BY Jenn Q. Goddu

The Gift Theatre Company’s rented storefront space in the city’s northwest Jefferson Park neighborhood is small. Or in more attractive parlance – “it’s intimate.” Yet it is at least bigger than the one-car garage the ensemble members still often make the trek back to when rehearsing their new shows. The garage, after all, is where the company worked up its first fledgling efforts.

“We don’t want to get too big for our britches,” says company co-founder Michael Patrick Thornton.

He sees a visit back to the space-restricted rehearsal space as a litmus test for a production’s power. “We have a saying that ‘if it sucks in the garage it’s not going to look any better once you put it in the theatre.’ If it’s not compelling to watch among the lawn mowers and the old tires and old doors, once you put lights and costumes on, it’s going to be just as bad, but look better.”

Sometimes the move back to the garage for a few rehearsals is simply practical. After all, the company has planned a six-show season for 2006-2007. It started with A Long Day’s Journey into Night (which runs through Oct. 15), directed by Thornton. Also on the bill are Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreame, and Chekhov’s The Three Sisters.

The company also is pulling together a Halloween show to run over two weekends as a collection of new short pieces and creepy selections from Beckett, Poe and Blake.

While this ambitious schedule wouldn’t necessarily mean an overlap at companies where the rehearsal time is three weeks, tops, the Gift prides itself on taking longer to get a script up on stage. In September the company was already casting for its production of Three Sisters, set to open 11 months later in August 2007.

“You’re going to get what you rehearse,” Thornton said. “We’re sort of a skittish neurotic bunch to begin with, and once you put us in a corner of two weeks to come up with a performance, we’re going to do what human nature does which is to kind of recede into a corner and protect yourself and look out for your own ass and make sure you’re covered on your side. But that leads to a real dearth and paucity of honest communication and I don’t know what you’re left with.”

Being honest is central to the company’s vision. As Thornton states it, The Gift’s mission is “to tell great stories on stage with honesty and simplicity.” He added, “It really is that simple.”

All the “simple” shows will be staged in the intimate storefront space, seating about 50 people, that the company began producing in with The Glass Menagerie in October 2005 after traveling around to produce at Victory Gardens, National Pasttime, Raven or Chopin.

Sheldon Patinkin helmed both the Tennessee Williams play and the company’s inaugural production in 2001, Howard Korder’s Boy’s Life at the University of Chicago. He’ll also spend more of his time with The Gift this season staging the McDonagh dark comedy.

Patinkin’s involvement with The Gift continues to amaze Thornton. In fact, he approached his teacher in the summer Steppenwolf training program back in 2001, asking him to direct, almost as a joke. Thornton and the other ensemble members thought Patinkin would be perfect for the project but didn’t really expect him to say yes.

But they underestimated Patinkin’s loyalty to his students. “They’re my students; that’s important to me, it was important to me that they really do well,” said the Chair of the Columbia College Theatre Department who is also an artistic associate at Steppenwolf. If his directing their first show was going to help, he was willing to do it.

Yet why does Patinkin keep coming back? “I like them very much and I like their work and I think that they’re an extraordinarily talented and dedicated group,” he said.

Plus he loves the “tiny little space” The Gift now calls home. “I loved doing Glass Menagerie in that space. It is so intimate.”

He’s not the only heavy hitter The Gift can call upon. The company also lists Northlight Theatre artistic director B.J. Jones, Steppenwolf ensemble members Rondi Reed and Tina Landau and actress Mary Ann Thebus among its artistic advisors.

Thornton’s not sure to what he should attribute the line-up of advisors, but he’s honored by the support. “All I know is that I don’t take it for granted and it’s as befuddling to me as it is to you.”

Although The Gift’s first show was in 2001, Thornton says the idea for the company was born in college. He met playwright William Nedved in high school in 1997 at a Playwrights Incorporated program in New York City and both ended up attending University of Iowa. They became fast friends, together talking about launching a company and starting it in a neighborhood that didn’t have any pre-existing theatre.

Nedved was coming from small town Iowa and Thornton had grown up in Chicago’s northwest side Jefferson Park neighborhood and both had been forced to look elsewhere for artistic stimulation. “We both kind of lamented the fact that where we came from was pretty artistically sparse,” Thornton said.

