearly since his arrival in the city in the summer (like many others) of 1968. In the 1970s a Chicago Sun-Times features writer and editor, he originated the role of Roger in Kingston Mines Theatre Company’s 1971 world premiere of Grease, and as a director he staged Chicago, Midwest and occasional U.S. and world premieres of plays by Sam Shepard, Peter Handke, David Hare, Heathcote Williams, Fernando Arrabal, Ted Whitehead, Agatha Christie, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph Heller, Terrence McNally, Alan Gross and Samuel Beckett. He founded and for several years led the Pary Production Company before joining the Organic Theater’s company of players. More recently [2008-09] he has acted in TUTA Chicago’s Uncle Vanya and Northlight’s Mauritius.

It seems ridiculous on the face of it to suggest that there is any such thing as a Chicago style of theater. How could a collection of 120 producing organizations with a performance history ranging from kitchen sink naturalism to extraterrestrial fantasy, from Second City skits to Kabuki Macbeth, be said to have a recognizable style? Yet it seems equally misguided to suggest the opposite, that theater in Chicago is essentially indistinguishable from theater in any major American theatrical center. When New York Times critic Frank Rich writes that a performance of Orphans by our Steppenwolf company “… introduced New Yorkers to a sizzling, idiosyncratic performance style as brawny, all-American and blunt as the windy city that spawned it,” we may laugh at Rich’s depiction – Chicagoans have a history of laughing at anything a New Yorker says about us – but we can’t pretend this is the first time our city or our theater has been so described.¹

The problem is, words like sizzling, brawny, all-American, and blunt only begin to describe a cohesive performance style. Even if the intent is to describe the Steppenwolf style – and not the Chicago style at large – we can quickly suggest several examples of Steppenwolf productions that have been cool, delicate, pointed, and anything but all-American. Yet, anyone who has followed Steppenwolf – to continue with that convenient example – knows that there is something special about the group; and anyone who has followed Chicago theater knows that when an out-of-town visitor asks “What’s it like?” you don’t answer, “Just like theater where you come from.”

The truth hides somewhere between the extremes. Theater in Chicago is not radically different from that in many other cities, but one can discern certain elusive characteristics, ranging from the way actors touch and speak to the ways in which theater institutions work with each other and their constituencies. The guiding ambition behind the essays in this catalog and the exhibit it accompanies is to examine those areas in which it is most often alleged that we can find a Chicago style. The scope of this examination has been left intentionally broad. It ranges from the work of the individual artist to the greater structures within which the artist performs, including the organizational, the economic, and the physical. The period of 1960 to 1990 includes both the strength of The Chicago Public Library’s theater collection and a common frame of reference for current theatrical work. There is no intention of denying the importance of the previous 120 years of theater in Chicago.

Looking at our city’s theater in this way should allow us to give a more precise description of what the Chicago style might be. What it will not allow us to do, however, is make definitive claims about the uniqueness of that style. Without also examining in equal depth the theater of other cities, we can only say to that curious visitor, “This is what our theater is; what’s yours?”

Determining more precisely what our theater is should help us with the more important question of what we want it to be. One of the main reasons the answer to this has been so slow in coming is that there is a fundamental disagreement over whether the question should be framed locally, nationally, or in some combination of the two perspectives. Even to speak of such a thing as a Chicago style is subversive of the traditional goal of establishing a national theater presence patterned after the heavily subsidized theaters in Europe. The strongest expression of this goal can be seen in the periodic attempts to establish a national theater institution, usually envisioned as a repertory company in a lavishly equipped theater building, a direct descendant of the Comedie Francaise.

