Lawrence Edwards, owner and operator of the Biograph Theater for more than three decades, has sold the historic film house to Victory Gardens Theater. Victory Gardens will gut the two-story building and convert into a playhouse with a 299-seat mainstage and a 128-seat studio theater.
The Biograph is a City of Chicago landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places, so the exterior cannot be altered.
The red brick-and-terra cotta facade, the old- fashioned marquee and the outside ticket booth will remain, but the interior ? remodeled several times since its 1914 construction ? is fair game.
The Biograph entered history and lore in 1934 as the place where “The Lady in Red” fingered Public Enemy Number 1 John Dillinger, who was ambushed and killed by FBI agents moments after leaving the theater. Ironically, he had just seen a gangster flick, “Manhattan Melodrama” starring Clark Gable. The Dillinger death occurred 70 years ago this month.
Victory Gardens Theater is the smallest by far of Chicago’s three Tony Award winning theater companies (the other two are the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters), with an annual budget of $2.1 million and 5,000-plus subscribers. The troupe has launched a five-year $15 million capital campaign to raise $9 million for purchase and renovation of the Biograph, $5 million in operating cash and a $1 million endowment.
The company already has commitments totaling $6.5 million, among them $1.5 million from the State of Illinois’ Build Illinois program, and $2.5 million from the City of Chicago. Governor Rod Blagojevich and Mayor Richard M. Daley are honorary co-chairs of the fundraising effort, the first time they’ve leant their names to an Off-Loop theater campaign. Other major gifts have been pledged by MidAmerica Bank, LaSalle Bank, Illinois Tool Works, the Kresge Foundation, the Sara Lee Foundation and the Victory Gardens board.
To glamorize the capital campaign, Victory Gardens has created an advisory board of stage and screen stars, among them William L. Petersen, Julie Harris and Olympia Dukakis. Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatists Edward Albee and August Wilson also are part of the advisory panel. Petersen, star of the original “CSI” on CBS, and Harris have long affiliations with Victory Gardens, having acted there a number of times.
Victory Gardens was founded in 1974. Since 1977 it’s been under the leadership of artistic director Dennis Zacek and managing director Marcelle McVay. The company won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater in 2001. The company produces exclusively new, American plays and supports a 12-person Playwrights Ensemble. The Biograph is just two blocks north of Victory Gardens’ current home at 2257 N. Lincoln, a building the company owns. After moving to the Biograph, Victory Gardens will continue to operate it as a three-theater complex leased to other companies.
JOHN LOGAN HELPED MAKE EVENT SUCCESSFUL. The July 16-23 National Showcase of New Plays, hosted here by Prop Thtr Group and Chicago Dramatists, was a rip-roarin’ success. It played to nearly-full houses for all 36 staged readings at three different venues. Representatives from more than two dozen theater troupes in the United States and Canada attended the Showcase, which is a biennial program of the National New Play Network.
Among those helping to fund the Showcase were Paul Libman of Libman Music, veteran agency honcho Albert J. Rosenthal and his wife, and actor/audio producer JoBe Cerny of Cerny/American Creative.
But the biggest individual donation to the Showcase came from John Logan, the former Chicago playwright now settling into his new Malibu home. Logan — a member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble – – understands the work required to hone a good script for stage or screen.
His plays “Never the Sinner” and “Hauptmann” have been produced successfully in New York, London, Chicago and elsewhere.
His screenplays for “Any Given Sunday,” “Gladiator,” “The Last Samurai” and last summer’s animated “Sinbad” have made him a wealthy and in-demand Hollywood Top Gun.
JONATHAN ABARBANEL is theater critic and reporter for Chicago Public Radio, a featured columnist for Back Stage, and theater editor of the weekly Windy City Times. Contact him at jabar525@sprintmail.com..
