There’s been a tsunami of theater news over the past couple of weeks. Steppenwolf named ensemble members Glenn Davis and Audrey Francis as co-artistic directors, replacing Anna Shapiro, who announced in May that she’d be leaving at the end of her six-year contract this summer. Ann Filmer announced that she’s leaving her post as artistic director at 16th Street Theater in Berwyn, which she founded 14 years ago. (Almost two years ago, Filmer faced charges of mismanagement and racial insensitivity from the creative team of Loy Webb‘s His Shadow.) 16th Street is the smallest and most affordable of professional houses in the state. (Tickets are $22, and they operate in a 49-seat basement theater in the North Berwyn Cultural Center.) Under Filmer’s tenure the company has focused almost exclusively on nurturing new plays. They’ve retained RGW Consulting in Oak Park to formulate a strategic plan for the theater’s future.
And in the “back from the dead” category: iO Theater, which closed presumably for good last June after owner Charna Halpern put the 40-year-old comedy behemoth on the market, citing lost income from the shutdown, will reopen under new owners. (Halpern had faced her own controversies over institutional racism and other issues raised by performers and students at iO.) Local real estate executives Scott Gendell and Larry Weiner bought the iO complex at 1501 N. Kingsbury for an undisclosed sum and plan to reopen it for classes and performances.
The impetus to change the membership rules, notes Shindle, came about through a working group led by Bliss Griffin, Equity’s diversity and inclusion strategist, and it’s just one part of a “retrofit” for the union. Bear Bellinger, a longtime Chicago actor and a “principal councilor” for Equity from the central region (which represents 16 states), served as one of the team leaders for the working group. In a blog post for Equity, Bellinger, who is Black, noted, “The first thing I noticed when I decided to join Actors’ Equity Association was how difficult it was to join Actors’ Equity Association.”
What the Open Access program might mean for Chicago’s storefront scene remains to be seen. Says Shindle, who graduated from Northwestern, “I absolutely love Chicago and Chicago to me is an example of a city with a pretty healthy ecosystem. I’m probably not supposed to say this as a union president, but I’m going to. We all did nonunion theater at one point and some people are most comfortable there, right? So people are going to work a day job and they want to go do a show at night and they’re not seeking to make it their entire living.
For Raven Theatre, the answer is “almost 40 years.” Founded in 1983 by Michael Menendian and Joann Montemurro, the company moved to a two-theater space in Edgewater in 2002, and went through a leadership change in 2017, with Cody Estle named artistic director. Last summer, Markie Gray joined Estle as managing director. And now the company is finally making the leap to the CAT contract program, which means they can hire a limited number of Equity actors and/or stage managers for their productions.
