When the time came to plan seriously about building a new Goodman Theatre, Roche Schulfer, the theater’s executive director, received one overwhelming, salient piece of advice from his peers in the resident theater movement across the country. Be prepared, they told him, to devote 10 years of your life to getting it done.
This Tuesday, about a year shy of that predicted time span, Schulfer joined other Goodman members and Mayor Richard M. Daley at a gathering in the North Loop to celebrate major funding gifts for establishing a new Goodman Theatre by the year 2000.
“They thought it couldn’t be done,” Schulfer said, “but now, it’s done.”
For the next three years, the theater will continue to stage productions in its home since 1925, the auditorium in the rear of the Art Institute of Chicago that was erected as a memorial to the Chicago playwright Kenneth Sawyer Goodman.
For the opening of the 2000-2001 season, however, Schulfer and artistic director Robert Falls expect to be ready for business in a $53.2 million complex on Dearborn between Lake and Randolph streets.
When completed, the Goodman will be part of a new North Loop theater area, just across the street from the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts (Oriental Theatre) at Randolph and Dearborn streets, due to open in late 1998, and a few blocks east of the restored Palace Theatre on Randolph Street, also expected to reopen in 1998.
The new Goodman will contain two theaters, plus lobby facilities, staff offices, rehearsal rooms and a restaurant/retail area.
In a neat and proper continuation of tradition, the two theaters will be named for members of the Goodman family, who have contributed leadership gifts to the project. The 800- to 850-seat mainstage will be the Albert Ivar Goodman Theatre; the 400-seat studio, the Owen Bruner Goodman Theatre.
Behind the ruffles and flourishes of the occasion lie several years of hard planning and fundraising. First announced in 1988, the project crawled along slowly until last year, when the pieces began falling into place. (“Whenever you get involved in real estate,” Schulfer notes, “it takes a while.”)
The Goodman board, which had raised $17 million toward the $53.2 million goal, has pledged to contribute a minimum of $21 million, and the City of Chicago, with Daley on board as an enthusiastic booster, pitched in with $18.8 million in tax increment financing (TIF), an amount now working its way through City Council committees. Private investing for the retail/restaurant area and financing arranged through a consortium of Chicago banks will take care of the balance.
What they’re getting for their money is a complex its builders expect will be among the most advanced playhouses in the nation’s wide range of resident not-for-profit theaters.
The principal architects of the project are from the Toronto-based firm of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg. The firm has done extensive work in designing and renovating theaters, such as the Stratford Festival in Canada, and experience in the field was the principal reason for its selection to build the new Goodman, according to Lewis Manilow, co-chairman of the capital campaign committee.
The overall plan for the half-city-block complex is to present a building that seamlessly honors tradition and heralds innovation. It’s what Thomas Payne, chief architect on the project, calls “a dynamic balance between the old and new.”
Tradition will be provided by the Selwyn and Harris, two adjoining theaters on Dearborn at the corner of Lake. Opened in 1922 but out of action as legitimate theaters for 40 years, their interiors will be gutted even while their landmark terra cotta facades are preserved.
Part of that interior will be devoted to the studio theater, containing a flexible space modeled after the small Cottesloe Theatre of the National Theatre of Great Britain in London.
A soundproof cocoon
Falls spent weeks studying the Cottesloe’s operation, from house management to box office, and he considers its flexibility, which allows everything from proscenium to arena-style staging, an ideal format for the experimental and innovative works that have been associated with Goodman studio work.
The studio will be encased in a soundproof concrete cocoon, necessary to keep out the noise and rumble of the subway underneath and the elevated tracks nearby.
Payne expects the studio’s interior design “to play with contemporary building materials, and there may be a few found objects to remind us of the heritage of the small, off-Loop theaters from which the studio sprang.”
To make sure Payne had the proper background for this work, Falls took him on a tour of several of Chicago’s small, off-Loop stages, where many of the city’s theater artists got their start. The idea, Payne says, was to reflect the tradition of the off-Loop movement and create “a theater with a soul.”
Between the Selwyn and Harris lies Couch Place, an alleyway that separated the twin theaters, and here Payne plans to place the principal vertical sign announcing the Goodman complex.
Just south, in space once occupied by the old Harris, will be the building’s main lobby, through which everyone — staff, casts and audiences — will enter the building. That was Falls’ idea. He wanted a common entryway.
The rest of the complex will be newly built on land that formerly contained the old Woods and Garrick theaters.
Here, Payne wants to begin a gradual progression from old to new, starting out with a combination of glazed surface and opaque masonry, embracing a glassed-in upper gallery overlooking Dearborn Street and leading up to a climactic glass-enclosed area for the restaurant/retail area. In Payne’s words, this bright spot will “command the corner” at Dearborn and Randolph streets.
In this new area will be the mainstage auditorium, which Falls wanted to be modeled after the classic proscenium arch stages of the traditional Broadway theater. “We want it state-of-the-art, with a stage tower, computerized sound and light boards, fly space and a full orchestra pit,” Falls says, “but the auditorium should have the looks of a classic house, with a main floor and balcony focused on the proscenium stage.”
Compactness and intimacy
Above all, Falls told Payne, he wanted to make sure the theater would be intimate enough so that eye contact between actors and audience would never be lost.
The interior design is to be more elegant here, probably incorporating use of dark, polished wood for the walls. The rake of the seats will be steeper than in the present Goodman, and, Falls says, the theater’s subscribers will be surprised at how compact their new theater will be.
The theater’s proscenium arch will be 30 feet high and 45 feet wide; the farthest main-floor seat will be 55 feet from the stage and the highest balcony seat only 70 feet away.
Many more details of interior and acoustic design have yet to be determined, and the specific nature of the restaurant/retail shops area is not finalized (although Friedman Properties Ltd., which owns the property where the River North restaurants Brasserie Jo and Maggiano’s are located, will probably be involved).
Somewhere in the new complex, there is bound to be room for a few emblems of tradition in this oldest and largest of Chicago’s resident not-for-profit theaters.
One of them is this motto, now carved into a lobby wall of the present Goodman and an almost certain choice to be incorporated into the new building:
“To Restore the Old Visions and to Win the New.”
