3-28-08
Professional Theatre in the Suburbs:
As Young Urban Families Move to the ‘burbs, Young Urban Theatres Follow
Anna K. Kurtz and Janna Sobel in 16th Street’s The Ascension of Carlotta.
Growing up in DuPage County, my earliest theatrical experiences were shaped by what many would consider to be staples of suburban theatre-going: musicals at the late lamented Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Summit, and community theatre, particularly children’s shows, at Theatre of Western Springs. The rap on suburban theatre for years has been that it’s a bastion for safe, predictable programming choices and a haven for theatres run by dedicated community-minded volunteers who aren’t always as concerned about quality in production values.
But anyone paying attention knows that’s bunk. After all, The Adding Machine, the musical created for Next Theatre in Evanston by Next artistic director Jason Loewith and Milwaukee-based composer Joshua Schmidt, has been winning raves in its off-Broadway run, despite its downbeat subject matter and decidedly challenging chamber opera score. Rebecca Gilman may have achieved her national profile thanks to productions at the Goodman, but Circle Theatre in Forest Park (see sidebar, p. 6) gave the playwright her first shot. For that matter, Steppenwolf famously started out in a church basement in Highland Park. Many suburban theatres that tend to focus on familiar classics, such as Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe, do so by hiring topnotch directors, designers, and actors who work regularly at larger regional houses—a far cry from the Waiting for Gufffman-esque image of suburban playhouses fostered by smug urbanites years ago. Even Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, surely what most theatre-goers think of when they think about conventional dinner musicals, recently won raves for using its in-the-round configuration to astonishing effect in re-imagining Les Miserables.
Every week in the Chicago Tribune, I write the “Suburban Stage” column, focusing on openings outside the 773 area code. When I first started the column a year ago, I wondered if there would be much to write about. I needn’t have worried. I seldom struggle to find material, and there are many weeks when I have to cut for the sake of space. Theatre in suburbia now encompasses everything from Shakespeare (First Folio Shakespeare Festival in Oak Brook) to high-profile world premieres. (Northlight’s Better Late, a commission from Larry Gelbart of “M*A*S*H” fame and Craig Wright, who has also premiered two other plays with the company, previews tonight in Skokie in a production starring John Mahoney and Mike Nussbaum.) There are plush performing arts centers in almost every section of the five-county region, from Metropolis in Arlington Heights to the McAninich Center at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn (where Buffalo Theatre Ensemble has been in residence for many years after relocating from the city) to the Center for Performing Arts at Governors State University in south suburban University Park. The League of Chicago Theatres currently lists 40 suburban-based companies and venues as members, including Big Noise Theatre in Des Plaines (which, intriguingly, opens a revival of Urinetown: The Musical next month—the first seen locally since the acrimonious one at the Mercury on Southport) to brand-new 16th Street Theatre in Berwyn, which, under founder and artistic director Ann Filmer, plans to offer a challenging roster of contemporary plays in its first season.
Filmer, formerly the producing director for Chicago Dramatists, with a long history of staging new work, moved to Berwyn in 2007 with her husband, musician Barry Bennett, and their toddler daughter, Hannah. She decided to start Berwyn’s first-ever professional theatre because “I just really wanted to work where I live. I wanted to have art and culture in the place where I live, which we should all have. Why should it just be in the great big city? And actually, a lot of artists live in Berwyn because of the affordable housing. And there was the Berwyn Arts Council.”
The BAC had been in existence for a few years, looking to bring more cultural opportunities to the residents of the predominantly blue-collar suburb, which has seen a pronounced shift in population from generations of working-class Eastern Europeans to more recently arrived Mexican immigrants and urban expatriates such as Filmer and her family. Filmer joined the organization right away, which brought her into contact with BAC board member Fran Gregory. When Gregory told Filmer that there was an unused theatre space in the North Berwyn Park District building, Filmer knew immediately that it was kismet. She set up a meeting with Joseph Vallez, the North Berwyn Park District executive director who had built out the theatre, and presented him with a proposal for a three-play season, emphasizing the idea of playwrights-in-residence, which dovetailed nicely with her experiences at Dramatists.
Vallez loved the idea of having a professional company in residence. In fact, Vallez, a longtime fan of Teatro Luna, the all-Latina ensemble that frequently produces at Dramatists, had used Dramatists’ configuration as a model for the Berwyn venue. The serendipity continued with 16th Street’s first production two months ago: a remount of Teatro Luna’s hit Machos, which came about when another script fell through.