William Dunlop called for a national theater in 1832. Since then, there have been numerous such proposals, including, in the 1930s, the Federal Theater Project of the Works Progress Administration and the American National Theatre and Academy (which Peter Sellars recently revived, briefly, in Washington, D.C.). In the 1970s, a number of new proposals for theaters, most of them based on European models, were considered by the American Theatre Association’s Commission on Theatre Development. In a policy statement written in November, 1979, and revised in February, 1982, the Commission advised that a national theater institution was unnecessary, because the network of existing theaters across the country amounted to a national theater of a sort more in keeping with American traditions of pluralism. “Our philosophic, economic, and social heritages have been bred from a diversity of cultural and ethnic sources,” the report stated, going on to quote Milwaukee Repertory Theater Managing Director Sara O’Connor at some length:

At issue here is how we see ourselves as a nation. The heart of the great American experiment has been the belief that a nation could be brought into existence whose sense of community would hold firm despite its immense geography, regional differences, and a culture endlessly assaulted, changed, and renewed by wave after wave of immigrants from divergent and conflicting cultures.

The report concluded, “Our National Theatre has been realized.”²

But is this national theater truly national? And must our “sense of community” be nationally defined? From its inception, the United States has tried to balance the need for national unity in some areas while protecting – and even encouraging – state and local differences in other areas. If defense is the area where national unity is paramount, culture clearly is the area that demands diversity. Yet, our theater makers are frequently reluctant, if not embarrassed, to pursue that diversity, opting instead for theater that more often than not is in a city or region but not of it.

The fact that this is still an open question for our nation’s theater is reflected by its inability to agree on what to call itself. Although they often seem shallow, purely cosmetic exercises, debates over names often are the tip of an ideological iceberg. Names matter, especially to the named. They matter most to those who are determined to maintain a new, precarious status. Mass political and social movements often demand name changes. The civil rights movement turned negroes into Afro-Americans, then blacks, then African Americans. Women (Miss and Mrs. to Ms.) and Native Americans have undergone similar transformations. Such name changes represent fundamental alterations in the way a group sees itself, and how it hopes to be seen by the greater society. A name is both armor and banner: it protects members of a group from the degradations of the past, and it rallies enthusiasm for a vision of the future. Any group that does not know what to call itself is not only unsure of what it is, but most likely has serious disagreements within its ranks over what the group should strive to become.

This is the situation that faces the American theater today, the situation that has faced it ever since the New York-based commercial system lost its grip ¬some say stranglehold – on theatrical production. The decentralization process begun by Nina Vance, Zelda Fichandler, Tyrone Guthrie, Margo Jones, and others was from the start very much a movement, and worked hard to gain a sense of identity and even permanency. Movement may seem now rather too incendiary a word to describe what has become such an established (if under-funded) institution, but the American theater still struggles over what to call itself, sometimes as heatedly as a group of firebrands at their first meeting.

The two main candidates over the years have been “resident” and “regional.” Both terms are intended to signal a change from the New York-centric system of the past to the current, decentralized one. Resident suggests a situation in which the theater artists no longer are shipped in from New York, but make their homes in the communities they serve. Resident originally was used to reflect the dream of resident companies of actors performing plays in repertory situations; that dream has proved largely insupportable (with notable exceptions).

That leaves us with regional theater. On the surface, this seems harmless enough, suggesting only a theater that is spread out over several regions of the country. Whereas the American theater of 1950 was produced within a few blocks of a busy Manhattan thoroughfare and then sent around the various regions of the country, today it is produced in those regions. But to many, regional also suggests provincial. In the late I 960s, Village Voice critic Julius Novick toured the country gathering information for a book titled Beyond Broadway. He found little support among theater artists and administrators for the common rubric, regional theater. “To many people it suggests folk plays being performed somewhere in Appalachia by genuine hillbillies,” he wrote, adding that he also found little evidence of variations in style from region to region. “These theaters draw very little except their audiences from their regions.”³

In recent years, however, more and more noise has been made in favor of a regional theater that is truly regional. Early on in the movement, founding directors across the country made clear that the theater they made was fully professional, just as good as that done in New York. As New York’s status as a role model declines toward the vanishing point, there emerges the possibility of theater that not only happens to exist in the various regions (however one may define a region), but that is a product of those regions. We can now envision a theater whose aesthetic, economic, ethnic, linguistic, and physical attributes are tied up in, defined by, and in its part defining of its region. There is less fear now that any deviation from a national norm will be perceived as second-rate, perhaps because what is first-rate is no longer so clearly (if arbitrarily) defined. There has been a remission in the plague of rubophobia, to use Calvin Trillin’s term for the fear of being considered a rube. Since Foxfire and Quilters, regionally specific folktales are no longer taboo; in any case, folktales certainly aren’t the only avenue for regionalism in the theater.

