Producer Hope Abelson Dies at 95
Born Hope Altman in the Chicago area on September 21, 1910, she studied dance as a teenager and went on to theater studies at Northwestern University. She began a career in live radio, playing occasional roles on the Ma Perkins soap opera and other national programs that originated in Chicago. Following her marriage to attorney and businessman Lester Abelson, she served as director of the Red Cross Speaker’s Bureau during World War II, organizing pitches for blood and bandages. After the war, she and three of her colleagues — one of them a young WGN newsman named Mike Wallace — each put up $1,000 to launch the Chevy Chase Theatre in suburban Wheeling. The area’s first star-policy summer stock operation, it presented shows starring such performers as Imogene Coca, Arthur Treacher, and Ruth Chatterton.
Abelson later served as executive director of Music Theatre, a tent operation in Northbrook. On a casting trip to New York, Abelson was introduced to producer Cheryl Crawford, who hired Abelson as her production assistant on Camino Real, a new play by Tennessee Williams. The play opened on Broadway in March 1953. Abelson quickly moved up from assistantship to producing; her other Broadway credits include The Golden Apple, The Rainmaker, The Egghead, and The Royal Hunt of the Sun. She was instrumental in the early development of Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre and in creating a United States support group for Canada’s Stratford Festival, of which she was a Life Governor.
She is probably best known for her unflagging financial support of Off-Loop theatre in Chicago; her generosity and that of her husband aided such major not-for-profit companies as Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Court Theatre, and the Goodman Theatre. Abelson also helped to establish the League of Chicago Theatres, and her philanthropy extended to the visual arts, music and dance. She and her husband finally allowed their names to be inscribed in bricks and mortar when they underwrote construction of a new building for Court Theatre at the University of Chicago, her husband’s alma mater. Lester Abelson died in 1980, and the Lester and Hope Abelson Auditorium opened in 1981.
Hope Abelson endowed the Abelson Fund for Artistic Development at the Goodman Theatre and the Hope Abelson Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University’s School of Speech. One of her most extraordinary endeavors was her development of the Chicago Associates of the Stratford Festival, an organization that has underwritten the participation of one or two young Chicago actors in the training program and the full repertory season of the Stratford Festival each year since 1983.
A private funeral will be followed by a public memorial at a date to be announced.
