Rob Howard, Nadirah Host,
and Marsha Estell in
My Man Bovanne
A little more than a year ago, City Lit Theater stood on the brink. After 20 years of producing high-quality literary adaptations for the stage, the company’s coffers were empty, and debts were accumulating faster than the theater could pay them off.
For several seasons, the company had been generating just enough income to keep going. Then last year, the theater’s holiday show–an annual adaptation of one of P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves novels–didn’t generate as much revenue as hoped.
“We had to suspend operations,” artistic director Mark Richard gravely recalls. As a result, City Lit dismissed its staff, closed its office, and both Richard and managing director Page H. Hearn found day jobs to pay their own bills while they worked to pay off the theater’s debt and tried to decide what to do next.
“These difficulties always hover over small theaters,” says Richard. “It is the downside of how vibrant the Chicago theater scene is. There is tons and tons of activity–and that means it is more and more difficult to stay visible.” And stay afloat.
It was a sad end, or so it seemed, for a company born in 1979 when a trio of young theater artists, Arnie Aprill, David Dillon, and Lorell Wyatt, founded City Lit in a less crowded, less vibrant theater scene. Aprill in particular had spent a great deal of time knocking around the young off-Loop theater movement, working for a time with Paul Sills and the legendary Body Politic. Using techniques borrowed from Sills and others, Aprill began adapting classic short stories for the stage.
These early adaptations were performed concert-style with a small group of actors performing different roles and sharing the narration. Performances took place in spaces not usually associated with theater–say a common area at IIT, or the Three Arts Club.
It was a heady time for Chicago’s off-Loop scene. New theaters were popping up all the time, and, as Richard remembers, “You could put all your money in your production, invite the press. They’d show up and if they liked the show, the reviews came out in a timely fashion and the phones rang.”