“Teatro Luna actually has a lot of their audience in Berwyn,” observes Filmer. 16th Street next opens The Ascension of Carlotta by Riverside-based playwright Will Dunne, a surreal journey through Berwyn, on April 4. The other two shows by resident playwrights include Arlene Malinowski’s Aiming for Sainthood, part of a trilogy about family relationships and Catholicism (Berwyn remains a heavily Catholic town) and a remount of Teatro Luna playwright Tanya Saracho’s Kita y Fernanda, dealing with class and immigration issues among Latinos.
The diversity is very much by design, but so is cultivating new work that will speak to the community. “Part of having playwrights in residence is having a relationship with the artist,” says Filmer. “This person is obviously a playwright for a reason. They have an opinion about the world…I’m interested in, ‘What does this playwright have to offer the universe? What is this playwright saying in their work as a whole that will be relevant and engaging to audiences and that is important for the community to hear?’”
As of now, 16th Street operates on a CAT Tier N contract, and has an operating budget that Filmer estimates to be about $83,000. They are run under the auspices of the Park District, rather than being their own separate non-profit entity. “I told Joe [Vallez] ‘This could be a model for other suburban theatres,’” says Filmer. “When you’re the only game in town, there’s more ownership from the community in the good way. The community really feels that we are their theatre. This is our theatre together.”
Alison Vesely, artistic director of First Folio Shakespeare Festival, understands the urge to create work closer to where one lives. She and her husband, First Folio managing director David Rice, are longtime residents of Clarendon Hills who had worked with many city-based companies, including the now-defunct Footsteps Theatre in Andersonville. (Vesely’s fellow former Footstepper, Jean Gottlieb, is now the artistic director of another professional suburban theatre—New World Repertory in Downers Grove.)
For 10 years, First Folio has been presenting Shakespeare under the stars during the summer on the lawn at the Mayslake Peabody Estate in Oak Brook. They have also, in the last few seasons, presented more contemporary comedies and dramas inside the historic mansion (including Rice’s Jeff-nominated adaptation of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe in an ambulatory Halloween season staging the last two years). Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy begins previews April 2. Beginning in the fall of 2008, First Folio will present their indoor shows in a renovated hall of the mansion, which will increase their seating capacity from 80 to 120.
Vesely, who notes that the company usually uses a CAT Tier III for their outdoor shows and a CAT II for the indoor productions, maintains, “We do have a good reputation with the acting community. It’s always a very collaborative rehearsal process.” And indeed, they don’t seem to have struggled to get Equity actors to make the commute out to the western suburbs, even though the venue isn’t exactly public-transit friendly. “We had a lot of connections with actors who wanted to do this kind of work,” says Vesely. And though Shakespeare may not seem underproduced, it isn’t actually that common to find professional productions of Shakespeare outside of the city. Even Writers’ Theatre, whose current production of As You Like It is winning raves, has only done three Shakespeare plays over its history.
If actors don’t mind being inconvenienced for the sake of performing in First Folio’s unique setting, their audiences appreciate not having to drive downtown to see high-quality theatre. “My feeling is that most of our audience doesn’t really like going downtown,” says Vesely. But the bifurcated nature of the First Folio season has sometimes been a tricky sell. “I think some of the avid theatre-goers out here will go see almost anything. There does seem to be a bit of a disconnect between our summer Shakespeare and the indoor shows.”
Another problem with which Vesely has wrestled is getting consistent press coverage from daily papers. And even the good reviews have what is perhaps an enviable problem attached to them. Says Vesely: “It’s a problem when people can’t get into a show that they’ve heard is really good when it’s selling out. Because of the limitations with the forest preserve [the DuPage County Forest Preserve oversees the mansion and the estate], we do our planning a year and a half ahead of time and there’s no way to extend beyond a few extra performances, because other things are coming in. That’s a sign of growing pains.” The company now operates with a $250,000 budget, the bulk of which is spent on artists’ salaries.
Vesely also says that, as a producer and director, one downside to being in the suburbs is that she and Rice can feel a little isolated from the rest of the theatre community. They have assuaged that in part by serving on the artists’ advisory committee for the Jeffs.
For Matt O’Brien, the new executive director and producer for Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights, the challenge is to take a well-funded organization (the budget this season is $2.6 million, and he projects a budget of $2.8 million for next year) and help refine its identity. (Full disclosure: O’Brien, the former executive producer for Irish Repertory of Chicago and artistic director of Splinter Group, is a longtime friend and colleague of this writer.) The facility opened in 2000 and was originally run as a for-profit venture geared solely toward booking existing shows, some from Second City and Apple Tree Theatre in Highland Park. The city of Arlington Heights took over the venue in 2004 and formed a freestanding nonprofit, Performing Arts at Metropolis (PAM) to run the center. O’Brien took over from former executive director Tim Rater, who had been there since 2002, in December of 2007. O’Brien is now putting together his first full season for Metropolis subscribers, who number about 2,500, a growth rate he puts at about 40 percent over the last two years.
