I had gone on this wintry afternoon to the fourth floor of the Fine Arts Building in search of a shrine. But, “Nah,” said the elevator operator. “They redid a lot of the space up here a couple years ago. Now it’s mostly offices.”
So what I sought had disappeared, become a part of lost Chicago. Still, I viewed that space as sacred ground, because it had once held the place that, in my mind, stands as a forerunner, an archetype and a symbol of theater in Chicago.
From 1912 to 1917, the auditorium, decorated in Greek revival style, was the home of the Chicago Little Theatre, which had as its credo, “Create your own theater with the talent at hand.” Under the direction of producer Maurice Browne and actress Ellen Van Volkenburg, this theater staged 44 classic and new works, 25 of which were American premieres, on a tiny stage in a room fitted out with just 91 seats and with an acting company consisting of local residents. It lasted only five years, but it was a harbinger of things to come. It was small, it was adventuresome, it was motivated by passion. It was the first of the small theaters that have made Chicago a mighty force in American theater, a force that through the years and continuing to this day still is dedicated to creating “your own kind of theater with the talent at hand.”
With its central location and large population, our city has always been an important center of playgoing. All the greats of vaudeville and the legitimate stage played here, from the very start of Chicago history. In my childhood, I can remember my parents coming home from their trips downtown with programs bearing the pictures of Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. And in the summer, the tents sprouted in the suburbs, offering plays and musicals featuring guest stars and local talent.
By the 1950s, however, about the time I was getting to be a serious theater-goer and began reporting on and reviewing the performing arts, the days of the great tours with great stars were ending. As early as 1951, when Tribune critic Claudia Cassidy noted “the inadequacy of some New York productions playing Chicago,” the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote to her, “The only cure is a decentralized theater. So that plays can be done freshly, all over again, off Broadway. In place after place, each time created brand new. Why don’t you take the stump for it in Chicago? No better place on earth!”
When Williams talked of resident theater, however, he was thinking of theater on the grand scale, along the lines of the large new complexes that were to come along in the cultural boom days of the early ’60s: Lincoln Center in New York, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Music Center of Los Angeles.
In Chicago in 1966, a $31 million, 14-year program for growth was issued by the Mayor’s Committee for Economic and Cultural Development, a blue-ribbon Establishment group convened by Mayor Richard J. Daley. But a huge new cultural center suddenly planted in the city was not to be the way of Chicago. Instead, our culture, and in particular the culture of theater, grew organically, finding its audiences in storefronts and former warehouses that had been refurbished by youthful, ambitious artists. These theaters popped up away from downtown, without lavish facilities, without big budgets, without stars and without (at first) much official support.
Second to none
One of the first blooms in this garden was The Second City, which opened quietly in December 1959, with no aim except, in the words of co-founder Bernard Sahlins, “to sell a little coffee, put on a little show and maybe make a little money.”
Some of its company members were University of Chicago alumni of the ’50s who already had engaged in relatively short-lived resident theater projects such as Playwrights’ Theatre and the Studebaker Theatre Company, which for one season had brought repertory theater to the downtown area. None of Second City’s early troupe members carried star power, and the location of the cabaret, at 1842 N. Wells St., on the site of a former Chinese laundry, was definitely out of the loop. But Second City lasted, grew and flourished because it was sharp, smart and professional and because its “talent at hand” was tremendous.
Hip as it was, Second City was primarily a cabaret of sketch comedy, with an occasional foray into drama. In Chicago, if you wanted to see something more than the leaden light comedies that had come to rest in the Loop, you were bound to go to the university theaters or to a sprinkling of community theaters — Old Town Players, The Last Stage, Chicago Stage Guild — in the city. At Goodman Theatre, the city’s oldest and largest resident theater, director John Reich, in alliance with subscription guru Danny Newman, was trying to edge toward professional status by mounting student productions, with guest artists, of classic theater; and, on a good day, those shows had some life.
The turning point
In 1963, however, this meager state of affairs changed forever, when into the vacuum came a whirlwind named Bob Sickinger. A young director from Philadelphia, he was brought to Chicago by board members of Hull House, who gave him a budget of $7,200 and asked him to reinvigorate the community theater program in their building at 3212 N. Broadway.
Sickinger set about his task with energy, ingenuity and a raffish charm. He recruited actors, sent them out to give drama readings in private homes, built up a list of supporters and, in November 1963, opened his first production in Hull House’s 110-seat theater (which, by the way, is still in use today, with alterations, as the home of About Face Theatre).
The play was Frank D. Gilroy’s off-Broadway drama about an embittered urban everyman, “Who’ll Save the Plowboy?”; and, being young and hungry and looking for something to write about, I went to see what was going on. It was a defining moment in my professional life, and, 39 years after I rhapsodically called it “the most exciting, significant and promising Chicago theatrical event in years,” I still believe Sickinger’s work there was a key eye-opener and mind-changer that led to the great Chicago theater life of the future.
