More and more actors are moving to Oak Park. With its high quality of life and proximity to the city, our village has become the location of choice for an increasing number of theater professionals.
A recent sub-zero evening brought a cadre of performers together to talk about their work and their village. Although all live in Oak Park, to refer to these artists as “local” actors would be misleading as they have worked extensively in professional theaters in Chicago and beyond. Nevertheless, after starting out elsewhere, they all chose to live in Oak Park, drawn here by grass and trees, schools, politics and, increasingly, a critical mass of other theater people who live here.
The evening was called to order by Belinda Bremner, a comparatively recent Chicago émigré, at her Oak Park townhouse on Kenilworth Avenue. The gathering included actors Tony Dobrowolski and Kevin Theis, as well as theater administrator Galen Gockel.
Everyone knew everyone else, having worked together repeatedly. Two upcoming projects – one in Oak Park and one in Chicago – involve everyone in the room. Coincidentally, both plays were written by British playwright George Bernard Shaw.
Dobrowolski and Theis are acting in a Chicago production of Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, which is being produced by ShawChicago, a 15-year-old theater company co-founded by Bremner, who also directs. The professional cast includes three other Oak Park actors, Adrianne Curry, Kevin Fox and Jack Hickey. Hickey, who serves as artistic director of Oak Park Festival Theatre (Gockel is the managing director), is producing another Shaw play, Arms and the Man, directed by Theis, at Oak Park’s Pleasant Home in March.
“This is where the circles within circles start,” says Bremner, referring to the fact that the two upcoming Shaw productions seem intricately intertwined.
“To do the kind of Shakespeare and classical work and modern classics done at Oak Park Festival requires the same chops that you need for Shaw,” she explains.
Why is Shaw’s work so compatible with Oak Parkers?
“I think it’s a perfect fit for Oak Park because it’s really smart-thinking, liberal, iconoclastic, let’s-shake-things-up-and-see-what-happens theater,” suggests Bremner, who notes that the political nature of Shaw’s plays finds fertile ground in this village.
And why, aside from a shared appreciation of the works of wordy British playwrights requiring a “nimble brain” (as Bremner puts it) has everyone chosen to call Oak Park home?
Dobrowolski moved here 16 years ago from Detroit with his partner Bob Vogler (who, just to keep those “circles within circles” intersecting, is the pianist for John Bull’s Other Island) because he wanted trees and grass.
When he encounters skepticism from Chicago actors about choosing to live in a suburb, “I tell them I live between two el lines, and how many buses did it take you to get to this audition?” says Dobrowolski. “I feel pretty lucky. I think there are just so many opportunities in Oak Park, and since we’ve moved here, there are so many more actors and directors who live here. You can’t spit without hitting someone you’ve worked with, which is a lovely thing. I can’t really imagine living anywhere else.”
“People ask me what it’s like living in Oak Park, and I really have to say it’s Utopian,” says Kevin Theis, who lived in Chicago for 15 years, “always within walking distance of Wrigley Field,” before relocating to south Oak Park six years ago with his wife and two young daughters.
“We’re walking distance from everything here. We’re a block away from Rehm Park. We’re a block away from Rehm Pool. We’re a block away from my daughters’ school, a block away from the el that takes me downtown.
“There are 30 kids on my block,” he adds. “We love everything about Oak Park. We love the school district, we love our neighbors, we love the village itself.”
“I know very little about theater and less about Shaw,” admits Gockel, though, as managing director of Oak Park Festival Theatre, he is perhaps understating the case. An Oak Park resident since 1969, Gockel, a former school board member and village trustee, has “a layman’s civic interest in promoting and helping support the quality of life here. My interest in theater is primarily because I think it’s an important element of our quality of life here in Oak Park.”
