Guess Who Was an International Theater Authority?

In June 2008, the second year of this blog, I wrote a post about Chicago theater based on a performance I had attended the night before, and on an article that day in the Chicago Tribune.

As it happened, the artistic director of the theater company that put on that performance was searching for such things, discovered my post, and quoted, favorably, part of what I wrote in his blog. The weird part is, he discovered it on the web site of The Guardian, a British newspaper. It was a link in the Theater Blog of Chris Wilkinson that used me as a source for the claim that Chicago has eclipsed New York as America's primary city for legitimate theater.

For the record, I am in no way an authority on international theater, Chicago theater, or any other theater. I enjoy live theater and live in a great place for it, so occasionally I am moved to write something.

About all I can say to support my claim about Chicago is that it was said to me by Allan Havis, an old college buddy who said it 30+ years ago, when we were attending a Steppenwolf performance together. Even though he found that night's offering a bit flaccid, he said Chicago had a more vital and important theater community than New York. 

Allan has a bit more standing on the subject than I do, as an internationally-acclaimed playwright, theater scholar, and native New Yorker. We had a good laugh. (See comments, below.)

The Chicago Theater I Know and Love.

Chicago Tribune theater critic Chris Jones has a great piece in today's paper about the likely impact of all the Tony Awards won last Sunday by Chicago theater artists and institutions.

I have enjoyed Chicago theater for more than 20 years. Chicago theater is a phenomenon. New York is no longer America's theatre capital. At best, that role is now shared between New York and Chicago.

Chicago theater is huge. It is the recently revitalized Loop Theater District. It is The Goodman, Steppenwolf, Second City, Victory Gardens, Chicago Shakespeare, and Lookingglass. It is the Neo-Futurists, whose weekend midnight show in a former funeral home in Andersonville is thirty plays in sixty minutes, never the same show twice, and if it's a sell-out there might be pizza.

Last night I saw two one-acts in a 35-seat theater attached to an art gallery in a second floor walk-up loft space between the El and Metra tracks just north of Irving Park Road. It was part of a festival. The first play was a 1916 meditation on culture-bound notions of gender and sex roles dressed up as a murder mystery. The second was part play, part dance piece, based on a proto-feminist short story published in 1899. They were terrific.

These are not neighborhood kids putting on a show, except that neighborhood kids putting on a show is exactly what they are. This is what Chicago theater is really about, walking into a funky storefront space with forty mismatched seats salvaged from an old movie house, and lighting instruments purchased at the hardware store. Then the lights go down and you have an astonishing, incredibly intimate theater experience.

This is how Steppenwolf began. I know because I was there, not at the very beginning in the Evanston church basement, but 20 years ago in the Lakeview storefront, where you could count on madness, violence, and at least a little nudity in every production.

If every living thing grows from its roots, this is where all that is Chicago theater comes from, these lofts and storefront spaces with 50 or 60 seats, a card table ticket office, and a $15 general admission ticket price. Sometimes the plays are brand new, made while you watch, other times they are classics. I have nothing against Wicked or Jersey Boys, but the Chicago theater I know and love is in the hundreds of neighborhood spaces ranging from small to tiny, where people make fresh art every night of the week.