Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
June 23, 2010
Chicago: Theater Capital of America
Kris Vire, theater editor at Time Out Chicago and a wonderful champion of Chicago theater, makes the perennial pitch: we should be are the theater capital of the United States:
A number of out-of-town critics have praised Chicago as America’s real theater capital over the last several years. What if, instead of continuing to export our stuff elsewhere for praise and dollars, we embraced what London’s Michael Billington, Toronto’s Richard Ouzounian, New York’s Terry Teachout and others have written and sell ourselves, not New York, as said theater capital?
If Cromer’s Streetcar [currently playing at Writers Theatre in Glencoe] deserves more viewers—and it surely does—why shouldn’t they come to Chicago to see it? Instead of courting the Scott Morfees and Jeffrey Richardses of New York, maybe Gigi Pritzker’s ready for another go at producing theater in Chicago after Million Dollar Quartet.
As Alan M. Berks notes in the first installment of his TCG [Theater Communications Group] report from the Twin Cities, one of the unofficial themes of Chicago’s TCG conference was the awesome, non-hierarchical nature of Chicago’s theater scene. Mayor Daley said a lot of great things to the nation’s theatermakers Saturday morning, as he did to the city’s press a couple of weeks prior when marking the tenth anniversary of the downtown theater district, in the presence of NEA chair Rocco Landesman, about the value of theater and other arts in building a world-class city.
So what if, instead of continuing the New York–centric 20th-century model, we make our city a theater tourism destination? With others so willing to call Chicago the real theater destination of North America, wouldn’t it be great if we embraced that label ourselves? What if theater audiences actually had to come to Chicago to see Chicago-style theater?
Coming off this weekend’s TCG conference here in Chicago (which, if nothing else, gave Chicago theater artists like Court the opportunity to strut in front of other national theater-makers), you’ll be hearing more talk like this throughout the coming year, leading up to a Columbia College-planned conference next spring titled Chicago – Theatre Capital of America: Past. Present. Future.
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