Changes at the top of Chicago theaters large and small have been a constant for the past three years—we have definitely been experiencing the biggest shift in leadership I’ve seen in the decades that I’ve been writing about the scene here. Not coincidentally, these changes are happening as regional theaters across the country wrestle with how to grow their audiences again after the COVID-19 shutdown and how to reimagine fundraising in a time of declining donations, as well as plummeting subscription and single-ticket sales.
Susan V. Booth took over last October as artistic director at the Goodman after Robert Falls’s 35-year tenure. Braden Abraham became only the second permanent artistic director at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre this winter. (He took over 15 months after founding artistic director Michael Halberstam resigned in the wake of sexual harassment allegations.) Steppenwolf named Audrey Francis and Glenn Davis as joint artistic directors after the departure of Anna Shapiro (and also brought in Brooke Flanagan as executive director). Teatro Vista also went with a duo by putting Lorena Diaz and Wendy Mateo in charge as co-artistic directors. Gift Theatre did Steppenwolf and Teatro Vista one better by naming three people—Brittany Burch, Emjoy Gavino, and Jennifer Glasse—to the top of their leadership roster.
Remy Bumppo gave the nod to Marti Lyons for the top spot, Redtwist hired Dusty Brown, Raven just announced Sarah Slight as its new artistic director, and Congo Square added Ericka Ratcliff and Charlique Rolle as artistic director and managing director, respectively. Oak Park Festival Theatre just opened its first season with new artistic director Peter G. Andersen, and City Lit Theater announced that Brian Pastor will take over next summer as executive artistic director when producer and artistic director Terry McCabe retires.
Some of the changes we saw in recent years didn’t last: Ken-Matt Martin was dismissed as artistic director at Victory Gardens last year before his first season was completed, and the Biograph Theater continues to sit dark and empty on Lincoln Avenue—its future murky. Lanise Antoine Shelley only got two productions at the House Theatre of Chicago during her tenure as artistic director before the board pulled the plug on the company. Reader contributor Sheri Flanders wrote about a wave of new Black leaders at theaters in Chicago in September 2020. As Flanders noted in a follow-up earlier this year, several of those profiled have since moved on, and some of the companies they led (including Sideshow and BoHo) have closed down entirely.
Nationally, Nataki Garrett, who led Oregon Shakespeare Festival for four years (including during the pandemic and wildfires that threatened the company’s venue in Ashland, Oregon) stepped down earlier this year. Garrett had faced racist death threats during her tenure, and the theater itself announced an emergency fundraising appeal this spring driven in part by declining post-COVID-19 ticket sales (which nearly every company has faced) and in part by entrenched financial arrangements, including restricted endowments and other instruments that don’t allow for cash fluidity in times of fiscal stress.
This week, Chicago Shakespeare Theater finally ended the suspense over who would be stepping into the shoes of founding artistic director Barbara Gaines, who stepped down last month, and longtime executive director Criss Henderson, who departed at the end of 2022. The theater has gone with Edward Hall, 57, as artistic director and Kimberly Motes, 56, as executive director—choices that seem to reinforce the desire of Chicago Shakespeare to continue to be a major player nationally and abroad and also shore up the company’s infrastructure and foundations in the post-COVID-19 world. Both Hall and Motes expect to start their new positions in the fall.
Gaines started the company as Shakespeare Repertory in 1986 with a production of Henry V on the roof of the Red Lion Pub on Lincoln Avenue. The company got its current name in 1987 and spent several years in residence at the Ruth Page Center in the Gold Coast before landing in its plush digs on Navy Pier in 1999. It expanded its footprint on the lakefront with the addition of the Yard in 2017. Under Henderson and Gaines’s leadership, Chicago Shakespeare brought in international artists with the WorldStage series and made several appearances abroad themselves.
Hall, the son of legendary British director Sir Peter Hall, staged Rose Rage for Chicago Shakes in 2003. His literally visceral adaptation of Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2, and Henry VI, Part 3 (which used about 20 pounds of organ meat in every performance) ended up off-Broadway, marking the company’s first New York City production. He also led London’s Hampstead Theatre for nearly a decade, bringing it back from near-bankruptcy through a renewed emphasis on new work. Hall founded the all-male ensemble-based Propeller Theatre in 1997 and toured their productions throughout Asia and the United States. He is slated to direct Richard III at Chicago Shakes in February 2024 (next season is the last programmed by Gaines).
While Hall brings the international perspective, Motes’s background seems to dovetail nicely with Chicago Shakes’s emphasis on family programming and community outreach. She was the managing director of Minneapolis’s Tony Award-winning Children’s Theatre Company and spearheaded strategic planning around increasing the theater’s “equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice efforts to eliminate barriers to participation for those underrepresented in theater,” according to a Chicago Shakes press release.
It is perhaps worth noting that Hall and Motes are also white, which means that Davis of Steppenwolf and Christopher Chase Carter of Mercury Theater Chicago remain the only Black artistic directors at larger theaters in Chicago at the moment. Northlight Theatre under B.J. Jones and Court Theatre under Charles Newell are among the largest theaters in the area that haven’t changed leadership since 2020.
