In the past, they fought the heat with popsicles.
That’s right! Handed them out to every member of the audience.
Oh, they tried blocks of ice once, too–with fans whirling from behind, pushing what little cold was emitted toward the people in their seats. Another time they doled out small battery driven, hand-held fans to cool the theater-goers’ sticky brows.
Over the last several summers, those ploys worked. Sort of. Because the audiences were good-natured and the summer evenings not so thick and sultry.
But this summer–the summer of the BIG HEAT with its electric blanket-like temperatures that never clicked off even when the sun went down–nothing outside of air conditioning was going to keep people in their seats much less lure them to this little theater.
It was just too damn hot!
Rich Cotovsky, executive producer of the Mary Arrchie Theater Company knew that. So did the members of his cast who’d been rehearsing for six weeks upstairs on the second floor in the small theater over a liquor store and cafe at Sheridan Road and Broadway. The heat had been stifling while they rehearsed and they often had to douse themselves with cold water to cool off. But they were dedicated and kept going. They were true believers.
“We knew we had a great play but a hot theater,” says Cotovsky. “We weren’t the only small theater without air conditioning, but we were the most notorious. We’d called about putting in air conditioning but we had to wait in line because every air conditioning installer in the city was busy and then all of a sudden we got a big time heat wave our opening week. And we couldn’t get anyone over there to cool the place off.”
Now storefront theaters have become a local passion in Chicago. Not only for theatergoers but for aspiring actors. The actors work for little or no money . . . mainly for the love of theater and the exposure they get. Theatergoers find the parking easy, the tickets cheap, the entertainment live and energized. They feel an intimacy with the action on stage.
“Truly, it feeds my soul,” says Tim Blevins, one of the actors in this troupe, who is a dog walker by day and an actor by night.
Most everyone involved with the Mary Arrchie troupe is something else by day so they can be actors at night.
The Mary Arrchie Theater Company has been around for 10 years, done good plays and bad plays, sometimes filled their 50-seat theater and had to add chairs, and sometimes played to an audience of eight–or even five.
This summer, with “Tracers,” the theater expected a winner and full houses.
“Tracers” is a play that tracks the experiences of a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. The dialogue is powerful, the reminiscence painful.
Then, the heat set in
“Like any opening weekend, everything was coming together at the last moment,” says Cotovsky. “We had previews Thursday, Friday and Saturday and then Sunday was opening night with critics and members of the Jeff committee coming. But what was really messing us up was the heat.”
That Thursday, their first public production, the thermometer hit 105 degrees.
“I knew we were in trouble,” says Cotovsky.
So Cotovsky started madly calling the air conditioning people again but could get no one. The theater was hot.
So when the audience arrived that night, they handed out ice water to drink and washcloths in cut-off plastic bottles filled with ice cubes and apologized for the inconvenience.
The next day, Friday, was the second preview showing. The theater had to be cooled down and fast so Cotovsky hit the phones again. He was not lucky. A rattled air conditioning installer, after being called every two hours by Cotovsky, told him he’d have to wait two weeks. Everyone was too busy. That day the temperature outside was 100 degrees.
“If we waited two weeks we were dead,” says Cotovsky. “I went to the phone book, found a place that sold air conditioning equipment and called. The guy didn’t install air conditioners, he just sold them. I told him our whole sad story and he sympathized with me. He said he’d get an installer to call me in a half hour and in a half hour the guy really did. He said he’d be over that afternoon and that sounded just wonderful to us.”
But then, as the city was reeling from the unending killer heat, power went out. Thousands of homes, apartments and businesses on the North Side lost power that afternoon and the Mary Arrchie Theater was one of them. The air conditioning man arrived but with no power there was nothing he could do. He left.
That night, with no air and no lights, they canceled the performance.
“It was a hell of a beginning,” says Cotovsky.
Only a handful of people showed up for the play and one or two of them followed the cast to a Mexican bar where there were no lights, but cold beer, and the actors ran their lines in the dark.
Saturday the situation was getting serious. Temperatures hitting the top of the 90s. Upstairs in the theater, says one of the actors, “It was God knows how hot. We just knew it was awful.”
The power, which had been restored briefly in the morning, went out again for most of the day. The A.C. man did not bother to even show up this time. The electricity came back up just in time for the show. Again no air, so they handed out cold water and the bottles with iced washcloths in them–and apologies. Somehow the audience again endured.
Then came Sunday. Opening night. Critics. The Jeff Committee. The air conditioning man had called and said he would be there by 11 a.m. By 11:30 a.m. he hadn’t shown up. At noon he wasn’t there either.
“All day people were calling up saying, `Do you have air conditioning yet?’ and we’d say. `We’re working on it,’ says Cotovsky. “And they said, `What do you mean you are working on it? They had no idea what we were going through to get air in there.”
Tick. . .tick. . .tick
At 1 p.m. the air conditioning man pulled up in his truck. Curtain was at 7 p.m. He had six hours. The cast was frantic.
“There’d been 10 guys waiting to help the A.C. man put the 400 pound unit up on the roof . . . it had to go up the stairs to the second floor, then up a ladder and to the roof. By the time he got there, there were only five of us. We had a rope around the unit trying to haul it up,” says actor Blevins. “I was right behind the unit and the rope slipped and for a minute or two it was crushing in on my head. Then they gave it a good haul and up it went. I had a headache the rest of the night.”
“We told the air conditioning man, `Our opening is in your hands. You got to get the air on by 7 p.m.’ ” says Cotovsky.
It got to be 6 p.m. and he wasn’t done. It got to be 6:30 p.m. and he still wasn’t done. The audience was beginning to arrive.
“Oh my God, I was pacing. I went onto the stage and sat on a wooden ramp and prayed,” says Ellie Weingardt, who was in charge of the publicity. “I will never forget that night.”
Seven o’clock arrived. Curtain time. The audience was there, in the tiny second floor lobby and it was hot. Hot and humid with still air that did not move and settled heavy into the seats and over the stage. The air conditioning man was still working. He wasn’t done yet, he told them. He still had to fill the unit with freon.
After 30 minutes, they let the audience go to their seats. The air conditioning man was on stage adjusting the air conditioning lines. A voice came over the speaker telling the audience that the man on stage was not part of the play. He was a workman finishing the duct work for the air conditioning unit.
“When he gets up and walks through the door,” said the voice, “the air will go on.”
Minutes passed. People were fanning themselves with their programs, waiting. Weingardt was praying. Cotovsky was talking to himself.
Suddenly, the man got up and walked out the door. He was done.
The entire audience stood up, broke into applause and gave the air conditioning man a standing ovation. He grinned. Then someone in the cast pressed a button. A steady hum could suddenly be heard and the air went on. And the play began. And it finished. And it got good reviews. People in the audience hung around afterwards to congratulate the cast.
When the lights came back on at the end of the play, there was the air conditioning man. He’d said he had another job to go to next but somehow he just couldn’t leave. He stayed to watch the play instead. He, too, had gotten caught up in the drama of this little theater. He, too, had played a starring role on opening night.
Never before had he gotten a standing ovation.
So to celebrate, he went downstairs to the liquor store and brought back beers for the entire cast. True to form, he made sure they were good and cold.
