I attended the opening night performance of About Face Theatre’s “The Little Dog Laughed” earlier this week. The playwright, Douglas Carter Beane, was in the audience and spoke during the post-show reception. He had mentioned to a colleague that he had been invited to Chicago for the opening and was wondering if he should attend. Mr. Beane admitted that he had never been to Chicago.

His colleague said to him,

“There are three great cities in the English-speaking theater world…London, New York, and Chicago. You HAVE to go.”

I agree whole-heartedly. I moved to Chicago from Miami to become Redmoon’s Executive Director and have arrived in theater heaven.

Yes, yes, I’ve heard it all about “why are you moving FROM Miami TO Chicago?” – and I’ll tell you, Chicago doesn’t have a hurricane season. I’ll take winters in Chicago over hurricanes any day.

Not only does this community have phenomenal theater at all levels, but it is also home to a community of artists and administrators who are supportive and collaborative in ways I have not experienced in other communities.

This week I also had the opportunity to sit in dialogue with the leadership of several colleague theatres, larger, smaller and similar in size to Redmoon. Everyone at the table was immediately respected as a full member of the group, no matter her or his length of service or the size of the organization. Another new executive director and I were included in the conversation and our opinions were valued. I did a lot of sitting back and listening to the collective wisdom, history and experience in the room.

I received “A Theater of Our Own” as a Christmas present and finished it within days of receiving it. How many cities have such a thorough and loving history of its theater scene? If you haven’t yet read Richard Christiansen’s history and memoir, get to it soon.

I am also amazed that I am in a city where attending the theater is a significant part of the leisure activities for a much broader segment of the populace than in other cities. The cliché is that in New York only tourists attend the theater, and there’s a great line in “Little Dog Laughed” that LA has stopped doing theater altogether. I’d like to see our local Convention and Visitors Bureau promote Chicago specifically as a theater town.

But in Chicago, we’re going strong and we are attacking the concept of theater and the theatrical experience from many angles.

Here at Redmoon we create objects and contraptions instead of sets and props. We create our own work and focus on the spectacle of theater. We create theater that brings communities together for a shared human experience, often with more visual and physical presentations than with traditional narrative storylines. We look for ways to create theatrical experiences that activate and engage public space whenever possible.

Inside the former ink factory on Hubbard Street in West Town that is home to Redmoon Central we laugh, we debate, we challenge each other, and we like to say that Redmoon is an adjective as much as a noun. “That’s very Redmoon” is often heard from members of our audience as well as by our staff.

Come see what it means for an experience to be “very Redmoon.”

—Christopher Schram, Executive Director