How Stage Left Is Reopening Storefront Theatre in Chicago

Storefront theatre is one of the cornerstones of Chicago theatre history. Transforming small, non-performance venues into theatrical spaces is a time-honored tradition of the city’s small theatre companies. So, when my company, Stage Left Theatre, found itself in need of space for a recent show, we wondered if we might return to our storefront roots for the project.

Although the city still boasts a lively theatre scene, there are a finite number of dedicated performance venues in a landscape drastically altered by the COVID pandemic. These are often booked months, if not years, in advance. Also, because venues are so sought after, space tends to be quite expensive. We thought we might be able to find a creative, less expensive solution to our space problem by turning a storefront into a theatre for a short time. After all, theatre is all about creation, right?

A (Brief) History of Stage Left Theatre

Founded in 1982 by graduates of the Goodman School of Drama (now the Theatre School at DePaul), Stage Left Theatre is the second-oldest ensemble-based theatre company in Chicago after Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Over its four decades, the company’s mission has evolved and expanded, but the core tenet has always been to create politically engaged plays.

I joined the company in the spring of 2021 as one of the directors for an outdoor festival of short, new plays. Many of the artists who worked on that project, myself included, joined the company’s reconstituted artistic ensemble in the summer of the same year. We produced an abbreviated season in 2021 and 2022 before relaunching the company with two fully produced shows—both new plays—the next year. Although both productions were strong, we had trouble reactivating our existing audience and cultivating new patrons. We became a resident company at a Chicago theatre institution that was a very poor fit for our goals and needs. Instability in the company led to the loss of several members of the reconstituted ensemble.

Doing a show in a totally new venue is daunting under any circumstances, even more so when that venue was designed for selling goods rather than accommodating an audience.

By early 2024, however, the turmoil had settled a bit. We terminated our relationship with the resident theatre and returned to itinerant status. We also underwent some changes in leadership and, with a small group of six core ensemble members, produced several nights of staged readings in the summer and fall of that year to build momentum and word of mouth ahead of a full production in the spring of 2025.

Project and Goals

With the company’s audience base and name recognition in need of rejuvenation, we knew that we wanted to do something big and bold. We wanted to continue championing new work. So, we selected The Distrikt of Lake Michigun by ensemble member Stephanie Murphy, a play she had developed through the company’s playwriting residency program a few years before.

The Distrikt of Lake Michigun blends vaudeville, Greek tragedy, and history play in novel ways. It’s a big, brash, slapstick comedy about the creation of Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood. Today, this area is some of the most valuable real estate in the entire country. In the late nineteenth century, however, Streeterville’s namesake, “Captain” George Streeter, claimed the neighborhood was an independent territory not subject to the jurisdiction of either the city of Chicago or the state of Illinois. A talented conman, Streeter spent decades fighting to keep his territory in courtrooms and on the streets, attracting a group of like-minded residents who helped him resist police efforts to clear the area. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful in turning the lakeshore into his own state, the neighborhood bears his name today.

As we tried to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of narrow availability and exorbitant cost of theatrical spaces, ensemble member Peter Leondedis had an idea. What if we tried to find a vacant storefront in the Streeterville neighborhood? The play was set there, after all. We set out on a sightseeing expedition and located several possible options.

After several weeks with no response, we were preparing to book space at another, more traditional venue when we heard from Deborah Bouchee in the management office at Chicago’s iconic Water Tower Place mall. The more we spoke with them, the clearer it became that the mall was the right choice for the show. The mall space offered all the following advantages:

• We would have full and exclusive access to the theatre 24/7. Instead of sharing space with other theatre companies, we would be the only group in the space and could rehearse at our convenience.
• The storefront was significantly larger than most of the spaces we had seen.
• There was ample back-of-house space for storage, construction, and other production necessities.
• The mall had some built-in public relations and marketing resources we could draw on.
• It was in an easily accessible part of town.
• Most importantly, it was significantly cheaper than any of the other spaces we considered,

Goals, Process, and Challenges

Having decided mount a new play in what used to be a clothing retailer, we set ourselves some goals for the project:

• Produce a big, energetic, and exciting show to relaunch Stage Left in its new incarnation.
• Offer a professional experience to the outside artists with whom we were collaborating. In practical terms, this meant observing Equity-like rules and the Chicago Not in Our House standards for conduct.
• Avoid any performance cancelations due to low ticket sales. We had to cancel several performances for both of our productions in the 2022-2023 season. Our metric for evaluation here was the Fair Fight Rule, meaning we needed to have at least as many audience members as cast members. So, nine.
• Ideally, transform the venue into a long-term home for Stage Left and a new, permanent performance venue in Chicago.

Of course, doing a show in a totally new venue is daunting under any circumstances, even more so when that venue was designed for selling goods rather than accommodating an audience. As such, we faced a bevy of logistical challenges in bringing the show to life.

The single biggest obstacle was licensure. To legally sell tickets to a performance event in Chicago, the venue must have a license for performance. These come in multiple forms, but the basic principle is that the city must certify that patrons can safely occupy the venue, can escape in the event of an emergency, and have access to restrooms and water.

Immediately upon settling on the mall venue for the show, we started applying for the license. Unfortunately, it’s an opaque process. We repeatedly submitted the requisite materials and heard nothing back. We had to become incredibly proactive, with our managing director, David Heimann, making frequent trips to city hall to check on the status of the application.

As the retail economy continues to undergo contraction, audiences would very likely love seeing theatres pop up in disused storefronts.

