2-16-07
Looking back at it now, artistic director Guy Van Swearingen credits the formation of A Red Orchid Theatre to “youthful exuberance.” It was, after all, 14 years ago that he basically built out a theatre at 1531 N. Wells St. just because he wanted to stage a production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection.
“I didn’t know that one play would ever drive me to build a whole theatre,” he concedes. “I was young and I didn’t know [a lot] about how to get theatre produced. This has all been baptism by fire.”
Yet this fall the ensemble, now 12 members strong, will celebrate its 15th anniversary – all thanks to Van Swearingen’s strong connection to Gelber’s comedy about the bleak existence of a group of beat generation heroin users. “It was burning in me to do it,” he said.
Van Swearingen looked around town for a space to let from an established company, but found the rents too prohibitive. Instead he decided to follow up on a space he saw advertised in the Reader, signed a year lease, and spent the next three months building a theatre.
“We were rehearsing the play while I was building the scenery,” he recalls. There was even a “cast rebellion” which he attributes to people getting antsy while rehearsing too long during the theatre’s construction. The show opened and met with favorable reviews in its six week run.
But then, after the show closed down, there was a general shrugging of shoulders and scratching of heads as Van Swearingen asked himself what to do now that the theatre was built. “A Red Orchid really started as a happenstance,” he said.
At first, what plays to produce was happenstance too. Nothing was formalized among the company members or as far as A Red Orchid’s overall approach to theatre. It was simply a matter of doing the plays as early members such as Van Swearingen, Michael Shannon and Larry Grimm felt sufficiently driven to do.
”[We] were doing plays when we were inspired to do them, because we wanted to make sure that we never lost any meaning or purpose in our work,” Van Swearingen said.
But it was just that haphazard approach which had Grimm nervous about officially joining as an ensemble member. He remembers telling Shannon and Van Swearingen that he’d be there as much as he could and do whatever he could, but that he didn’t want to become a member. They put him on the stationary anyway and, he says, “There was no saying ‘no.’”
Not that he regrets it. The ensemble has become “more familiar and familial” to him over the years and is one of the few Equity spaces he can call home now that he has a full-time job teaching at a high school and can no longer rehearse during the day.
But how does he explain his initial reluctance? He’d seen a number of companies fail by the mid-90s and thought A Red Orchid was just one more group of “young guns who have great ideals and not a lot of business sense.”
He adds that, by all standards of Chicago theatre, A Red Orchid should have closed years ago, but it has survived by “sheer tenacity and will” and Van Swearingen’s determination.
It was tenacity and will that, along with talent, netted A Red Orchid some big successes along the way. Their Born Guilty of 1994 was enough of a hit for the company to transfer to the old Hull House space. Another “surprising hit” was The Caine Mutiny Court Martial in 1996. But it is Tracy Letts’ Bug in 2000 that really broke out, as The Barrow Street Theatre decided to bring many of the original A Red Orchid cast members to New York City to perform in the premiere.
Still, it was only in 2004 that the company began planning out its seasons in advance. “We decided to ramp up our programming and actively campaign for subscribers and try to put a legitimate face behind it all,” Van Swearingen said. “Not that there wasn’t a legitimate face behind it [before], but we just wanted to step up the game and be a motivating voice in the Chicago theatre community and started playing by those rules.”
The company’s subscription base has jumped from 50 people two years ago to 150 now. The operating budget has increased and A Red Orchid is growing its board and even employing people part-time in administrative roles.
Yet the decisions remain driven, at least to some degree, by the passion of old. Ensemble member Kirsten Fitzgerald recalls feeling that the 2005-06 season was “almost selfish” because the plays felt so personal. The Sea Horse, for instance, in which she starred with Van Swearingen, was a show they had both loved and thought about staging for years.
To Fitzgerald The Sea Horse is one production that really represents for her what the A Red Orchid ensemble is about. “Even though there were only two of us in that show, the whole ensemble was extremely supportive and actively encouraging and assisting in problem solving from the beginning,” she said. “It was amazing to come together on that.”
Fitzgerald joined the ensemble in 2000 because it was “such a passionate creative environment I couldn’t imagine not wanting to work there. I feel like there is a fire there, and a respect for fresh ideas. It’s not that that’s not present anywhere else, but I feel like it’s more present at A Red Orchid.”
The first A Red Orchid show Fitzgerald ever saw was an Ionesco play. She recalls Victims of Duty as a visually, viscerally and emotionally engaging show and adds, “A Red Orchid was the only place that was able to make sense of [Ionesco] for me – and not just make sense of it but make it necessary to do.”
Which gets at the other element that distinguishes A Red Orchid productions, in Fitzgerald’s perspective. “The thing that I most strongly associate with A Red Orchid is bringing something to life, bringing the heart and the humanness into something that perhaps seems very abstract or very far away.”
One contributing factor may be that all the shows are played out in what the company’s Web site describes as an “intense and intimate” 80-seat house, or what Van Swearingen heralds as “pure magic.”
Grimm agrees: “There are plenty of intimate stages and small storefronts in Chicago, but there’s something about that being down an alley, by a Chinese restaurant and a Subway, that’s kind of magical. It’s an odd little saying, but big ideas are so capable of coming out in small spaces.”
Even when he has access to bigger spaces, Grimm says he finds himself looking at them askance. “Every time that I try to produce theatre outside of A Red Orchid I wish that I was in A Red Orchid because of the space. I’ve never seen more possibilities for transformation of a small space than I have there.”
A Red Orchid has a lease on the Wells Street place for the next two years, and even as the company aims to grow bigger, there are no plans to leave their cozy home (which it does rent out in summers).
After all, the space helps A Red Orchid accomplish what so many Chicago companies aim to do, Grimm said. It’s almost a stereotype, he conceded, for a theatre to claim it is doing “gutsy, raw, edgy, real” work, but “A Red Orchid does that again and again.”
He points to the current production, a Midwest premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, as proof. “It’s one of those shows, like many other gutsy shows that they’ve done, that only A Red Orchid could get away with making work.”
Van Swearingen sees Blasted as an example of the company’s greater desire to challenge the audience. “Whatever we do, I think it’s food for thought and the audience leaves out of A Red Orchid always with something on their mind,” he said. “People are going to leave here talking.”
It’s not that the company is “ripping things from the headlines,” but rather that A Red Orchid considers its play selections through a lens of social consciousness.
“What’s important about the things that we’re doing is how they relate to people individually – the honesty with which that gets explored and the vulnerability with which that gets explored,” Fitzgerald said. “One of my favorite things about A Red Orchid is that as we challenge each other [in the ensemble], we challenge the audience too, to think and discuss, I like that about a lot of Chicago theatre in general, that it challenges audiences as it entertains.”
Says Van Swearingen, “You have a palpable sense of creativity and heartbeat here.” A Red Orchid’s growth has been grassroots and hard fought. “There’s a fierce resolve here to seeing this place succeed.”
What’s sustained that resolve over the past 14 years, he said, is the “great, wonderful, inspirational things” that have happened and the feeling throughout “that we’re doing meaningful and purposeful work.
“We’ve found our niche by doing inspired work and challenging ourselves as artists to push ourselves further constantly.”
A Red Orchid’s Midwest premiere of Blasted runs through March 4. For tickets to the Sarah Kane play call 312/943-8722 or visit www.ticketweb.com. A Red Orchid is at 1531 N. Wells or www.aredorchidtheatre.org.