The production had all the energy, commitment and passion that we have come to associate with Chicago theater at its best. The cast of community theater players was headed by Bob Kidder, an English teacher from Highland Park, who startlingly gave a portrayal of blistering power. The show was, in short, a knockout.
Something wonderful had happened. This was home-grown, homemade, hometown theater that needed no apologies. It stood on its own as theater worth seeing, and soon it had a strong and devoted audience for plays by Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, John Hersey and Athol Fugard. Mike Nussbaum, whose career in Chicago theater spans five decades, knew something was going on, he recalls, “when we [the actors] didn’t know anybody in the audience. We knew we didn’t have to rely just on friends and relatives for attention.”
Sickinger’s work ethic, Nussbaum says, “was tremendous. Since we all had day jobs then, we rehearsed at night, and Bob thought nothing of working until 2 or 3 a.m. Then, when we opened, he would be out there in the audience at almost every performance, giving a little laugh or a little grunt of encouragement that we could hear. When he wasn’t there, we really missed not hearing those sounds.”
Seeds of theater
In his six years at Hull House, before overextension, exhaustion and a yen to make movies got the best of him, Sickinger planted and nourished many seeds of living theater. He developed actors, established a writing program for new plays and opened two additional Hull House theaters, at 4520 N. Beacon St., now the home of Black Ensemble Theater, and at 500 E. 67th St., the present base for the Chicago Theater Company.
Soon, there were several others. Baird Hall, a church auditorium at 615 W. Wellington Ave., became a small production center for works by avant-garde playwrights Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Maria Irene Fornes. In 1969, director June Pyskacek, who had staged these shows, opened Kingston Mines Theatre at 2356 N. Lincoln Ave. and continued her pioneering work. A block south and across the street, the Rev. Jim Shiflett, a man of God who also was a disciple of theater, had established his Community Arts Foundation’s headquarters in a two-story building at 2261 N. Lincoln Ave. that had once held a bowling alley. Paul Sills, the son of the improvisational innovator Viola Spolin and Second City’s original director, dubbed it the Body Politic and launched his influential Story Theatre there.
There was beginning to be a community. We called it “Lincoln Avenue theater.”
Add the Organic
In 1970, another prime innovator came to town. Stuart Gordon, then 23, who had stirred up a fuss at the University of Wisconsin with a “Peter Pan” that contained some nudity, asked Sills if he thought the Organic had a chance to make a go of it in Chicago. “Sure,” Sills told him. “We’ve already got the Body Politic and Kingston Mines. When you get here, we’ll have a scene.”
Youthful and daring, the Organic troupe was, I suppose, essentially a hippie group in its beginnings. Like so many of the young theater artists who would be pouring into Chicago in the early ’70s, the Organics had come from the era of Vietnam War protests, and they carried their passion for that cause into their theater work. They were a tight communal group, gathering in a circle after each show to split the box-office proceeds of that night’s performance. Their first resident show in Chicago, at Holy Covenant Church on Diversey Avenue, was an adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” which flashed a lot of flesh and showed tremendous imagination in its use of the church space.
Gordon was a find, and a gift. Sills called him “a genius, a comic book genius, but a genius.” He moved into the downstairs space at the Body Politic and started a series of zestful, colorful, inventive shows, from an adaptation of “Candide” to a weird contemplation on “Poe,” followed by the 1971-72 three-part masterpiece, “Warp!”, triumphantly billed (six years before “Star Wars”) as “the world’s first science fiction epic adventure in serial form.” Telling of a mild-mannered bank teller who saves the world from the evil forces of destruction, the show summoned up a universe on its small stage, thanks to a sharp script by Gordon and Lenny Kleinfeld (a.k.a. critic Bury St. Edmund), a gung-ho cast and an amazing array of costumes by designer Cooky Gluck. (I still have and treasure a space helmet, made of a mixing bowl and TV rabbit ears, as a souvenir of that memorable event.)
Gaining momentum
By then, the movement toward a distinctive Chicago style of ingenious, inventive, energetic theater was gathering speed.
The advances, though initiated by small theaters, were not limited to them. In 1969, Goodman Theatre, under the leadership of director John Reich, had moved from a student/guest star operation to a fully professional theater. William Pullinsi, fresh out of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., had opened his first Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Summit in 1961. By the early 1960s, Drury Lane in Evergreen Park, the first of the many Drury Lane theaters to be opened by producer Tony DeSantis, had turned its tent-house operation into an indoor theater that advertised “theater-in-the-round all year ’round.” Director George Keathley’s arrival at the Ivanhoe Theatre in 1968 had initiated a new, more sophisticated repertory of dinner-theater fare that embraced Chicago area acting talent. And in 1969, acknowledging the growing power of resident theater, the annual Joseph Jefferson Awards were inaugurated to honor locally produced work.