Washington Post drama critic David Richards once speculated about what would happen if a prospective theater-goer were magically transported from Anytown, U.S.A., into the seats of a D.C. theater. “Would it dawn on him midway through the spectacle that he was in the Nation’s Capital? Or would he wonder whether cable cars or palm trees, freeways or Lake Michigan awaited him outside?”⁴

Richards regretfully concluded that it was an exceedingly rare performance in Washington that gave any indication that a locally defined aesthetic was in operation. He wondered why a political town like Washington didn’t produce more satire (Mark Russell aside), and declared his yearning for the kind of dynamic he perceived to be at work in Chicago, where the Second City regularly made pointed reference to local politics and mores.

If there is such a thing as a regionally defined aesthetic in the American theater – if such a thing is even possible in an era of jet travel and TV, where every enterprise strives to be “world class” – then Chicago is broadly perceived to be among the leaders. Sometimes that aesthetic – the Chicago style, if you will – seems an empowering, energizing thing, as when David Mamet speaks of the lessons he learned as a busboy at Second City or carrying a spear for Bob Sickinger at Hull House in the 1960s. Other times, it-seems rather silly: William Petersen once bragged to an interviewer that when a Chicago actor spits on himself, he doesn’t wipe it off.

Clearly, there are levels of use and misuse in the notion of regionalism. In April of 1989, the South Coast Repertory’s SubSCRiber newsletter heralded a new series with the headline: “Calfest Kicks Off With Three Premieres by California Playwrights.” The reason stated for limiting the program to California writers was the standard one of wanting to invest in ” … the immediate and future needs of its community.” As soon as that base is covered, however, the article takes pains to point out that SCR is not too local:

“Interest from across the country in participating in the creation or viewing of these plays has also been gratifying.” The article suggested that only the playwrights would have to be Californian. And yet, topping the stack of playwright headshots accompanying the article was that of Beth Henley, who apparently became a Californian in connection with the filming of her plays. This is the same Beth Henley whose Southern roots were touted when the Actors Theater of Louisville first produced her plays in the 1970s.

Whether or not Beth Henley now lives in California is beside the point. The newsletter reports that Henley ” … brings SCR and CalFest audiences her first play set outside of Mississippi. The setting is the unyielding terrain of the Wyoming Territory.” Abundance, as Henley’s play is called, may be an admirable piece of writing. But unless she found something in the Wyoming Territory of special significance for modern residents of Costa Mesa, it is hard to see how the play fulfills the promise of community responsiveness.⁵

The standard response to such criticism is that art is most responsive when it deals in universal values; the best theater transcends petty regional concerns, or so the argument goes. That may be true, but the best art also remains rooted not merely in specifics, but in the specifics of place. Athol Fugard’s plays overflow with universal truths that have tremendous impact on audiences around the world; and yet, his plays are invariably suffused with the images and language of South Africa. To imagine Chekhov without his Russia, Ibsen without Norway, Shakespeare without England, is to imagine them diminished beyond recognition.