Landing in Chicago after college, the duo began to form an ensemble drawing from Nedved and Thornton’s college friends and Thornton’s high school friends. They also ended up pulling in some of the new people Thornton met while in summer actor’s training at Steppenwolf.

Now there are 15 company members who are, Thornton said, dedicated to the idea of building an ensemble. Along those lines The Gift regularly schedules group training sessions called The Lab. They’ve had Eric Forsythe come in from Iowa to teach Jerzy Grotowski (whose teachings regarding the actor making a gift of him or herself by going beyond normally acceptable limits inspired the company’s name) and Jeff Perry lead them in a workshop on performing Chekhov.

Ensemble is a word that gets thrown around a lot in Chicago, Thornton said. “We just want to be really careful and keep investigating what that word means. It’s just not enough for us to just pick plays where we can work with each other, and that’s it. We really want to grow with each other and pitch each other’s boundaries.”

The Lab helps build “an unbelievable level of trust,” he said. “You know you’re safe and you know that you really can go anywhere. You can go to the scariest places in your soul and your scene partner is going to be right there with you. I think our training together just always keeps us mindful that the company doesn’t end with us. That it’s called The Gift for a reason. Because we’re after a certain level of performance where all technique and all kind of ego fades away and all you’re left with is this honest, emotional, simple performance that’s connected to your partner on stage and the audience.”

The small size of the new home space at 4802 N. Milwaukee also helps accomplish the intimacy the company’s actors are looking for. In addition, the location fits with Thornton and Nedved’s original goal of bringing theatre to a community that might be starved for a taste of the stage.

When The Gift opened its doors, they were warned it was a gamble, executive director Danny Ahlfeld concedes. Yet they didn’t believe it.

“I knew it would work,” he said. “When we did it, I was right. It wasn’t a challenge.”

“The people from the neighborhood are flocking out here,” he said. “I attribute it to the hunger for culture out here.”

Area residents are welcoming the chance to see shows without having to drive downtown, he continued. “Out here there’s normal people and people like theatre. Your average Joe is going to see theatre if you give it to him.”

Thornton agrees that the predictions no one would go out to Jefferson Park, a blue-collar neighborhood with Polish, Irish and Mexican residents, to see theatre has proved “patently untrue.” Even staging the three-hour Long Day’s Journey drew new people to the theatre. “There’s an appetite out there,” he said.

The Gift is also trying to give back to the community through its Real Life Drama initiative, which asks members of the Jefferson Park neighborhood to come in and tell their stories related to a question linked to one of the season’s offerings. The company works with the community members who reply to develop the personal stories and perform them.

In the most recent effort, participants were asked to tell stories about the day their life changed. Linked to The Good Thief, the question was particularly resonant with Thornton as the May 2006 production marked his return to the stage after a series of near-fatal spinal strokes left him paralyzed. With the help of rigorous physical and speech therapy the actor was able to battle his way back on to the stage.

Thornton’s recovery, and the way in which the community and company banded together to build the Jefferson Park theatre space, has become part of The Gift lore. Thornton says he’s “a reluctant poster child.” What he’s gone through is “irrelevant” he said. “I’ll just make jokes about it; I’ll talk to other theatre companies [and say], ‘If you guys really want to sell out a show, get a spinal cord injury and learn how to walk again because the press just eats that up.’”

So what does make The Gift unique? Everyone interviewed was reluctant to offer an answer.

Thornton is more preoccupied with building the company than finding it a distinct niche. Efforts are underway to expand The Gift’s board, and the company also hopes to launch a film initiative and start offering classes.

“I really think with the resources we have, and the momentum we have, that we really can be the best ensemble theatre of under 100 seats in the country,” he said.

The Gift offers “simple, honest acting,” Ahlfeld said. “You’re not going to see our plays with a director’s stamp on it. You’re going to see the actors.”

Yet at the same time, The Gift is just made up of actors like everybody else, he said. “If we start thinking we’re unique, I think we’re in trouble. We’re just a bunch of regular people that are actors, and we’re honest, and we do good shows.”

Or as Patinkin put it, “With 150 theatres in town, it’s hard to be unique. It’s more important to be good – and that they are.”

A Long Day’s Journey into Night runs through Oct. 15 at The Gift Theatre, 4802 N. Milwaukee, Chicago. Tickets are $15-25. Call 773/283-7071. For more information about the company’s upcoming season visit www.thegifttheatre.org.