You’d be hard pressed to find another theater in the country with 2,300 subscribers and a whopping 50 seats in the house. But especially in the past two years, Writers’ Theatre — located behind the store Books on Vernon, in downtown Glencoe — has enjoyed extraordinary growth. There are several clear reasons.
North Shore audiences have responded warmly to the theater’s programming, which places an emphasis on literary, poetic and passionate works by established authors ranging from Tennessee Williams to Noel Coward. The theater offers an unusual level of intimacy to a suburban audience that does not have all that many storefront options. Artistic director Michael Halberstam has coaxed many of the best-established local actors and directors out to his theater in the last couple of seasons, and his work has been supported by local critics.
“Michael has focused on his art and let everything else flow from there,” says Marj Halperin, executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres. “He hasn’t worried about fancy buildings or going after the same New York hits for which everyone else is competing. He’s just defined a narrow artistic mission in a community that appreciates his work. It sounds simple, but very few theaters stay focused in that way.”
But as Halberstam starts his new season with “Spite for Spite” (which previews this weekend and opens to the press on Sunday), he’s got some tough decisions to face. Aside from a few single tickets, the entire run of the play is virtually sold out to subscribers (there are 1,000 more than last year). But even though the annual budget has increased this year by $300,000, to a new total of $750,000, there are so few seats in the theater that it is impossible to bring in enough money at the box office to support increases in the number of full-time employees, the size of actor paychecks and all the other accoutrements of growing arts organizations.
“We don’t have the staff to adequately support our subscribers and we don’t have the ticket sales to adequately support out staff,” Halberstam admits with his usual frankness. “We just cannot sustain this growth with a 50-seat theater.”
At various times over the past couple of years, Halberstam has talked about knocking down walls and adding more seats, but he has now decided that’s not viable. Writers’ Theatre has never had the luxury of proper dressing rooms or on-site offices, and the property is so close to the back wall of Books on Vernon there is no room to build an entrance for the theater itself.
“You don’t,” Halberstam says, “want a couple of hundred people traipsing back through a bookstore.”
That means the company needs a new home. Halberstam says that the theater may not remain in Glencoe, but he is determined to stay on the North Shore.
“That’s where 90 percent of our audience comes from,” he says. He also wants to maintain the theater’s reputation for intimacy, even if he’s looking for four times the seating capacity.
In practical terms, that’s probably going to require the Village of Glencoe (or a neighboring community) to offer the kind of financial support that can be seen in the City of Chicago, which recently contributed $1.5 million towards the new home of the Lookingglass Theatre Company in the Pumping Station on Michigan Avenue. In that sweetheart deal, Lookingglass landed a rent of $1 per year.
“Village governments have fewer resources and are not as able to do that kind of thing,” Halberstam acknowledges. “But we need to find a new home within a year or so.”
In the meantime, Writers’ is presenting a season that includes Austin Pendleton’s “Booth,” Simon Gray’s “Butley” and August Strindberg’s “The Father.” Most shows, it seems, can be done in a shoebox.
“I never gave them a nickel’s chance of doing a play this huge in that theater,” says Dakin Matthews, the California-based translator of “Spite for Spite,” “but they have somehow squeezed everything in.”
“Spite for Spite” incidentally, is a translation of a work by Augustine Moreto, a contemporary of Lope De Vega’s. The cast of Halberstam’s production includes Karen Woditsch, Maggie Carney and Mark Ulrich.This weekend in Glencoe marks theEnglish language premiere of the play, which Matthews describes as “a great undiscovered classic.”
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Assigned to review “Party” for the Tribune at the Bailiwick Repertory last week, I looked up a piece I had written about the original production in 1992. Back then, I had made a reference to Brain Bentley, listed as the play’s author and granted a long biographical blurb in the program. As anyone who has followed the many subsequent revivals well knows, “Party” was created by David Dillon, who now takes full authorship credit. So what happened to this Bentley fellow?
He never existed. “It’s all part of the `Party’ mystique,” says Bailiwick artistic director David Zak. “We made him up because we thought the play would get better reviews if the critics thought that David Dillon [something of a notorious figure in the Chicago theater community] was not the author. It was just a little experiment.”
Party on, guys.