The question is not whether the theater should be rooted in a culture, but how that culture ought to be limited. Postmodern artists take the world for their palette, mixing images and styles from wildly divergent times and places. The effect works so long as the individual bits remain identifiable. As Berkeley sociologist and media analyst Todd Gitlin wrote recently, “Postmodernist literature cultivates place names in the same way consumers flock to the latest cuisine – in the spirit of the collector; because the uniqueness of real places is actually waning.”⁶

Not long ago the Tribune Magazine ran on its cover a photo of a city skyline under the headline, “Where in the World is this City?” It was Tokyo, but as architecture critic Paul Gapp pointed out, it looked like any of a dozen cities. Regional idiosyncrasies are not only pleasing to the senses, they have an importance not easily defined. William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley in November, 1944:

I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and I don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. Though the one I know is probably as good as another, life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time. ⁷

Faulkner said his choice of the South wasn’t important, but made clear that good writing must be grounded in a knowledge of place, a knowledge so thorough that it is difficult to learn more than one in a lifetime. When artists attempt to create from an international outlook, they risk giving up the thing that gives their work depth and power.

To look for a Chicago style of theater need not be an exercise in self-congratulatory boosterism. It is not even essential that we be pleased with what we find. But we would do well to take a steady, hard look at what we have that is ours, before it loses its power to move us. We may find that the Chicago style is a thing that crops up only intermittently. Nevertheless, we must identify it if we are to nourish it, improve it, and value it. The differences will never be as great among American theatrical styles as, say, between French farce and Peking opera. And it may be foolhardy to suggest we can control our theater’s style through force of will. We can, however, inform our appreciation of regional differences with something approaching the sensitivity of a wine lover who would never confuse a Burgundy with a Bordeaux. By all accounts, Chicago theater is a particularly hearty varietal, able to stand up to the harshest scrutiny.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Scott Fosdick worked as a drama critic and/or entertainment editor for 10 years in Chicago, New Jersey, and Baltimore before earning his doctorate at Northwestern University. His articles have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including Stagebill, American Theatre, Family Life, Parenting, The San Jose Mercury News and The Sunday New York Times, as well as a variety of refereed scholarly publications.

1. Frank Rich, “Theater: Steppenwolfs ‘Orphans’,” New York Times, May 8, 1985, 1: p. 22.
2. American Theatre Association Commission on Theatre Development. “Policy Statement: National Theatre,” November 1979. Revised: February 1982.
3. Julius Novick, Beyond Broadway: the quest for permanent theaters (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 4.
4. David Richards, “What’s So Capital About Our Theater?,” Washington Post, December 16, 1984: p. KI.
5. Cristofer Gross. SubSCRiber: News for Subscribers to South Coast Repertory. April 1989: p. I.
6. Todd Gitlin, “Postmodernism: Roots and Politics,” Dissent, Winter 1989: pp. 100-108.
7. Joseph Blotner, ed. Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 185.

I missed the Sickinger cycle. Bob Sickinger came to Chicago in the early ’60s to create a community-based theater for Hull House. Sickinger believed in theater that is rooted in the heart of the city, that draws support from the members of its neighborhoods. He wanted to “revive the spirit of the community to want its own theater.” Oh, Bob, if you could see it now!

Sickinger also worked to create an environment in which nascent talent could flourish and to set a professional standard for the development of that talent. Among the Chicago stars whose artistic roots are embedded in Sickinger’s Hull House are actor Mike Nussbaum and playwrights Alan Bates and David Mamet.

While all this was brewing in the city, I was in the suburbs teaching school and housewifing. We would come to the big Loop houses and see our friends in the road show companies of Fiddler on the Roof and Man of La Mancha. In fact, the first play I ever saw in Chicago was in one of those big houses – it was 1960 – the beginning of this three-decade era we are about to trace … and my freshman year in college. The play was the pre-Broadway tryout of Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana with Bette Davis(!) and Margaret Leighton. The second production I saw was a hilarious revue at Second City, Bernie Sahlins’ young improv company in Old Town. It was my first Off-Loop experience.

When I returned to Chicago in 1973, after an absence of two years, I moved into the city because I knew that professional theater was what I wanted to be part of – I wanted to act. And I wanted to do it here, not in New York. I had earned my Equity card in summer stock. So I auditioned around – for Bill Pullinsi at Candlelight, for George Keathley’s Ivanhoe, for Carl Stohn at Pheasant Run – and that’s all there was for an Equity actor. For non-Equity actors, there was the Old Town Players, a community theater with a Sickinger-style orientation. There was some experimental stuff going on, also non-Equity. The future looked bleak. I became a mortgage collector.

