A Theatrical Tapestry (Reprint)
Posted on | September 18, 2009 | 1 Comment
Note: This essay was originally published in 1990 by the Chicago Public Library in a collection called Resetting the Stage: Theater Beyond the Loop 1960-1990. The publication was part of a larger exhibition of the Chicago Theater Collection (part of the Special Collections of the CPL) curated by Scott Fosdick. Originally intended to be published as part of my project Theatre That Works by arrangement with the authors and the CPL, I’m bringing them to a new home here. “A Theatrical Tapestry” by Sharon Phillips is the first of five.
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.
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May 14th, 2010 @ 2:00 pm
[...] possible for Equity actors to actually work in town. She is also the nicest woman in the world. (I reprinted an essay Sharon wrote about 20 years ago on the early days of the storefront movement a while [...]