V is for Vernon Avenue in Glencoe, where you will find one of the most intimate and successful theaters that the Chicago area has ever known. The Nicholas Pennell Theatre is located at the back of Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Ave., and it is where the Writers’ Theatre has been doing its first-rate thing for more than a decade.
The history of Chicago theater has many stories of small spaces filled by the big dreams of actors, directors and writers. For those of a certain age, the Writers’ Theatre evokes the origins of Steppenwolf Theatre, which began in the mid-1970s in the basement of the Immaculate Conception Church in Highland Park before becoming nationally known and renowned. Those even older might remember sitting in the cramped Kingston Mines on Lincoln Avenue and watching a buoyant little show called “Grease,” before it went on to become, for a time, Broadway’s longest-running musical.
Size, when it comes to theater, really doesn’t matter. The Writers’ Theatre has stayed true to its mission: “The word and the artist are our primary focus.”
The current production is a new adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” which opened May 6 and is scheduled to run through Aug. 3. The run is long in order to accommodate the theater’s more than 3,500 subscribers.
Some tickets are held back for the general public, and you really should try to get there because the company plans to move later this year to a larger, 100-seat space two blocks away. Co-founder and artistic director Michael Halberstam says that the current space will remain, perhaps serving as a studio for experimental works.
The move is long overdue, and there is no reason to believe that the quality of productions will suffer with more seats and elbow room. And the next time you hear about a theater starting in a basement, in the back of a bookstore, in a bar or in a storefront, think about visiting. You might witness the birth of something wonderful.