However, in an effort to augment my classical theater training, I signed up for a class in theater games at this really funky place on Lincoln Avenue – the Body Politic. It was hippie heaven … really! Tim Kazurinsky was one of my classmates. My teacher, Jim Shiflett – tall, bearded, sandaled – had been taught by Viola Spolin herself. He made a convert out of me. I watched Shiflett’s company, The Dream Theater, with their unique mix of improvisation, Grotowski-based movement, and mime, work. Some of it was awful, some of it was brilliant, all of it was compelling. And in that intimate space downstairs at the BP, the audience became an integral part of the experience. The dynamic between actor and audience was alive and electric.

Shiflett was a visionary. He took up where Sickinger left off. He believed that the arts – particularly theater – could revitalize a community, that it could serve to give a resonance and consequence to the quality of our lives. As the founder of the Community Arts Foundation (CAF) in 1966, he put that vision into action, and caught up others in his missionary fervor. He encouraged the Community Renewal Society, the urban arm of the United Church of Christ, to provide the initial funding of the CAF’s theater and other arts programs which were then housed at the Wellington Avenue Church and in 1969 convinced the CAF board to purchase the 2257-61 building on Lincoln Avenue. (Believe it or not, that entire 2200 block was slated for demolition as part of “urban renewal.”) Housing a bowling alley on the top floor and a slicing machine company on the ground floor, the building was converted into three performance spaces along with offices and workshops. With Shiflett as executive director, Bill Russo (Rock Cantata) and Paul Sills (Story Theater) became the first program directors in that building. Having named his performance space the Body Politic, Sills took off for New York. But the name stuck. And the CAF building and its programs became known as the Body Politic Theatre.

In 1973, in order to apprentice myself to the Dream Theater, I became the box office manager at the Body Politic. It was an exhilarating place – besides the Dream Theater’s Pure Desire which was in rehearsal, June Pyskacek’s The Influence Show with Tony Zito at the piano was playing nightly, Ray Nelson & his puppets inhabited one of the upstairs rooms, the Chicago Mural Group filled an office and workshop space with artists dedicated to community-developed art in public places, the Yellow Press poets had weekly readings in the “rug room” on Monday nights (sometimes there were even riots … over poems!), the Chicago Contemporary Dance Theater were negotiating for a dance studio and office, Byron Schaffer’s Dinglefest Company was in residence and performing “verbatim,” the Magic Circle had recently moved out over to the Wellington Avenue Church, Stuart Gordon’s Organic after a three-year residency, had moved up north to the Beacon Street Hull House. No one had any money, shows were mounted on shoestrings, the energy was tangible.

In retrospect, that next year, 1974, was a landmark year. Up to that point, the Body Politic and Kingston Mines had led a quasi legal existence. The city’s stringent fire code for theaters (after the horrific Iroquois Theater Fire in 1903) made it impossible for our small theaters to be in compliance. The CAF/Body Politic’s board chairman, Tom Nolan, then a lobbyist for Catholic Charities, focused the theater’s energies toward City Hall. But it was the eloquent editorials of Glenna Syse in the Sun-Times which tipped the scales in favor of the change. In late 1973, the city code was amended to allow for the existence of the “theatrical community center.”

Having refinanced its building, the BP set about making the necessary changes to bring it into compliance with the new code, including the addition of new heating and ventilation systems and sprinklers (measured and ready to be installed). But on Friday, the 13th, in September of ‘74, the BP burned – an electrical fire apparently. The Independent Eye (Conrad and Linda Bishop), formerly of Milwaukee’s Theater X, managed to inaugurate their new company in the former rug room, the only theater space to escape damage. Joe Ehrenberg’s Chicago City Theatre had to find an alternate space. It took nearly nine months to rebuild – the Chicago Contemporary Dancers and the Dinglefesters sanding and scraping the charred tin ceiling in the upstairs theater space, the Dream Theater members pouring concrete downstairs.

