Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
June 28, 2010
What is Court Theatre?
A dress rehearsal for Court Theatre in its Hutchinson Courtyard iteration, circa 1961.
Since 1981, Court Theatre has produced five shows per season in our 250-seat theater on Ellis Avenue. Our name, the “Court,” however, follows from our origins as a summer repertory theater that performed in Hutchinson Courtyard on the campus of the University of Chicago. Founded in 1955, the Court Theatre produced three classics per season before expanding their season into the new indoor theater. Since that time, we’ve sprung from a community theater to a nationally-recognized professional company. We no longer perform in Hutch Courtyard, though that tradition has been sustained by University Theater and the Dean’s Men (a recently-formed student society that performs strictly Shakespeare). From Court Theatre’s 1959 Season program:
WHAT IS COURT THEATRE?
About that time of year when the radiators in University Theatre are gasping their last rattle of the season and Buildings and Grounds is setting out daffodils and grass seed in Hutchinson Court, that sprawling activity known as the theatre in this community begins to move into high gear.
The classics (affectionately referred to as “the public domain boys”) are reviewed. The big and important word that somebody is doing three good plays goes out to most of the actors in the city. The tech men begin to haunt Maxwell Street for cable and crinoline. The addressograph is inked and cranked, and a fountain that does not work is covered with a stage that does. By the first of July actors have succeeded in usurping squirrels, mosquitoes have succumbed to DDT, Goth battlements have been wired for hi-fi, and a green campus court has been transformed into that elusive, transitory, magic thing known as theatre.
Court Theatre’s raison d’etre is a special kind of an audience that comes in shirt sleeves from Hyde Park and Glenview and Oak Street, from Gary and Western Avenue to sit on the grass and enjoy the classics.
We welcome you to our fifth season of productions. We look forward to hearing your ideas and comments. We hope to welcome you back next year. Mostly, we hope you have fun. We have.
MARVIN E. PHILLIPS
Producer, Court Theatre
For its 1959 season, Court Theatre produced Shakespeare’s Othello, William Congreve’s Love for Love (a Restoration comedy), and a seldom-performed nineteenth-century play titled Francesca Da Rimini by George Henry Boker, a verse adaptation of a tale from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno.
*The addressograph, circa 1955.
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