Oak Park Festival Theatre kicked off season 35 with its annual gala, Feb. 20, at the Carleton Hotel. This year’s event featured a special appearance by longtime Chicago theater critic and Oak Park native Richard Christiansen, who was honored by the theater with its first-ever Arden Award.
Well-known as the former chief critic for the Chicago Tribune before his retirement in 2002, Christiansen also wrote for the Chicago Daily News for many years and authored A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago, which was published by Northwestern University Press in 2004, with a forward by actor Brian Dennehy.
Christiansen is often cited as a seminal force in Chicago’s rise to prominence on the national performing arts scene. Because of his enthusiasm for fledgling theater companies doing innovative work here in the 1970s (Steppenwolf, for instance), the Second City shed its inferiority complex as a stopover for touring productions on their way from the East Coast to the West Coast and now boasts a reputation as arguably the most fresh and vigorous theater scene in the country.
Presenting the award to Christiansen on behalf of Festival Theatre, Belinda Bremner remarked, “Because of him, Chicago really is the theater center of America.”
The event was also a good excuse to unveil Festival Theatre’s 2009 season, which includes Arms and the Man, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Kevin Fox, March 9-29, at Pleasant Home; Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, directed by Michael Weber, June 12-July 11, outdoors at Austin Gardens; and Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, directed by Kevin Theis, July 17 through Aug. 15 at Austin Gardens. Tickets and information are available at oakparkfestival.com or 708-445-4440.
Christiansen began his remarks with a story: “Some years ago, I was waiting for a plane at O’Hare, and a very nice gentleman came up to me and said, ‘Are you Richard Christiansen?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ So he turned to his teenage son and said, ‘I told you it was him! I know who you are,’ he continued to me, ‘because every time I go to Oak Park High School to pick up my son, I see your picture on the wall.’ [Christiansen’s headshot appears in Oak Park and River Forest High School’s entrance lobby in a photo gallery of outstanding OPRF alums.]
“I tell you that story because it means how nice it is to be recognized by your home town, and this is my home town. People say, ‘Are you from Chicago?’ and I say, ‘Yes, I’m from Chicago, but originally from Oak Park.’ I was raised, educated, and came of age in Oak Park. I got my first reading, writing and arithmetic from Christ Lutheran School in south Oak Park. I graduated in 1949 from Oak Park and River Forest Township High School. I got all my early instruction in writing and the theater in grade school and high school in Oak Park, so these were my formative years, and very happy and very formative years they were.
“I go back a long way with Oak Park Festival Theatre. In 1975, when Marion Karczmar established the theater, their very first production was a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The participants included David Mamet in the role of Oberon, King of the Fairies, and a wonderful actor named William H. Macy played Puck. That was long before David had achieved such heights as a playwright [Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross] and long before Billy Macy [Fargo, Pleasantville, ER] was one of the busiest actors in the United States. I still think of them as those young people back in 1975. I’ll always remember those very first impressions.
“That was a very auspicious opening for the Festival Theatre, which has gone on so well for so many years, and it is my great, great honor to be honored by Festival Theatre.”
Kristin Gehring, a theater director and teacher who lives in Oak Park, has taught on the theater faculties at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville and at North Park University in Chicago. Her Chicago-area directing credits include Circle Theatre and the CAST performing arts program at Percy Julian Middle School. Her production of Benjamin Britten’s operetta Noye’s Fludde opens March 20 at First United Church in Oak Park.
