2016 In Theater Was Wildly Convulsive On And Offstage

I think it’s safe to assume that nobody in Chicago’s theater community had a worse 2016 than Darrell Cox and Joe Jahraus. Or deserved it more. Decades of bad behavior caught up with them in June, when the Reader published an exhaustive report by Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt, detailing physical and psychological abuse carried out by Cox (with Jahraus in the role of enabling sidekick) at their off-Loop home, Profiles Theatre. Reportedly aided by a crisis-management PR firm, Cox made a few wan stabs at saving the situation. But community outrage was so intense—not to say creative, protesters papering the theater’s storefront with Reader covers—that Profiles closed down less than a week after the story appeared.

But that’s not all. Not even close.

But then, on yet another hand—the one that holds the reason for all that’s happened this year—there are the theaters and their shows.