One morning, shortly after the fire, the entire company of Horses, Inc. showed up at the theater armed with brooms and dustpans. And without ever saying a word, as if in a performance art piece, they set about sweeping up the cinders and debris in the upstairs theater. This bizarre company, then housed in the building where Steppenwolf is now located [a 211-seat facility at 2851 N. Halsted, where Steppenwolf resided from 1982-1991 - Dan], created alternative alternative theater – their Christmas card one year featured one of their actresses, a woman of ample proportions, clad only in flour.

Well, anyway, when the BP came back into full production in the fall of 1975, all of a sudden there was competition. Victory Gardens had opened up in the old movie house on Clark Street; Wisdom Bridge, begun by a brash young man from Shreveport, Louisiana, performed in a former Chinese night club on Howard Street; the Evanston Theatre Company (now Northlight), founded by Greg Kandel, had started with Mike Nussbaum as its first artistic director. I forget when St. Nicholas (David Mamet’s company) made its presence felt, but in 1976, it took over a former bakery and printing shop on Halsted.

In 1977, Byron Schaffer moved on over to an old chocolate factory on Belmont and created the Theatre Building. The new city code had opened up new vistas. A community of theaters was birthing.

One peculiar thing that affected the growth of this nascent community was the gift and curse of CET A. Shiflett and others had done an extraordinary job in getting the city to include the non-profit theaters in this indirect funding. CET A, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, was a federally funded program administered by the Mayor’s Office of Manpower to regrant monies to city agencies to employ the unemployable. Well, who could be more unemployable than bunches of actors and largely volunteer theater staff members? The CET A money turned us overnight into responsible employers. We paid real salaries rather than cash shares out of the box office receipts. We offered real benefits like health insurance and IRA contributions. We even paid real employment taxes to the government. We became legitimate. A shock! But the CET A funds also enabled groups of artists to work as artists – to have the luxury of long rehearsal periods – to experiment – to do work that we wanted to do rather than what we had to do. Unbelievable. The curse of the system was, of course, when the CET A funds disappeared a couple of years later, we didn’t have enough money to replace them. Our artists had to go back to their non-artist jobs and weren’t as willing to do developmental work just for love. Still, we were able to sustain a small staff and had begun to understand that there was a business to this theater business.

Another influential player during this time was Actors’ Equity Association. The first Off-Loop Equity production was at the Body Politic in 1973 – The Night They Shot Harry Lindsay with a 155mm Howitzer and Blamed It on Zebras. It was produced by Del Close of Second City, written by Dick Cusack, and starred Mina Kolb, Byrne Piven, Mike Nussbaum, and David Mamet. The contract was then called the CO.L.T. (for Chicago Off-Loop Theater) and was created on a show by show basis for whatever producer wanted to hire an Equity actor or two. Initially, I was able to work with the Dream Theater on a concession from Equity, and then finally, the Dream Theater was put on a “seeding” contract, agreeing to hire one actor per show one year, then two the next, etc. However, Equity was able to wheel and deal with each of us separately, and depending on our own skills at negotiating, some got better deals than others. Our first effort at collective bargaining was under the auspices of OLPAC, the Off Loop Producers Association of Chicago. In 1976, Roche Schulfer, then the manager of the Goodman Stage 2 company, joined up with me, Marcie McVay (Victory Gardens), Jeffrey Ortmann (Wisdom Bridge), and Peter Schneider of St. Nick and a couple of others, and we did our Don Quixote bit with the union. To no avail. However, in 1983, reorganized as the Producers Association of Chicago-area Theaters (PACT), we found a favorable adversary in the person of Suzanne Brown, a tough but enlightened labor leader who understood the need of the theaters to survive if they were indeed to hire actors. The resulting CAT (Chicago Area Theaters) contract is an extraordinary document – reflecting the needs and desires of this professional community – including the non-profit theaters as well as the commercial producers. Chicago is the only city that has its own contract. It exemplifies what collective concern and focused energy by our theaters can and does produce.