“A lot of it is that you have to recognize the audience is never wrong,” O’Brien says. “I’ve been trying to approach programming from the point of view of choosing shows that are very populist, but at the same time evince a high level of skill in terms of design and construction and making sure it’s as good as it can be.” O’Brien identifies his subscribers as falling south of the Marriott’s age line, estimating that the bulk of them are in their 40s and 50s. “A lot of our audience is like me,” says O’Brien, who moved from the city to Libertyville with his wife and two children several years ago. “Just because we’ve moved out here doesn’t mean we’ve changed our mindset about the way the world works. They still want to see what’s out there, and they still want to see what’s new.”
O’Brien declined to confirm details of the new season, which is still in negotiations, but he did say that the Metropolis’ 309-seat proscenium facility will be reconfigured for several shows to create more of the effect of an intimate black box space. The plans call for two musicals (“one classic Broadway and one contemporary”), as well as a “recent Pulitzer Prize-winner, a Mamet comedy, and a recent popular chamber musical,” says O’Brien. The longtime Beckett aficionado also plans an evening of Beckett shorts, and O’Brien also says that the many musicians who have played at Metropolis (Irish rockers Hothouse Flowers came in for a St. Patrick’s weekend performance) love the fact that “no one is further than 20 feet from the stage.
“The line I’ve been using is that the cool thing about Metropolis is that it’s a not-for-profit that thinks like a for-profit,” says O’Brien.
Carole Dibo of Wilmette Theatre doesn’t have the resources of a Metropolis, but she has big plans for her multi-use venue, nonetheless. Longtime acting instructor Dibo and her partner Sam Samuelson, who is an agent with Stewart Talent, saved the downtown Wilmette movie theatre from being turned into a furniture store. Now they offer youth acting classes in an upstairs studio, a wide array of indie features in the cinema, and many live events, including a recent evening with Oscar winner Olympia Dukakis when she was in town directing Todd Logan’s Botanic Garden, and cabaret evenings with cast members from Jersey Boys and Wicked. Other star appearances have included John Turturro, who showed up to lead a post-show discussion of his feature Romance & Cigarettes. The venue also regularly hosts professional productions by Chicago Kids’ Company.
“What we wanted to do was to institute a homegrown effort to bring professionalism up to the suburbs, whether it’s live theatre or film discussion,” Dibo says.
Dibo, who started the teen acting program with Rachael Patterson at Acting Studio Chicago, plans to keep her work with youth upfront as the venue grows in other directions. (Metropolis also has a large youth theatre training program, and First Folio does extensive outreach performances in suburban schools.) “I’ve done casting in the city. I know what skills are needed to compete downtown. We expect more professionalism [from the students]” says Dibo.
A newbie to the world of film screening, Dibo says that it has been sometimes difficult to get the features she would like in a timely fashion. But by offering an interesting array of public panels and discussions around the films, she hopes that her audience will wait for the films to reach them. On April 3, the Wilmette presents a screening of the documentary Out of Faith, about Jewish interfaith marriage, followed by a discussion with producer L. Mark DeAngelis and three rabbis. And patrons can also take a glass of wine to their seats. “The village has been really good,” says Dibo. “We asked for a liquor license and we got it. The North Shore Vistors’ Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce, they’ve all been really supportive.”
Dibo’s comments about the support she’s received from the town of Wilmette echo those of Vesely, Filmer, and O’Brien, who all emphasize that local entities, both governmental and commercial, recognize how important it is to their respective communities to have quality live theatre available. “Twenty years ago, there was nothing down here,” says O’Brien of downtown Arlington Heights. “It was a ghost town. Now you can see hundreds and hundreds of people walking around downtown on a Saturday night.”
Filmer notes that it’s important to keep talking up the theatre, even to those who may be initially skeptical. “A woman called up early on because she’d seen something about our season. She lives in Stickney and she said, ‘I’m so glad you have a theatre in Berwyn. But what are these plays? Do you want anyone to come to your theatre? What is The Ascension of Carlotta? Why don’t you do plays people know, like The Glass Menagerie?’ I told her ‘Well ma’am, at one time, The Glass Menagerie was a play no one knew. Come to this play and tell me what you think of it afterward.’ She promised that she would.”