Or so the mythologizing goes when you talk to theater companies in Chicago. Steppenwolf, now a multimillion-dollar nonprofit theatrical enterprise, started from humble beginnings in a church basement, honing in on a specific brand of honest and raw performance, ballooning into a nationally renowned institution that many theaters hope to emulate. It’s as close to a theatrical American Dream as you can get, a Chicago spin on New York’s “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”
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A lot of these stories remind me of a theater that popped up about 40 minutes away from my home town in New Hampshire earlier this year. It opened in an old H&M (with the original counters still in place and the dressing rooms functioning under the same name but a very different purpose) and hosts a diverse season of original works from a wide variety of producing groups. One of the most surprising parts about this theater is that almost every other store in the outlets it moved into have gone out of business, to the point that it shares the entirety of a clothing outlet with a bowling alley, 2 tech stores, and a Macy's. The self funding theater now pays for the rent of the entire outlet lot to prevent the building from being sold, which is impressive for a relatively small theater space producing original works in rural NH. I don't know where exactly the support for this theater is coming from, but its really inspirational because the only theaters that seem to be surviving in NH right now are professional, community funded, or externally supported in other ways, which often do really well known shows to make as much money back as possible.
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