Space: The final frontier?

BY Kris Vire

Okay, maybe Gene Roddenberry’s line doesn’t quite fit, but space is certainly the final word in theatre. Everybody needs it: rehearsal space, storage space, performance space. Even if the answer to all of the above is your apartment (suggested donations only, natch), you’ve gotta have a space or you don’t have a show.

And space seemed to be on everyone’s minds this year. Bailiwick lost its lease on Belmont to Theatre Wit. Porchlight announced, then un-announced, a new home in Lincoln Park. Steep moved from Wrigleyville to Edgewater. The House bounced around the North Side after parting ways with the Viaduct. Victory Gardens sold the Greenhouse. And the Trib’s Chris Jones continued banging the drum for more downtown theatre spaces.

I’m all for more spaces, but not necessarily the Broadway-sized houses Chris is rooting for. Given the current economic situation, projects that size are even more unlikely in the foreseeable future than they normally would be. Besides, until the Loop can keep a few more places open late enough for a post-show cocktail, I tend to prefer my theatre out in the neighborhoods, down the street from the corner pub.

There’s a finite number of those small and midsize spaces where itinerant storefront companies can ply their wares. I spend an inordinate chunk of my life in the Chopin’s basement, which housed four of my favorite productions this year: The Hypocrites’ Miss Julie and Our Town, TUTA’s Uncle Vanya and Strange Tree Group’s The Mysterious Elephant, and the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins* (*Who Kill Him). I’d love to see more companies work there, particularly because the space’s physical limitations (those damn columns!) so often spark something superhuman in directors and scenic designers. But there are only so many slots in a year.

In fact, most of the small rental spaces in the city are booked solid. I heard this year from nascent theatres who inquired around about rentals in early 2008 and were told in several cases they’d have to wait until 2009 to mount a show.

Obviously, this is a good sign for the health of our theatre scene, right? Presumably, but it can also be a real pain in the ass. Those high-profile, high-traffic rental houses like the Chopin and Theatre Building Chicago can’t accommodate enough. Hopefully Jeremy Wechsler’s proposed gut rehab of the former Bailiwick to create three 100-seat theatres, on paper at least a more sensible use of that space, will help pick up the slack.

(Then again, I could be overestimating when I call these theatres “high profile.” I attended David Cromer’s Our Town at the Chopin after the glowing reviews had made it a breakout hit; a conversation with my seatmates, who’d come based on the Trib’s recommendation, revealed that not only had they not known the Chopin existed, they didn’t know theatre was even done in spaces like that. This and other anecdotal evidence served to remind me this year that we still have our work cut out in educating Chicagoans that there’s more to theatre than Jersey Boys.)

As desirable as a Wicker Park or Lakeview space with proximity to dining and drinks might be for a theatre company, there’s such a thing as too close to the cocktails. That’s why I’m so happy for Steep’s move—last spring’s terrific Breathing Corpses and Greensboro: A Requiem will be the last times I have to sympathize with excellent actors battling the live bar band on the other side of the wall.

On the other hand, some theatres have solved dilemmas by putting the play in a bar (a trend I could get behind), as Hell in a Handbag did when the impending Bailiwick closure forced them to move Silent Night of the Lambs to Mary’s Attic. I’ve seen theatre in a variety of non-traditional spaces this year, come to think of it. Theatre on the Lake may play host to theatre all summer, but it clearly wasn’t built for it—and Dog & Pony’s astonishing As Told By the Vivian Girls, which will remain one of the most memorable theatregoing experiences I ever have, used it in a way no one else has.

Pavement Group’s exhilarating punk-rock pastiche Lipstick Traces was staged in the repurposed industrial space known as the AV-Aerie, a venue so nontraditional the show almost didn’t happen (always check your permits, kids). Sharon Greene’s ultra-charming Fake Lake, put up in the Welles Park swimming pool, was one of the two best prime-time shows I’ve seen the Neo-Futurists do (the other being the one that followed it this year, Kristie K. Vuocolo’s A Very Neo-Futurist Christmas Carol). In June, I sat on the ground in a light rain in Grant Park to see Seth Bockley’s intermittently amusing oddity War Garden, proving that anywhere can be a performance space, provided you have permission from the Park District.

I don’t mean to suggest I didn’t see anything great in a traditional theatre, the kind with fixed seats and a stage. Court’s staging of Caroline, or Change, with E. Faye Butler and Kate Fry, was an astoundingly moving accomplishment. American Theatre Company’s rollicking Speech and Debate was one of the rare plays so enjoyable I made time to see it twice—no mean feat when you see 150 plays a year. (Our Town was another.)

I’d even put several of this year’s shows in one of those big, downtown Broadway-sized houses near the top of my list this year. The Drowsy Chaperone, Avenue Q and John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd revival, all at the Cadillac Palace last spring, were three of the best tours Broadway in Chicago has ever presented. Too bad each of them was only here for two weeks, while it’s the execrable Dirty Dancing that sits down for months.

The worst thing I saw this year was downtown too, as it happens, but it wasn’t BIC’s fault. Goodman’s execrable Turn of the Century had me agape—a waste of onstage talent and money beyond belief. If more downtown theatres would mean more crapbaskets like that, I vote for a construction freeze.

Kris Vire writes about and reviews theatre for TimeOut Chicago.

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