SR Digest Bonus: Seeing Chicago theater elsewhere

January 1, 2019—Issue #4

Welcome to a special bonus edition of Storefront Rebellion! This free digest brings Chicago theater news and reviews from me, Kris Vire, right to your inbox. I definitely want to hear your feedback: Reply to this email, or if you’re reading this on the web, hit me at kris@krisvire.com or find me on Twitter @krisvire.

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FAYETTEVILLE, ARK. — Happy New Year, friends! I’m writing this from my hometown, 650 miles to the south and west of Chicago, where I’m ringing in 2019 while visiting family and friends.

It’s a long holiday stretch between last week’s newsletter and next week’s with no new show reviews in between. (This trip prevented me from seeing this year’s brief engagement of Burning Bluebeard, but I hope if you were in Chicago this weekend you took my advice and got your tickets.) But here in Fayetteville, Arkansas (population 85,257), I saw some Chicago theater this weekend. Or, at least, I saw some theater created by a bunch of Chicago artists.

The show was Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, as staged by TheatreSquared, an Equity company that launched here in 2006—five years after I moved from Fayetteville to Chicago. I wrote an extensive profile of TheatreSquared three years ago for American Theatre; the $25 million new home the company had just announced at that time is now set to open in the new year.

One of my favorite things about T2 (which, full disclosure, was begun by folks I’ve known for upwards of 20 years, ever since I started as a theater major at the University of Arkansas here) is something I only alluded to in that 2016 profile: the deliberate connection the company has made to Chicago’s theater scene.

TheatreSquared’s Chicago bona fides for Miss Bennet included its director, Keira Fromm; its scenic designer, William Boles; sound designer, Eric Backus; and about three-quarters of its cast: Tyler Meredith, Will Mobley, Gregory Geffrard, Dana Black and Katie Gonzalez.

And while this was an outsized example, it’s not isolated. Multiple shows every season for the last several years have brought Chicago artists to Fayetteville; TheatreSquared holds general auditions in Chicago every year.

I love this not just because I love showing off my hometown—though I do—or because the word is spreading that Fayetteville is a great place to work—though it is. As an advocate for Chicago theater, I love what this Chicago–Arkansas pipeline says about Chicago’s increasingly equitable reputation as a theater talent pool.

Even just two decades ago, when I was a college theater major, we didn’t talk about Chicago. I know now that there was incredible work being done in the late ’90s by the likes of Famous Door, the Journeymen, Remains, Cardiff Giant, About Face, Writers, Plasticene and more (and that they were expanding on what had been built by the Goodman, Organic, Victory Gardens, Wisdom Bridge, etc.).

But we weren’t hearing about it in Arkansas, where the most that had trickled down to us might have been word of Steppenwolf, because they had had success in New York. Chicago and its theater scene weren’t topics we covered in any of my classes. The fact that I moved to Chicago after undergrad—with no real intention at the time of staying there long-term, mind you—now feels like an incredible stroke of luck.

The pipeline that TheatreSquared has established flows both ways: Chicago artists have a new market that’s actively looking to offer them work (in a charming, arts-loving Southern town), and the young artists now coming up through the University of Arkansas are learning that Chicago is a vital and viable place to make a theater career. It might be my personal favorite form of cross-pollination.

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