We learned to take this cooperative spirit and bottle it. First there was CAPA, the Chicago Alliance for the Performing Arts, with its ticket voucher program to build awareness for theater, dance, and music companies. The theaters eventually formed their own organization, the League of Chicago Theatres, initially to address common marketing and advocacy concerns. (The League of Chicago Theatres, founded in 1979 by 20 companies, now has a roster of 120.) One of the first actions of the League illustrates for me the extraordinary sense of mutuality in this community. In the spring of 1979, the BP announced that it would “go under” if it didn’t raise $26,000 in four weeks. Unbeknownst to us, League members stuffed their theater programs with flyers asking patrons to send $1.50 to the BP. Lots of people did just that. I would burst into tears with each mail delivery.

Succeeding to the position of Managing Director that summer, I became immersed in the business of survival. To that end, by 1981, the BP entered into a unique collaboration with Victory Gardens – a joint ownership of our building. Given the confidence of Marcie McVay and Dennis Zacek in the VG mission and identity, the steadfast dedication of their board led by Fred Bates, and our combined abilities to see how our companies might complement each other, this mutually beneficial partnership was forged. It further illustrates the kinds of creative collaborations that make our Chicago theater community so unique.

While I write out of my own 15-year experience at the BP and my most recent year at Wisdom Bridge – a theater that has reached out to its Rogers Park community to create theater for and with individuals who otherwise would have had no access to our art – I am acutely aware that this story mirrors efforts all over our city. Abena Joan Brown’s ETA Creative Arts Foundation has done on the south side what Sickinger set out to do at Hull House on the north side. And, of course, there is Court Theatre in Hyde Park, Pegasus in Uptown, then Lifeline and Raven in Rogers Park, The Chicago Theatre Company on the south side, Latino Chicago in Wicker Park, Blue Rider carving out new territory on south Halsted … I could go on and on. Sickinger’s vision of a theater community growing its artists, artistry, and audience from within has been so fully realized that we are now also a community able to welcome and incorporate theater from without, even from around the world.

I wish I were a weaver. Then I could create a fabric as richly textured and brilliantly colored as this theatrical community. Chicago theater, however, is not a quilt of individual blocks – it is an interwoven tapestry – each thread representing the personalities who have shared their artistry with their neighbors. Some like Sheldon Patinkin from early days at Second City to Columbia College and the National Jewish Theater, James O’Reilly from the outside summer Shakespeare at Court Theatre to the Body Politic, Michael Cullen from Travel Light to Cullen, Henaghan and Platt, Bob Falls and Michael Maggio from Wisdom Bridge and Northlight to the Goodman, are threads which – like a good theater game – converge and redivide. Some of our threads may be getting a little frayed, but we know we’re an integral part of the picture.

Thank you to Bob Sickinger for setting up the loom, to Jim Shiflett for putting the shuttle in motion … and for letting me add my own thread to this fabulous fabric.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sharon Phillips has been an integral part of the growth of Chicago’s off-Loop theatre since 1973 when she began as the box office manager of the Body Politic Theatre while training with the Dream Theater. Subsequently serving the Body Politic as Managing Director from 1979 to 1988, she participated in the early negotiations with Equity for an off-Loop contract and was instrumental in the formation of the League of Chicago Theatres. She later served as President of the League and of the Chicago Theatre Foundation. Returning to her love of teaching, Sharon became the Outreach Director for Wisdom Bridge Theatre while it was on Howard Street and then returned to the old Body Politic building as the Educational Outreach Director for Victory Gardens Theater. Currently a “church lady,” Sharon is the Director of Youth and Family Education at St. Pauls United Church of Christ where she has annually directed a major Bible Story Theatre production for the past thirty-one years. A member of Actors’ Equity Association since 1966, Sharon still occasionally finds herself back on stage — most recently with the production of Murder in the Cathedral directed by Bernie Sahlins.