Within the past decade, Chicago has acquired not only a national but an international reputation as a city overflowing with theatrical energy. After the first successful exports electrified the nonregional theater world, the East Coast media created, then perpetuated, their own myths about this midwestern phenomenon. One of these myths held that Chicago possessed over one hundred flourishing theaters. This number was taken from a local compilation of all functioning theatrical programs, almost all of them literally amateur and including many that belonged to small colleges and churches. But the myth persisted and continues to persist.
In actual fact there are only about a dozen not-for-profit professional Equity theaters in the city. The largest of these, the Goodman, seats a little less than seven hundred; the remainder hover around two hundred or less. There are, indeed, at any given time, at least an equal number of aggressive and exciting theaters that are technically not professional (i.e., non-Equity, and certainly nonprofit), but the truth is that the one hundred-plus figure is a distortion of reality. But when Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times in June 1985, "What is the current state of American Theater? One word, Chicago," was this a distortion? In its oversimplicity, yes. In its comprehension of theatrical courage, no.
Anger and Euphoria
I write, in a sense, from the trenches. I am artistic director of one of the small professional theaters, the Court Theatre at the University of Chicago. I cannot therefore profess an outsider's objectivity. Nor would it be proper for me to pass critical judgments on the success or failure of specific Chicago theaters or artists. My observations are thus coming, you might say, from the wings. And if Chicago does represent the current state of American theater, then there is cause for concern as well as congratulation, anger as well as euphoria. But this is a view from the present. Chicago has had to fight hard (if indeed it was consciously fighting) to acquire its present reputation.
Chicago has resisted and embraced its own cliché--"the Second City." In theater during the late sixties and early seventies, it resisted by forming many almost entirely amateur groups that challenged and, in a sense, created an audience for the avant-grade and the bizarre. In the late seventies and the eighties, Chicago embraced the cliché by seeking respect in New York (there was no other route). The early results were mixed. One of the first was unique. A funny, spunky little musical about life in a Chicago high school, which was developed in a tiny theater, became the glitzy Broadway success, Grease.
There were other, much less successful ventures. The Goodman sent a serious and very good production of Friel's Freedom of the City eastward to a cold and uninformed response. One of the early populist and popular theaters, the Organic Theatre, sent its space saga Warp to face East Coast scorn. It is the more recent exports--to New York, Washington, London, and Edinburgh--that have given Chicago its present status. David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross originated at the Goodman, as did Hurlyburly. Steppenwolf Theatre exported Balm in Gilead and Orphans to critical acclaim. Wisdom Bridge produced In the Belly of the Beast and a highly original Hamlet. Most recently the Stormfield Theatre's production of Hauptmann at the Edinburgh Festival made the London critics sit up and take note of
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