The momentum inevitably led to the transferring of hit Chicago shows to New York. Two of the plays were quick Broadway flops in 1973. “Status Quo Vadis,” a slick social comedy by Donald Driver that had been a huge hit at the Ivanhoe, lasted only one night. The first episode of “Warp!” fared little better; it lasted a week, its failure almost decimating Gordon’s company.
But one show, a real Chicago show that had started out at Kingston Mines in 1971, was an immense hit. “Grease,” a raucous, raunchy musical by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, based in part on Jacobs’ days at Taft High School in the 1950s, opened off-Broadway in 1972. It received mixed reviews, including a New York Times notice by a baffled Clive Barnes, which so incensed Jacobs that, as I recall, he stood up in the midst of the opening-night party and threatened, only half-joking, to march on the Times in the freezing February cold and punch out Barnes.
The show that could
“Grease” survived and prospered, moving uptown and entering the record books as one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history. Not bad for a little musical that had been spun out from a series of spoof songs that Jacobs and Casey had been performing at parties. Its subsequent worldwide success boosted Chicago’s reputation as a theater town; but in all of its many manifestations, on Broadway and in the movies, “Grease,” it seems to me, was never better than when its real Chicago cast and its authentic Chicago jubilation set Kingston Mines rocking.
In the early ’70s, then, almost everything was in place for a solid theater community in Chicago. The directors, the actors, the producers, the designers and a growing sense of importance were here. Now, all we needed to make the scene complete was a playwright of note.
He would soon arrive.
The main acts
1959 — The Second City opens.
1963 — Hull House Theatre opens.
1964 — Candlelight Dinner Playhouse, established in 1961, opens its new dinner/theater operation in Summit.
1969 — Goodman Theatre becomes a fully professional resident theater.
1969 — The Joseph Jefferson Awards honoring resident theater productions are inaugurated.
1970 — Director Stuart Gordon establishes the Organic Theater in Chicago.
1971 — “Grease” opens at Kingston Mines Theatre.
1971 — “Warp!” billed as “the world’s first science fiction epic in serial form,” is premiered by the Organic Theater at the Body Politic.
1972 — “Grease” begins a long, lucrative run in New York.
Linda Buchanan/ Scenic designer
`It was a pretty youthful scene’
“My roommate at the University of Chicago was Marilu Henner, who was appearing in something called `Grease’ up north at Kingston Mines. I was studying urban planning, but she got me interested in theater and I started designing things. I worked at Court Theatre for a long time, then gradually freelanced with other theaters. It was a pretty youthful scene. There wasn’t much money; a big budget might have been $1,000. So we used what was already in the scene shop, just threw a few more pillows on it to make it look different. That’s all changed, of course. I travel a lot with my work, and I would say that Chicago today is way up there at the high end of resident theaters in technical know-how and equipment.”
Tony Mockus/actor
`I wouldn’t trade my life for anything’
“I started acting here when I was 18. Got my Equity card in the road version of `Mister Roberts’ at the old Erlanger Theatre in 1949, and what a joy it was to be in that company under the direction of Joshua Logan. I came back to Chicago after the Korean War, and I worked all over, in the old Studebaker Theatre Company, at Drury Lane and then in regional theaters like the Guthrie in Minneapolis and Seattle Repertory. In the early ’60s, I even had my own little theater in a bowling alley in Buffalo Grove. I also did my time in Hollywood, which was profitable but not enjoyable. I always returned to work in Chicago, because I didn’t want to unsettle my family — and because now that’s where the grandchildren are. We’ve developed something important here in theater, and I’m glad I was able to take part in it. I’ve had a good life; I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
June Pyskacek/ director, producer, teacher
`I knew “Grease” would be a hit’
“I had gone to the Goodman School of Drama, and I was doing `Happenings’ in art galleries in the early ’60s when I was asked to direct in a theater group in a hall at the Wellington Avenue church. I was sweeping up there one night when a man came over and asked me if I would like to direct his work. He was Jean-Claude Van Itallie, the playwright, and we did produce several of his plays, including `America Hurrah,’ which had a very successful run. In 1969, I went looking for a new place to work. I found this old trolley barn on Lincoln Avenue that had a good space, so we rented it for $1,000 a month and did more off-Broadway work. Our biggest hit, however, was `Grease.’ It couldn’t miss. From the moment I heard those songs, I knew it was going to be a hit.”
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TODAY
1959 to early 1970s
Planting the seeds of the resident theater movement.
Feb. 17
1970s to 1985
The “renaissance” of Chicago theater.
Feb. 24
1985 to present
A global reach amid changing times.
March 3
Final words
Christiansen’s last column as chief critic, and some of his favorite productions.