Wisdom Bridge producing director Jeffrey Ortmann recalls the time some years ago when a consultant for a major Chicago food company called and offered him a substantial donation.
“We have $200,000 to give away,” she told him casually, as if talking about a covered dish. “Do you happen to have a project you could spend it on?”
There were times, Ortmann says, that the money people donated to live theater actually shocked him. But no one has called him lately to offer anywhere near $200,000.
In fact, few are calling Ortmann to offer much of anything at all. Wisdom Bridge subscribers complain they have a hard time tracking him down these days or getting answers to questions about whether the troupe–home to some of Chicago’s greatest theatrical accomplishments of the past several decades–is still producing live theater.
Ortmann recently sent out a letter apologizing for the confusion, canceling a planned show and promising another soon. But even he admits sometimes to fearing the worst. When told people worry that Wisdom Bridge might go under, he says, “It could happen.”
The story has become familiar to fans of Chicago’s once vaunted, midsized off-Loop theater movement. Four of the nine theaters that constituted this landmark cultural development have died or faded in the past five years.
This is one area where the legacy of the ’70s seems not in retro-flashback. All of these troupes began in those years, gritty experiments by artists in their 20s; their work was often
surprising, often wonderful. The same years produced Rich Melman’s Lawrence of Oregano and other trickily named theme restaurants; in both arenas, undergraduate pluck eventually gave way to bigger enterprises.
Other upstarts in their 20s are now doing a ’90s version of theatrical experimentation, but that doesn’t mean something valuable hasn’t been lost. David Mamet’s early work, Stuart Gordon and Bury St. Edmund’s “WARP,” William Petersen and Remainsian feats such as “Moby Dick” and Robert Falls’ early ventures at Wisdom Bridge were high-water marks of a grand era.
The long, slow dance of death is painfully familiar to Remains Theatre, which lost its home at 1800 N. Clybourn Ave. two years 1800 N. Clybourn Ave. two years ago and hasn’t produced anything since its “Moon Under Miami” bombed last May. The Body Politic Theatre survived as a rental space for years until giving up the ghost last year, its upstairs mainstage and studio theaters absorbed by Victory Gardens. (The two had shared the building at 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. for nearly 15 years.)
The Organic Theater Company, which once produced “WARP” and Mamet’s first full-length play, now is only a rental house. It’s currently negotiating to merge with the much younger Touchstone Theatre.
Wisdom Bridge gave up its Howard Street home a few seasons back, spent a disastrous year at the Ivanhoe Theater and, after one production last fall at the Harold Washington Library, is on hiatus, awaiting developments with a new entertainment complex about to open in suburban Skokie.
Even that plan is in flux and may not come off; the long homeless Northlight Theatre is now part of the Skokie talks, too.
“There’s definitely a squeeze in the middle,” says Michael Maggio, resident director at the Goodman Theatre and a graduate of Chicago’s off-Loop, midsized scene. “The tiny theaters will always be there, and Goodman and Steppenwolf have large subscriber bases. But the midsized theaters are struggling, and it hurts the whole theater landscape. I mean, my God, Wisdom Bridge is one of our premier theaters.”
“The field is littered with bodies,” says John Walker, managing director of Victory Gardens.
“It’s definitely a time of retrenchment,” says Richard Friedman, managing director at Northlight. “We’re down from a high of 8,000 subscribers to 3,700 at Northlight. We no longer have a director of development or a marketing director. Right now the bottom line is paying your bills and keeping your doors open.
“We need stability, and we certainly don’t need to lose any more theaters.”
Facing a changing scene
The reasons behind all this are many, and they vary from theater to theater. But to some extent, these troupes are victims of their own success.
“When we started, the downtown touring circuit of large national shows had all but died,” Maggio recalls. But in the past 10 years, the road has come back, creating a lively downtown theater hosting everything from “The Phantom of the Opera” to “State Fair” and “Dial `M’ for Murder.” Meanwhile, by the late 1980s, the not-for-profit scene that Wisdom Bridge and the others had nourished launched a smaller orbit of commercial off-Loop theaters, such as the Royal George and the Briar Street, which have stolen away both source material and audiences.
Outsiders such as “Show Boat” producer Garth Drabinsky, who is now renovating the Oriental Theater, are revitalizing downtown to the point Maggio worries about the Goodman: “What’s the presence of the Walt Disney Company at the Chicago Theatre going to do to `A Christmas Carol?’ ” he asks. (Disney has signed a four-year lease to produce at the Chicago.)
