When the Gift Theatre, a storefront company with deep roots in the northwest neighborhood of Jefferson Park, celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2011, a tradition was born: a festival of 10 new works, each 10 minutes long, playing for 10 performances only. Simply titled “TEN,” the popular festival became an annual event. This year’s iteration, opening on March 25 at A Red Orchid Theatre’s Old Town venue, is the first production of the Gift’s 25th anniversary season and features world premieres by Chicago playwrights John Gawlik, Jennifer Rumberger, Gregory Fenner, Kimberly Dixon-Mays, Dolores Diaz, Stephanie Alison Walker, Emilio Williams, Jermaine Jenkins and Brett Neveu.
“TEN25th” marks the third festival curated by co-artistic directors Brittany Burch and Jennifer Glasse, who took over leadership of the company when founding artistic director Michael Patrick Thornton stepped down in 2022. (Emjoy Gavino, an actor and casting director who splits her time between Chicago and Minneapolis, briefly served as the third co-artistic director and remains a Gift ensemble member.)
The festival’s programming tends to come together organically, rather than beginning with a specific theme or prompt for writers, Burch and Glasse said in a recent interview. This year’s contributors include several Gift ensemble members (Gawlik, Rumberger and Fenner), two writers whose previous plays have been developed through the Gift’s “In the Works” reading series (Dixon-Mays and Walker), a student of Glasse’s (Jenkins) and other established local playwrights (Diaz, Williams and Neveu). As usual, the lineup will also include an improv set.
The 10-minute format for these new works offers certain advantages from an artistic perspective. “I think it’s easier to take risk,” said Burch. “There’s not as much weight on, ‘Is everybody going to love this? How will it sell?’ It’s a really cool way to experiment and try new things and just play.” As for audiences, Burch said, “People know they’re in for a wild ride, and so even if you don’t like one piece, it’s over in 10 minutes, and then you have another one. There’s something for everybody.”
“My favorite feedback from ‘TEN’ is when people are like, ‘I wish it had been longer; I would love to see the full play version of this one,’” said Glasse. Multiple former “TEN” premieres have been developed into full-length, successfully produced plays, such as “Obliteration” by ensemble member Andrew Hinderaker, which went on to further productions, including a sold-out run in Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater in 2024.
The shows featured in “TEN25th” range from comic to serious, movement-based to dialogue-heavy, realistic to absurdist. Glasse will perform in two plays: “Landing” by Dixon-Mays, which Glasse describes as a “beautiful slice-of-life piece” set in the time of the Apollo moon landings, and Rumberger’s “And Then There Was Morning,” a futuristic story with elements of magical realism. Jenkins’ movement-based piece offers a powerful reflection on his journey through the world as a young Black man. Fenner’s “Bozos” is a comedy about the administrators of a clown school navigating funding cuts and layoffs, while Williams places King Claudius from “Hamlet” in the unlikely scenario of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. A wild ride, indeed.
As the Gift celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, it’s worth taking a look back to the company’s early days. Like many Chicago theaters, the Gift originated in the imaginations of eager young artists — in this case, Thornton and William Nedved, who studied together at the University of Iowa in the late 1990s. As founding ensemble member Maggie Andersen recounts in her recent memoir, “No Stars in Jefferson Park,” the group that would become the original ensemble gathered for their first play reading in a crowded Lakeview apartment in 2001. Many had met Thornton through the School at Steppenwolf, a prestigious training program (currently on hiatus) that has launched many acting careers.
Committed to producing intimate, ensemble-based work, the Gift took its name from a passage in Polish director and dramatic theorist Jerzy Grotowski’s “Towards A Poor Theatre,” which reads, “The actor makes a total gift of himself (to the audience).” In 2005, the company opened its first permanent venue in a former shoe store in Jefferson Park, which was a blue-collar neighborhood with few local arts institutions when Thornton grew up there.
During the following years, the Gift drew critical acclaim and loyal audiences with productions such as Conor McPherson’s “The Good Thief,” a one-man show for which Thornton won a Jeff Award in 2006, and the 2015 world premiere of “Good for Otto” by Tony Award-winning playwright David Rabe. As the founding artistic director, Thornton continued to lead the company until 2022 while also building a successful acting career in TV and on Broadway, where he most recently appeared in “Waiting for Godot.”
Like many of the original ensemble members, the current artistic leaders also met through the School at Steppenwolf; Burch and Glasse attended the program together in 2010. During the early years of their tenure as artistic directors, their main focus was keeping the Gift open and actively producing in a period when midsized theaters were “dropping like flies, due to the hardships of the pandemic,” Burch said.
Over the past year, the company took a pause from full productions to conduct a strategic planning process, from which several goals emerged: growing and nurturing the ensemble, continuing to develop new works by local writers, and reaffirming the company’s ties to Jefferson Park.
Choosing the theme of “homecoming” for the upcoming season, the Gift will stage the Chicago premiere of Marina Carr’s “Marble,” as well as its December gala, in Jefferson Park’s Copernicus Center, a historic movie palace turned cultural venue. Another full-length production, the world premiere of “Hayward” by ensemble member Netta Walker, will play in Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater this fall.
Currently an itinerant company, the Gift has outgrown its original space and hopes to find a new permanent venue in Jefferson Park someday. However, “we are not in a position to start a capital campaign for a multi-million-dollar project at this point,” said Burch. “It’s more important for us right now to just continue to produce.” When “Marble” opens in August, it will mark the Gift’s first mainstage production in Jefferson Park since its final pre-pandemic show, “The Pillowman,” closed early in March 2020.
The company’s partnership with the Copernicus Foundation, the local nonprofit that operates the Copernicus Center, provides “a great opportunity” to bring the Gift home, said Burch. “People in the Jefferson Park community are just excited, because we are going to be in the heart of Jefferson Park,” Glasse added. “That’s really nice to give that back to them.”
Emily McClanathan is a freelance critic.
If you go
The Gift Theatre’s “TEN25th” festival plays March 25 to April 4 at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N Wells St.; tickets $25 at 773-283-7071 and thegifttheatre.org.