Eventually, we found out that, in order to obtain a durable license that was good for two years, we needed technical drawings of the space drafted and certified by an engineer or an architect. The price of such drawings would’ve radically cut into our budget for the show, so hiring a firm wasn’t an option.

At this point, we were already well underway on rehearsals, and delays would’ve been disastrous. We reached out to the local alderperson’s office (this is the Chicago term for a city councilor) for help. After some investigation, the office helped us obtain a series of short-term licenses that covered our performance dates. This wasn’t quite ideal because we could only obtain licensure for a month’s worth of paid performances. As a result, we added two preview weekends of free performances that ended up cannibalizing our ticket sales a bit, but we did open on time.

The other major logistical challenge we faced was dealing with the mall itself. Although the mall’s management was enthusiastic about having a theatre in the building, they weren’t used to dealing with our unique requirements. This led to some red tape both in getting into the space on time and in operating the show after mall hours. The mall turns off its elevators and escalators once it closes, but our show ran later most nights. This introduced accessibility issues. More than once, we had to contact mall security to assist an audience member in getting out of our space on the sixth floor because the elevators had been turned off.

Less serious but similarly nettlesome were the problems with staging and running a show in a venue not intended for live performance. The space had been built out according to the specs of a specific retailer, and we didn’t have the budget or the time to do a full renovation. The room had hardwood floors and wood-paneled walls, which necessitated the installation of acoustic panels and placement of rugs around the room to baffle the very live sound. We had very limited control of the lighting in the space because the electrical system was oddly wired. Also, it was dominated by a large cashier station that turned the room into an L-shape. We used this to make the piece more immersive, staging a vaudeville-style pre-show entertainment on one side of the “L” and putting the scripted play in the longer runway portion of the room.

Finally, although we had lots of backstage and storage space, we had no on-site laundry. This meant one of the production team members had to shuttle the laundry at the end of each performance week and bring it back before shows started again.

All this necessitated an incredible investment of time and energy from the company’s six ensemble members and the production staff.

Assessment and Takeaways

So, how well did we accomplish our goals, and what did we learn from the process?

We produced a big, energetic, exciting show that got strong audience feedback. Our collaborators are excited to work with us again. Perhaps most importantly, we didn’t have to cancel a single show. In fact, we sold more tickets for Distrikt than for our entire 2022-2023 season combined. It was the most successful new play in the company’s history.

The only goal we missed was our desire to turn the storefront into a permanent venue. Because we couldn’t afford to get the technical drawings, we couldn’t secure a permanent license. Without the license to do more shows ourselves or for other companies, it really didn’t make sense for us to continue paying rent on the space.

To that end, the project as a whole suggested that there’s lots of potential for theatre outside traditional venues in Chicago. We had full houses for all our previews and, after a short lull, were playing to mostly full houses again by closing. Numerous patrons told us they were excited to see a theatre in the mall. Most of those further said that they hadn’t been in the mall for more than a decade before coming to see our show. As the retail economy continues to undergo contraction, audiences would very likely love seeing theatres pop up in disused storefronts.

Just as small companies built the city’s theatrical infrastructure in small storefronts in the 1970s and eighties, today’s itinerant companies need to think outside the box when it comes to venues. If we’d had more time and resources, we would have loved to pour them into turning the space into a permanent venue. If we’d had more time, we would have focused more on building alliances with other local companies to hold onto the space.

What did we learn from all this?

1. Start early and be proactive.
   We started working on getting the licenses secured and the lease agreement in place the second we settled on the mall venue, and even working on that timeline, we barely got everything done in time. A city like Chicago has a large and sprawling government with a complex bureaucracy, and the unfortunate truth is that approving a permit application for a theatre company isn’t going to make the list of top one hundred most important things anyone in city hall is dealing with. 
   
   You’re going to need to set a regular check-in time for your company’s point person to go, probably in person, to talk to someone about the application. It’s only because our managing director diligently followed up that we figured out what was going on with our application. If we’d mailed it and forgotten it, we never would’ve heard back and risked massive fines and closure when we opened the show. 
    
2. Make friends.
   We got some excellent friendly advice throughout the application process from an architect who was friends with our managing director. We also eventually reached a solution through the help of the local alderperson’s office. None of the critical project infrastructure would have been possible with only company members. Even better, we now have established lines of communication with these folks for any future projects we want to launch.
   
   We also worked throughout the production process to build marketing relationships with other businesses in the mall, other local theatre companies, and various public relations firms around town. These were valuable to varying degrees, but the process of establishing partnerships is always a fruitful use of your time.
    
3. Stay agile.
   One of the best things about the Stage Left ensemble is nobody in the group ever says “That’s not my job.” Several times throughout the process, the entire project came perilously close to collapse. Each time, someone from the ensemble made sure that didn’t happen. Whether that meant installing soundproofing after a tech rehearsal or making trips to pick up documents from city hall, everyone understood that we were all responsible for the project as a whole. 
    
4. Adapt or die.
   Theatre is always a process of negotiating between your ideal vision and the material possibilities of your budget and timeline. Transforming a retail store into a performance space entails a tremendous amount of such negotiation. Once we got into the space, we had to be extremely judicious about what we absolutely needed to make the show work. Although this necessitated some tough sacrifices of fun ideas, we were happy with the final product. 
    

After all our work, we believe the storefront model is still viable. Although the bureaucratic infrastructure of the city can be difficult to navigate, we’d love to see more theatres branching out to parts of the city without many theatre spaces. We certainly plan to try again, and we’d love to work with other, similarly minded companies.