A Stage for the Ages
August 1, 2014 (last updated on August 1, 2014)
Court Theatre, now in its 60th season, went from “a new type of summer theatre” to a Chicago institution.
Court Theatre is a mainstay of the Chicago theater scene, a company so dependable that in 2006 the Wall Street Journal dubbed it the most consistently excellent theater in America.
But Nicholas Rudall remembers when the campus company was so short of cash that he had to donate a fridge for theater staff to use. Rudall, a professor emeritus in Classics who was Court’s artistic director from 1971 to 1994, laughs at the memory. “That’s the way theater actually works,” he says of Court’s hardscrabble beginnings. “It comes from people with a passion for it and people willing to do anything for it.”
Court was the brainchild of University Theater director Marvin Phillips, who in 1955 wanted to capitalize on the popularity of outdoor summer theater.
That summer, a coalition of students, faculty, and community members performed three Molière plays on a small Elizabethan stage under the elms of Hutchinson Courtyard. The plays were translated by French professor Richard d’Anjou—an early example of the collaboration between Court and UChicago scholars that has since become a hallmark.
“The University of Chicago is . . . creating a new type of summer theatre,” Phillips wrote in a memo to University leaders after the company’s first season. “Instead of following a star system or relying on the production of last year’s Broadway's successes, we are presenting only examples of the world’s great dramatic literature in the best tradition of the academic theatre.”
Today, Court’s Center for Classic Theatre taps the expertise of faculty to translate and adapt plays and advise the actors and production team. In 2011 Travis Jackson, associate professor in Music, advised Court’s artistic director Charles Newell on the score for his Jeff Award–winning production of Porgy and Bess. Last year a conversation between Newell and Judith Zeitlin, professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, resulted in a daring revival of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.
Court’s emphasis on classic theater and willingness to stage difficult modern works were welcome additions to Chicago’s still-emergent theater scene in the 1960s and 1970s, says Rudall. Back then, “you couldn’t look in the newspaper and decide to go see an Ibsen play or even Shakespeare.”
Court and its directors embraced the challenge of producing the works of Brecht and Shaw and Euripides. Rudall’s background in classics proved to be an asset. “Even when I was teaching Greek tragedies in Greek, I was always thinking of them as theater, not just as literature,” he explains. “Both sides have touched each other.”
Although Court performed serious plays, the company still liked to enjoy themselves at the theater. A 1969 memo reminded performers that “DRINKING INTOXICATING LIQUORS in and around Mandel Hall is against a University law. Abuses of it have cost us a dress rehearsal once, in the old days, so never again.”
Productions earned strong reviews that attracted talented actors and technical staff from across the country. A young Kevin Kline made his Chicago debut in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (directed by Rudall) in 1968.
In the mid-1970s, University of Chicago president Edward Levi, LAB’28, PhB’32, JD’35, asked Rudall to lead Court’s transformation into a year-round professional company. It was, Rudall believes, part of Levi’s effort to make Hyde Park more attractive to faculty and students.
Rudall and his colleagues raised funds for a 250-seat theater to be Court’s permanent home. Completed in 1981, the Abelson Auditorium now brings in 35,000 patrons annually to see Court productions. Under Newell’s leadership, partnerships with faculty remain a tradition: Court will use Rudall’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis for the current 60th season. It’s a fitting tribute to the company’s origins as it steps toward the future.