Chris Jones: What happened to theater in Chicago?
CHICAGO — In March 2019, a group of Steppenwolf Theatre leaders gathered at the offices of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, an internationally renowned architecture and design firm that had designed the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia and the 120-story Wuhan Greenland Center in China. Not coincidentally, the firm had also worked on The Yard theater at Chicago Shakespeare, a $35 million project that opened in 2017.
They were hardly the first globally famous architects to work with a Chicago-area theater. In 2016, Writers Theatre in Glencoe opened a $28 million theater, designed by the renowned architect Jeanne Gang and located in a leafy suburb with a population of just 9,000 people; Writers had made its bones in the back of a bookstore but the Gang commission was announced at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Steppenwolf was spending more than $54 million on its new theater-in-the-round, a 50,000-square-foot expansion including classroom and rehearsal spaces. Gill said he and his firm had “approached the project in the way that you’d think about a play.” “The ultimate idea,” he said at the time, “is that there will now be a village of architecture at Steppenwolf that works as a full ensemble.”
Like the projects it succeeded, Gill’s eloquent words reflected a formidable level of ambition. Three new, world-class theater buildings with a cumulative total cost of $117 million! Chicago theater, it seemed at that moment, was seeing an inestimably thrilling explosion of growth.
But the landscape of the Chicago, and the broader American, theater, has changed so much since 2019 it is almost unrecognizable.
Both of Steppenwolf’s top leaders in 2017 — and executive director David Schmitz — are no longer with the company, which reports it. Nor are Chicago Shakespeare executive director Criss Henderson and artistic director . In fact, leadership at top Chicago nonprofit theaters has almost all changed over, almost all at once.
