AMERICAN THEATRE: Small and midsize performance venues help create Chicago’s patented storefront scene. For years, multi-venue spaces across the city have been home to these intimate productions and the companies that crafted them, providing residencies of a sort for smaller theatres that didn’t have their own spaces to not only make their work but cultivate audiences. When these rental outfits shutter or change direction, as a number of notable Chicago venues have in the last few years, they disrupt this fragile community. Recently, space has become increasingly hard to find for theatre companies in Chicago, making it more difficult for smaller companies to maintain their already tenuous footholds.
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Working in and for small theater groups is not an easy life. I am thinking back to a local theater in Baltimore called Single Carrot Theater. They were run by a group of artists who bought a small building in Baltimore and turned it into a black box where they were residents for several years. They would put on fairly regular productions and rent out their building to supplement their income. This worked for several years, but after an organization that was renting their space moved somewhere else, they could no longer afford the building and began doing work in found spaces such as buses. This kept them alive for a little while longer, but during COVID the company finally had to truly shut down. Their production manager taught at my school, so we got some of their gear and I got to hear a lot about the story.
I personally want to work in larger-scale theater companies where budgets are higher even if it is not possible to do as unique of work, but I do still have an appreciation for how much artists can grow in small spaces like these.
Chicago is such an interesting theatre market for a few reasons but before I begin, I will say that a lot of these make theatre harder to survive in Chicago. First is that the price for rental properties can be astronomical. It is a booming city and similar to New York, the landscape of the space is constantly changing. Solidifying a long-term partnership with a venue, I imagine, for this reason can be a challenge. Chicago is also located in an interesting part of the country. To the north you have Milwaukee, a small but theatre filled town with no less than five professional theatres. To the east you have Cincinnati, and you are not that far from Cleveland, two more densely artistic cities and to the south you have St. Louis which is a smaller but still metropolitan city. I think all of this makes the Chicago theatre scene rather scrapy which I personally enjoy and when theatres do succeed there they are cherished by the community.
It sucks to see that the venues do not seem to be looking out for smaller theatre companies the way they used to. Even though they seem to be prioritizing profits over supporting the theatres, as mentioned in the article this will only hurt the theatre scene as a whole down the road. Reading this after the article on the cultural arts crisis in Chicago shines a new light on that subject. While that article focused more on audiences not seeking out shows and this one focuses on smaller theatres not having venues, it is sad to see that the Chicago theatre scene is struggling on so many sides. Knowing the cost of Chicago, I really hope that these theatres can find places to reside and work.
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