Walker notes, “Fifteen years ago, Chicago became home to a viable theatrical industry, and people from all over took notice.”
At the same time competition blossomed, funding dried up. “Even in the ’80s, high interest rates helped corporations and foundations earn a lot with their investments and created dollars for donations,” Ortmann says. “But then Reaganomics hit and shifted some of that money to social services. Now, in a time of slower growth, there’s very little money at all.”
Every one of these theaters has been engaged for years in its own private struggle for survival. Ultimately, the Body Politic and the Organic collapsed after their founding artists moved elsewhere. Remains and Wisdom Bridge both became victims, to some extent, of the costs of maintaining real estate, only to find later difficulty trying to produce as an itinerant theater. And they both lost artistic personnel to Hollywood and elsewhere.
“I still think the answer is to produce rather than to be a landlord,” says Ortmann. “We sank a lot of money into everything from taxes to leaky roofs at Howard Street, and the building became both a blessing and a curse.”
Both Wisdom Bridge and Northlight are talking with officials at Skokie’s North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, scheduled to open in the fall and replace the old Centre East, which has been taken over by Oakton Community College.
Ortmann wants to produce at North Shore sporadically and house more experimental works in unspecified smaller theaters elsewhere.
But all involved are trying to determine a way to finance an additional $1.8 million needed to enable a banquet area to double as a studio theater. The 850-seat main stage is too large for most Northlight and Wisdom Bridge productions.
Bill Novello, chairman of the Centre East authority board, which owns the new complex, says, “We hope to have an agreement with Northlight in the near future. Wisdom Bridge, while we aren’t ruling them out, are second in line at this point. Negotiations with Wisdom Bridge frankly stalled some time ago.”
Victory Gardens, Court success
Some other theaters are more settled in their homes, at least. By inheriting the Body Politic mainstage and studio theaters upstairs, Victory Gardens strengthened its situation and can now extend hits in one theater while continuing its subscription series in another–something it did earlier this season with “Jest a Second” and “Never the Sinner.”
That is also the idea behind Court Theatre’s use of rotating repertory, which offers two shows at once and can allow for flexibility if one proves a runaway hit. Like Victory Gardens, Court–at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park–is proving to be a survivor, moving with apparent success to a new generation of leadership with the arrival of Charles Newell as artistic director last season.
Officials at neither theater, however, are sanguine. “Seemingly we’ve made the transition (of artistic leadership) smoothly, but there’s always trepidation and fear,” Newell says. Victory Gardens has taken some unusual steps recently: teaming up with Northlight for one mainstage offering this season and canceling another expensive project because of a funding shortfall.
“The Body Politic space has helped, but it comes with extra costs,” says Walker, echoing Ortmann’s concerns about the dual personality of real estate. “Now we have to strike a balance between using the spaces ourselves and renting them out. The key is never to let them sit dark.”
Walker also thinks the tide may have turned. “Sales are up since last year,” he says. The theaters also need to work together more to survive, all agree. “I think we need more collaboration,” says Friedman.
Part of a cycle
Some newer theaters have emerged as replacements. The Next Theatre in Evanston continues under its second generation of artistic leadership. Shakespeare Repertory now offers three large, Equity Shakespearean productions each year. Bailiwick Repertory, once a non-Equity operation, now hires Equity actors and offers omnibus programming. Touchstone, once a small suburban troupe, now mounts important Chicago premieres.
Some longtime participants in Chicago’s theater movement say these turns of the wheel are natural. B.J. Jones has directed and acted at just about all the off-Loop theaters. “Losing some theaters is a tragedy, but it’s understandable,” he says. “Look, when we started all this, we were just a bunch of young people with nothing to lose. We weren’t trying to make a living, and even in the off-Loop’s heyday, we didn’t. We all supplemented our incomes with day jobs.
“We came here because it was a great place to start. But we came here to get experience and move on, and that’s what happened. It’s a cycle.”
“Cycle is the operative word,” agrees Jeffrey Ginsberg, who went on a roller-coaster ride for the past year while the National Jewish Theater in Skokie, where he’s co-artistic director, faced a planned shutdown and won a last-minute reprieve.
“Even if you look at the Group Theatre (in New York City) in the 1930s, it had a 10-year life,” Ginsberg says. “The arts are so tenuous that the cycle is bound to damage some institutions and make room for new ones.”