Saying farewell to Deborah Acker and Jeffrey Carlson
Two artists with connections to Chicago Shakespeare died July 6. Deborah Acker (more commonly known as Deb), the longtime production stage manager for the company whose tenure stretched back to the Ruth Page years, died at age 69. Actor and teacher Jeffrey Carlson, who performed there twice but who found his longtime teaching partner Susan Hart through Chicago Shakespeare, died at age 48.
Chicago Shakespeare’s public statement on Acker said, “We are heartbroken at the loss of Deb Acker, our beloved stage manager for over 30 years. She was not only a brilliant theatermaker but also a generous, thoughtful, and wickedly funny person. In her extraordinary tenure at the theater, she led over 100 productions and worked with thousands of actors, directors, designers, and artists from Chicago and around the world. She was a woman of grit and wit and wisdom.”
Sound designer and composer Lindsay Jones, who created the sound and music for many Chicago Shakespeare productions, says, “What Deb really excelled at was being able to work under incredible pressure and make everyone feel like they were supported and everything is calm and is going to be OK. She managed to have a great sense of humor about it while she did that. You wouldn’t know necessarily how special that was unless you went around the country like I do, and constantly put yourself in this situation and see how different people handle it, to be able to know that Deb Acker was truly exceptional in how she handled that stuff.”
What encompassed “that stuff”? In a Facebook tribute to Acker, Jones wrote, “By the time I first met Deb, she had already been at Chicago Shakespeare for a very long time, and you could sorta tell that she had really seen it all. She definitely had. And here I was, coming in with all kinds of ideas, which I’m positive totally drove her crazy. ‘I need you to call this cue a second and a half before the sword goes into the body.’ ‘Seriously?’ I was totally serious. And she would sigh and then write it in pencil in her book while loudly repeating what she wrote. ‘SOUND CUE EIGHTY-SEVEN POINT FIVE—ONE AND A HALF SECONDS BEFORE THE SWORD GOES INTO THE BODY.’ But you know what? She fucking nailed that cue every time. And I was totally dead serious when I would get on com afterwards to tell her that she totally fucking nailed it and I wanted to have her babies.”
Joan Claussen, lighting crew head at Chicago Shakes and a longtime friend of Acker’s, notes that she first met Acker on one of her first jobs out of college, working backstage on a 1987 production of Driving Miss Daisy at the Briar Street Theatre. “She was fun, on top of it at work, and I immediately respected her.”
She adds, “We worked so closely together for so long that it became almost automatic. I could tell from her intake of breath where the ‘go’ [order for the cue] was going to come.” Claussen created a private Facebook page for people to share memories of Acker and notes that her sense of humor (often reflected in her wry nightly show reports) has been mentioned repeatedly. Claussen also points out that Acker was a mentor for many women in stage management and technical theater over her long career.
There will be services for Acker Saturday, July 22, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, with a Chicago memorial to come later.
Carlson made history by playing the first trans character on a daytime drama in 2006 on All My Children. (An obit in the Guardian said Carlson was named for Jeff Martin, a longtime character on the soap beloved by his mother.) A native of Long Beach, California, Carlson graduated from Juilliard and made his Broadway debut in 2003 in Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who Is Sylvia and went on to star in the Boy George musical Taboo.
But for Chicago theater artists, it wasn’t just his national profile or even his onstage work that made the biggest impact. It was his dedication as a longtime teacher of Shakespearean technique.
Carlson played Prince Hal in Chicago Shakespeare’s 2006 epic staging of Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2. It was his Chicago debut, and he made the city his home off and on for the rest of his life. For many years, Carlson taught here with longtime actor and coach Hart, who he met while they were doing the Henry IV shows. (The Chicago Shakes production traveled to England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, and the review from the Guardian called Carlson “a star in the making.”)
Hart recalls their first meeting at the first readthrough for the show, where she noticed “this blonde boy across the table. And then he opened his mouth and started reading, and my jaw went on the floor. I never heard anybody navigate the language so beautifully in my life. So I started to nod to him across the table, and he of course had to have thought, ‘Who’s that woman? Why is she nodding at me?’” Hart adds, “At the first break, I bounded up to him and said, ‘Hi, my name’s Susan. I teach here. Who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m Jeffrey.’ And I said, ‘OK, hey, it’s great to meet you. We need to be friends.’ And then he didn’t know anybody in Chicago at that point, really. And we just became friends and then immediately realized that we had a great affinity for Shakespeare and his language. And we just started a gorgeous, rich, beautiful friendship from that very first day of rehearsal.”
When Carlson relocated to Chicago, the two eventually launched what they called, reasonably enough, Carlson and Hart Shakespeare classes, which they ran together for nearly ten years, often designing courses that would do a deep dive into each of the plays in the Shakespearean canon.
As a teacher, Hart says Carlson was remarkable in part because, “He cared very much, as I do, about the individual actors, as actors with individual needs. Every actor has their own path. And we never had the expectation that all the students would rise to the same level together. It was done personally and individually with lots of love and lots of care. And we became family.”
In a Sun-Times obituary, Hart also mentioned that Carlson, who was not trans, would call her to help him develop the character of Zoe, the trans rock star on All My Children. “He realized he was representing a group of people he was proud to get to know and represent.”
Carlson is survived by his parents and two siblings. A brother preceded him in death. Hart says a Chicago celebration of life will be scheduled for later this summer.