One way to make sure you remember to celebrate Victory Gardens’ 25th anniversary season is to bear in mind that the theater is two years younger than Dennis’ and Marcie’s marriage.
Dennis Zacek and Marcelle McVay, who met while they were students at Northwestern University, were married in 1972, when he was teaching at Loyola University and she was a social worker. Two years later, in 1974, Victory Gardens was born; and by 1975, both Dennis and Marcie were working at the theater.
The rest, as they say (particularly on anniversaries), is history.
They have weathered the years well. Dennis, Victory Garden’s artistic director for 22 years, now has some gray in his beard, but Marcie, the theater’s managing director, still twinkles (“It’s the only word for her,” insists playwright Jeffrey Sweet), and Victory Gardens, now commanding four small theaters in its building at 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., is preparing its usual season of premieres by playwrights, old and new.
There will be a Sept. 22-Oct. 18 encore production, directed by Zacek, of “The Sovereign State of Boogedy Boogedy,” by Lonnie Carter, one of 12 members of the theater’s playwrights’ ensemble. After that, there are new plays by S.L. Daniels and Rick Cleveland and, at the end of the year, Julie Harris and Mike Nussbaum will star in the premiere of “Winter,” by Claudia Allen, a writer whose career has been shaped by her work at Victory Gardens.
It’s a busy, promising season, and coming off the big summer success of Sweet’s “Flyovers,” which gave the theater the biggest box-office numbers in its history, it finds Victory Gardens in a relatively comfortable financial position. (The debt has gone down to five figures.)
Founded in 1974, a time when the Off-Loop movement of Chicago theater was moving into high gear, the Gardens originally had a set-up that was unique, even by this city’s rough-and-tumble organizational standards. Eight people–Warren Casey, Cordis Heard, Stuart Gordon, Roberta Maguire, Mac McGinness, Cecil O’Neal, June Pyskacek and David Rasche–put up $1,000 each to start a cooperative, communal theater dedicated to promoting the work of their fellow Chicago theater artists.
For their $8,000, they bought a light board and launched their first world premiere production, “The Velvet Rose,” by Stacy Myatt, directed by McGinness, in a hastily assembled theater in the Northside Auditorium Building at 3730 N.Clark St. (now the site of Cabaret Metro).
The play, about a cosmetics queen clawed to death by her pet Persian cat, was not a success. According to McVay, “We thought that since Chicago audiences had embraced primitive and naif artists in the visual arts, they might do the same in the performing arts. Well, they didn’t.”
Broke, but with their light board still in place, the theater directorate next lined up with a commercial producer to present “The Magnolia Club,” a country-western musical that became a hit, and, in a ritual that was to be repeated many times over the next two decades, saved the theater from extinction.
The eight-person directorate was not working well, however.
Zacek, who at the time “was working where I could find work” in Chicago theater, first appeared on stage at the Gardens in 1975, playing a Bulgarian jewel thief in Frank Shiras’ “Strangle Me.” When one of the theater’s founders left, he joined the board of directors. In 1977, after Alan Turner, arts patron and early supporter of the theater, declared that nowhere in the country could he find a successful theater directed by eight people, Zacek became the sole artistic director. Turner signed up as its first board chairman; and McVay, who had started out in 1974 as office manager, settled into her long-term job as managing director.
In 1979, with the arrival of Sandy Shinner, first as public relations officer and later as an accomplished stage director, the essential administrative core of the Gardens was set.
Until 1981, the theater carried on at the Clark Street address, presenting most of its work in an upper-floor, leaky-roof space reached by climbing 65 steps or by taking a creaky little elevator papered with Victory Gardens posters. (“The posters were everywhere,” says William J. Norris, who has worked at the theater both as actor and playwright. “They hid the cracks.”)
In 1981, the theater moved to its present Lincoln Avenue space, buying into and sharing the building with the Body Politic; when the Body Politic went out of business in 1995, Victory Gardens became the sole owner.
True to its founding principals, Victory Gardens has remained a home for Chicago-based artists; and since 1983, it has focused on encouraging, developing and producing works by its select group of local playwrights. Up to this season, it had produced 200 plays, 109 of which were world premieres. It also holds acting and playwright classes, and it nurses drama along through staged readings and workshop presentations. (Scott McPherson’s “Marvin’s Room,” one of the treasures of Chicago theater, had its first reading at Victory Gardens under the direction of Eric Simonson.)
In the process, the theater has created a playwrights’ ensemble, now numbering 12 persons, whose work it presents on a regular basis. Allen, who has had five plays produced at the Gardens (all directed by Shinner) in the last 10 years, acknowledges her debt to the Gardens and to Zacek: “The theater has an incredibly loyal group of subscribers; and Dennis maintains a strong personal commitment, in every way.”
The theater has been a seedbed for both individuals and institutions in the theater. Actors William L. Petersen and Aidan Quinn did some of their earliest work at Victory Gardens, and the Latino Chicago company was born there in 1979. Besides Allen, the theater is now a home base for playwrights Sweet, James Sherman, Charles Smith, Dean Corrin, Steve Carter, John Logan, Gloria Bond Clunie, Lonnie Carter, Nicholas Patricca, Douglas Post and Kristine Thatcher.
Sweet, whose “Porch” in 1979 was the first of his six plays produced at Victory Gardens, says, “It was the first time I got paid royalties as a playwright, the first time I felt like a pro. What has impressed me most about the theater is this: After one of my shows opened and didn’t do well, Dennis asked me, `What have you got for us to do next?’ There is a difference between a theater that produces plays and one that produces playwrights. I’m always grateful to have a production, but it’s particularly important to have a home.”
Survival, and a tight budget, has always been a priority at Victory Gardens. With a subscriber base of 2,847 and an annual budget of $1.2 million, it is not the largest not-for-profit resident theater in Chicago, and it is not the house with the largest number of theater awards.
But, where other small Off Loop theaters of its founding era — renowned theaters such as Remains, The Body Politic and Wisdom Bridge — have failed and gone out of business, the Gardens has endured.
Why? “Simple,” says Norris. “Dennis and Marcie. They’ve stuck with it; they’ve given it their complete devotion over the years, and whatever business knowledge and professional savvy the place has needed to keep running, they’ve supplied.”
This mom-and-pop atmosphere has its drawbacks. Both Zacek and McVay regret losing the theater’s early open-door policy, when so many young directors and actors had their first crack as professionals at the theater. Now, Zacek and Shinner handle most of the directing work, with only an occasional guest, such as Simonson this season for Cleveland’s “Danny Bouncing,” coming on board.
And the search for new audiences never stops; though the subscribers remain loyal, they also grow older.
Still, McVay says, “We would like to grow a little larger, and we would like to start a subscription season again in the small studio theater too. But for our mission, our mainstage (200 seats) is just the right size. We wouldn’t want it to be too much bigger. We like what we’re doing.”
And if Dennis or Marcie ever steps down, there is always Zachary, their 8-year-old son.
“That kid,” says Sherman, “is amazing. He knows every inch of the theater, and he probably has learned more about it than most people who have worked there. He’s the heir apparent.”
