Given all the recent administrative turmoil at the Victory Gardens Theater, you might expect Dennis Zacek to wish he were not currently in the throes of directing a play. But that’s not the approach of a man who has been at the creative helm of the Midwestern citadel of new work for more than 20 years.
“Getting my teeth into a Douglas Post play has been a blessing,” Zacek said last week between a couple of lengthy sighs. “Great artistic things can come when you are in severe pain. You develop a heightened sense of reality.”
As the Tribune reported on Sept. 8, the board of directors of Victory Gardens recently voted to hire a new chief executive officer of the theater, potentially limiting the influence of Zacek and his wife, managing director Marcelle McVay. Zacek and McVay have, of course, been at the helm of Victory Gardens almost since the theater’s beginnings.
If the board’s new appointment goes through as planned, Zacek and McVay are not expected to remain in their current posts. And because their identities are so linked with the theater they have long nurtured, it is hard for most people to imagine Victory Gardens without Zacek and McVay or Zacek and McVay without Victory Gardens.
Late last week, Zacek quietly was hoping that the board’s extraordinary recent actions would be resolved internally in favor of the status quo (at press time, there had been no formal developments in a situation being watched closely in the theater community). And while he acknowledged receiving numerous recent expressions of support from both the theater’s subscribers and its resident ensemble of playwrights, Zacek was eager to shift the topic of conversation to the stuff that propels him out of bed these tough recent mornings — Post’s “Blissfield” and Victory Gardens’ ongoing commitment to new plays.
“I’ve spent the last 27 years developing new works,” Zacek said. “And we’ve all worked on this one with joy, just like all the others.”
Post’s career is a good example of how a theater can invest in new plays while still pleasing an audience and achieving a level of financial stability. Long nurtured at the Gardens, Post has become a very successful writer in recent years. That has happened, in part, because Post (a Chicago resident) is a savvy, commercial scribe who knows how to keep an audience in his grip.
There have been seven recent productions of “Earth and Sky,” the Post script that premiered at the Gardens; they included a well-received revival at the Circle Theatre in Forest Park. Post spent time in England working on a substantial British tour of the play, which featured performers well-known from television there. Also, Post’s “Murder at Green Meadows” was recently performed at the American Theatre in Hamburg, Germany,
Post’s musical “Gethsemane” was recently workshopped in Chicago, and he is working on a commission from the Newberry Library and the Field Museum. None of these opportunities, he says, would have come to him without Victory Gardens.
“There is no other theater in the country with the same commitment to new work and, more specifically, to Chicago writers,” Post says. “It’s critical to the continued growth of the theater in this city and beyond.”
“Blissfield,” which is in previews this weekend and opens on Monday, has the mystery format that Post favors. Although it’s tough to believe, Post insists that the idea for the piece was provided by a drunken man in an English pub (both names long forgotten).
“I was sitting in a pub in Kilburn talking with an old and drunk painter,” Post says. “He told me my next play should be about a man who goes home and finds that everything has changed. He told me it should be Kafkaesque. So I took all that as a sign to get back to work and I wrote what he wanted.”
Post, rather than the inebriated painter, added the details. A foreign correspondent (played by Kevin Gudahl) comes back to the Midwest for the funeral of a friend (and a former congressman with progressive views) who is assumed to have killed himself. As the play unfolds, the hero finds there was more to the death than those in his little community had hitherto assumed.
“It’s a mystery that wants to be a political play,” Post says. “It’s a big play for me that represents a culmination of a lot of my previous scripts.”
Those previous works, of course, all first took flight at the Gardens.
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On Monday night at 6 p.m., the mainstage of the Goodman Theatre will host a celebration of the life of Michael Maggio. Maggio served as the Goodman’s associate artistic director from 1987 until his death on Aug. 19 at age 49 from complications of post-transplant lymphoma. His influence, though, went far beyond the Goodman’s doors. Aside from serving in the last year of his life as the much-beloved dean of DePaul University’s Theatre School, Maggio gave casting breaks to countless actors (including Ross Lehman, who was featured in this column last week) and suggested great new scripts to numerous little theater companies whose creative doings often occupy this space. Since Maggio’s death, the remarkable depth of his influence on the Chicago theater community has become increasingly obvious.
Monday’s event, which will be free and open to the public, will feature a mix of personal tributes to the late director and images from his theatrical work. “We are emphasizing the word `celebration,’ ” says Goodman spokeswoman Cindy Bandle. “We’re just glad we had Michael with us for as long as we did.”
