The Windy City Playhouse, a once-lively performing arts venue located at 3014 W. Irving Park Road at the western end of Chicago’s North Center neighborhood, has closed and been put up for sale.
The building, which includes a bar, dressing rooms and two small upstairs apartments, opened in 2015. It was the brainchild of artistic director Amy Rubenstein, who told the Tribune Tuesday that she felt that “the Chicago theater community seems to want something we are not able to provide and that other leaders can do better.”
Windy City, which specialized in immersive, populist, accessible productions, often with handcrafted cocktails and snacks served to the audience, had considerable artistic success over the past eight years with such shows as “The Boys in the Band,” “Noises Off,” “Stick Fly,” and especially the long-running “Southern Gothic,” which employed a company of actors for several months.
At its height, the company also was producing in the South Loop, where it had a hit with “Every Brilliant Thing.”
Most recently, the Equity company produced a dinner show, “Recipe for Disaster,” with the chef Rick Bayless in the basement of the Petterino’s restaurant in downtown Chicago.
Rubenstein, who said she still hoped to partner with Bayless and others on future creative projects, also cited “a disconnect between audiences who now want to pay less and artists who now want to make more.”
“That compromised our economic sustainability,” she said, leading to the sale of a theater that may well now fall to other uses.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.