THE DEFIANT WAKE: Sean Sinitski celebrates with a bang, while Jim Slonina tries to capture the moment for his European friends. (Photo: Elizabeth Laidlaw)

This was a rough year. There is no reason to put a pretty face on things. The economy just limped along and everyone I know (actors, writers, audience members) complained about money. Even from my rather cozy critic’s perch I could tell a lot of theatres were hurting, or were at least working very close to the bone. And I’m not just talking about the notable theatre companies that folded up their tents (Defiant, Roadworks Productions, Noble Fool). I am also talking about the continuing non-success of Mayor Daley’s prefab Theatre District.

I won’t call it a failure because the folks at Broadway in Chicago are clearly working their buns off to bring us the very bloated, big-budget, middle-brow Broadway shows Daley promised. There just aren’t enough of those shows in the pipeline. And as the folks at Crain’s Chicago Business reported earlier this year, the beautiful, refurbished theatres downtown were dark and empty a lot more than they were full of light and energy and paying customers. The closing of Noble Fool’s pretty but unprofitable space on Randolph St. only underscored the problem.

Meanwhile, in Chicago’s real theatre scene, you could almost taste the desperation in the risk-averse programming at so many theatres. Why, for example, did the folks at Court Theatre decide to do The Importance of Being Earnest? And why is City Lit doing it in early 2005? Well, ticket sales, of course. I mean the play is brilliant, but it is hardly ground breaking.

But I don’t want this column to become another of those dreary, everything-is-awful-in-Chicago-theatre columns. Because, actually, much more went right than wrong in Chicago this past year.

For one, there were still plenty of theatres, both established and new, that took interesting risks. The American Theatre Company, for example, produced American Dead, a new play by Brett Neveau, that was as puzzling as it was moving (and vice versa). And then there was Job Opportunity, a small cast show performed in a car as it traveled in real time throughout Chicago’s northside. The play—about a mysterious, perhaps criminal, deal gone wrong—was well written and the performances were brilliant. They better have been; the actors were performing for a small audience sitting less than three feet away.

For another, there were plenty of creative, inspired companies putting new spins on familiar material. A crazy new company calling itself the GreyZelda Theatre Group did an amazing experimental, micro-low budget version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. And the folks at Circle Theatre did a wonderful, extreme version of Neil LaBute’s Bash that captured the dark side of the religious right so perfectly, I thought for sure the jig was up for those guys. I remember specifically thinking, “How can the religious right wing win in November when LaBute has blown the cover off their hypocrisy?” Goes to show what great prophets critics make.

This was also the year we got international approval for our work, in the form of a gushy article by British critic Michael Billington. If you follow Chicago theatre at all closely you already know this. But I mention it because it is a big deal. If you don’t know about this article here is the link to it online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1244982,00.html. Great reading, even if it does lapse into what we more cynical journalists call a blow job feature writing. (But then don’t we all.)

A far more important event happened this past year among us critics. I am talking about the publication of Richard Christiansen’s book, “A Theater of Our Own.” This book is important to Chicago’s theatre scene for many reasons. First, it is almost always interesting to read what a veteran critic has to say about the shows he reviewed on the beat. But more importantly, this is the first book to attempt to put between the covers of a hardbound book all of the glory and inspiration of Chicago’s theatre scene. It doesn’t capture it all. The newer, fringe companies get short shrift. And the book is written in the sometimes dry, fact-packed style of well-edited Sunday features.

What matters, though, is that someone finally got it down. The pre-fire theatrical enterprises, the Iroquois Theatre tragedy, the WPA, the great flowering of theatres in the late ’60s, early ’70s, AND the blooming that continues to this day.

Agree with it. Disagree with it. It is still a work of scholarship and one that belongs in the library of everyone who loves theatre in Chicago.

Finally, 2004 was the year that Chicago-style theatre really began to catch hold in the suburbs. Those living in the city may not think this matters, but you need only look to the success (artistic and otherwise) of Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe to see that a small theatre in the right suburb can have a major impact on things. And if you are an actor looking for work, are you really going to turn down a paying gig in St. Charles just because it involves a bit of a drive?

For whatever reason the western suburbs are a real hot bed of new theatre life. In St. Charles there are two such companies, one in a revitalized theatre at Pheasant Run at one end of St. Charles and a small, hole-in-the wall company, Steel Beam, at the other. Both companies have very Chicago-style aspirations and working styles.

At Pheasant Run, the remains of the Noble Fool gang, working in a reconstituted, and legally separate, theatrical organization (that now owns the name, Noble Fool, but is not burdened with any other Noble Fool baggage), performs in two spaces in that resort complex. At Steel Beam, a much pluckier and lower budget organization works hard to keep afloat, juggling a season of professional productions with shows for children and an improv troupe.

Meanwhile, in Naperville, Vicky Quade and Mary Hale (both of Late Nite Catechism fame) have opened the Crossroads Theater in that suburb’s thriving old downtown district, an area packed with restaurants and nightclubs. And in Downer’s Grove, another veteran of Chicago’s off-Loop scene, Jean Gottlieb, of the now defunct Footsteps Theatre, has opened New World Repertory.

Then there is the company of no fixed abode: The Janus Theatre, a company that used to perform in the Vail Street Café in Arlington Heights, but now, since the closing of that coffee house, may be found performing in Elgin, in Schaumburg, at the Athenaeum in Chicago, or, as happened last summer, at the London, Ontario Fringe Festival. In fact, there is so much going on in the western suburbs they have their own professional organization: West Suburban Theatre Connection, the brainchild of Diana Martinez, executive director of the Paramount Arts Centre in Aurora.

All of which gives me reason to be cautiously optimistic about the coming year.

Jack Helbig is a critic, playwright, and SAT/ACT tutor living in Chicago. He reviews theatre and writes about the arts for the Chicago Reader and the Daily Herald. His translation and musical adaptation of A Flea in Her Ear, Hotel d’Amour, written with Gregg Opelka, is represented by Dramatic Publishing.  He is currently working on a new musical with Mark Hollmann, Wild Goat, set in Ancient Greece.

2004 YEAR-IN-REVIEW

Headlines-In-Review

Trends in Chicago Theatre in 2004

Annual Report: A Healthy Year in Chicago Theatre

Proletariat Theatre: 2004

2004 Theatre Season Gets a B

A Year of Scattershot Splendor

The Literature of the Stage

Five Reasons to be Optimistic and a Couple, Three More Not to Be