Jane Addams Hull-House exhibit showcases museum's lead role in Chicago's theater scene

Chicago theater owes a great debt to visionary social reformer Jane Addams. Without her decision to include a community theater in her Hull-House settlement, the city’s Off-Loop theater scene might not exist as the unique entity it is today.

A new exhibit, “Act Well Your Part” opening Monday at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, outlines this legacy and its influence on the evolution of theater in Chicago from the development of community theater and the Little Theatre movement to improv and the nonprofit theater scene.

Founded in 1889 by Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, the Hull-House settlement served recently arrived European immigrants in a variety of ways, including many cultural clubs and creative outlets. (Another current show “Radical Craft,” extended through Dec. 19, showcases paintings, ceramics and textiles created from 1889-1935 at Hull-House.)

“For Addams, the arts were always central to the larger project of social reform,” notes Hull-House director Liesl Olson. “The arts were never just this other thing. They were always central to the push toward a healthy well-being, engagement with neighbors and your community.”

“Act Well Your Part” includes photographs, playbills, posters and other ephemera as well as an extensive timeline tracing the influence of theater at Hull-House from its beginning to today. The items were collected from archives at the Newberry Library, the Chicago Public Library, the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of Chicago and the Hull-House Association.

It was a laborious but thrilling project full of discoveries for Olson, Hull-House Associate Director Matthew Randle-Bent and Ross Jordan, curatorial manager.

“It’s actually kind of overwhelming how much historical information there is and how it's spread across these different collections,” says Randle-Bent. “We uncovered some amazing material.”

The 230-seat Hull-House theater opened in 1899. Above the stage was inscribed “Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies,” from which the exhibit takes its name. In 1957, the theater was damaged in a fire, but in those preceding 58 years thousands of people enjoyed a variety of performances.

Over these years, the Hull-House Players performed works by Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw as well as works by Chicago writers, including Ben Hecht and William Vaughn Moody. And Viola Spolin, considered “the mother of improvisation,” taught classes and began developing her “theater games,” a founding tenet of improv.

Addams, who died in 1935, left a legacy that spread even wider in 1963 when Bob Sickinger came to town to direct theater at the Hull-House Association’s four theaters at the Jane Addams Center and Uptown Center on the North Side and Parkway Community House and Henry Booth House on the South Side.

Sickinger’s work here would lay the groundwork for the explosion of Off-Loop theater in subsequent years.

“Sickinger’s great, great contribution was doing open casting calls across the city, to draw in and really coax notable performances out of Chicago actors, and also doing avant-garde work as well as all kinds of other plays,” says Olson, adding, “All of this was new at the time, and people began to take notice.”

In his theater history memoir, “A Theater of Our Own,” the late Chicago critic Richard Christiansen, then working at the Chicago Daily News, recalls reviewing a 1963 production of Frank D. Gilroy’s “Who’ll Save the Plowboy?” at the Jane Addams Center. “The production was a defining moment in Chicago theater life, and a revelatory experience for me. ... It proved to me for the first of many times that small mattered, that a piece of theater in a 110-seat converted bowling alley could be a wonderful, big time," he wrote.

On into the 1980s, the Uptown Center would be home to Organic Theatre and Black Ensemble Theater, with the Jane Addams Center providing a stage for other rising itinerant theaters, including Famous Door, About Face, Bailiwick and, of course, Steppenwolf. There, the latter company staged its early productions of “Balm in Gilead” and “True West,” two hits that put the young theater troupe on a national map.

Randle-Bent says he hopes people leave the exhibit with a better understanding of the significance of Hull-House’s role in the development of Chicago theater but also “with a sense of theater’s importance as an element of civic life, as a tool through which we have important social and political conversations. That it’s a form of gathering whereby we share stories about the kind of society we want to be.”

Throughout April,  “Act Well Your Part” includes a series of events beginning at 7 p.m. on opening night, April 14, with a discussion featuring local theater artists Malkia Stampley (Goodman Theatre), Marti Lyons (Remy Bumppo Theatre), Mikhail Fiksel (Albany Park Theatre Project), Gabrielle Randle-Bent (Court Theatre) and Wendy Mateo (Teatro Vista Productions). For more information on future events, visit hullhousemuseum.org.