Today several of us got up at 9:00 and met at Kyra’s house to pull her couch into Michelle’s van.  I love our morning meetings. We coaxed the couch down the three flights of stairs with an energy that could be described as giddiness (or grunting).  Michelle, our newest company member, brings with her an exuberant passion for design and hard work.  This was the first morning that we realized another benefit of having Michelle with us – she also brings a minivan big enough to move a couch.  In the past, moving a free piece of furniture was a catastrophic headache.  No longer.

So today, as we approached our space for our first rehearsal in the space (after much trial and tribulation), there was an ease and excitement in the air. We carried the couch in and saw nearly the whole team waiting for us… almost the entire company happened to pop by this morning, and we were even joined by Jared, our intrepid lighting designer who has been under the gun with no less than three other productions in the last month. And we settled down for our first run of Act I.

I had missed the richness of our space, and I know I wasn’t alone. It’s certainly an odd one, as are most buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. The cast has had a blast this last week rehearsing at the Heart of Gold, where many of our friends perform and reside and live art. But the walls of our little odd space are deeply steeped with old memories that resonated today with us company members, and by the looks of Act I, this cast will be adding many memories of their own to the objects in our little box.

There’s the chandelier. In point of fact, we are never allowed to take this chandelier down due to Park District policy. It’s not an oversight on our part, we literally MUST incorporate this beauty into every show, or risk having it pull focus like a wayward zit. We of course made it the centerpiece of our recent production of The Dining Room.

There’s the fireplace, complete with the portrait of Abraham Lincoln (we make up stories that Lincoln spoke here when the building was dedicated. He didn’t… he had been assassinated long before construction began in 1926) We can remove Lincoln, and often do, but we once used him with a spot to stand in as the ghost of a father figure during Limbo Tales.

There’s the windows and radiators upstage that are often covered or curtained over, but when we converted the stage into a studio apartment for Accelerando, the radiators and windows allowed Georgann Charuhas look out on the real city lights of Lincoln Park and evoke a beautiful lonely solitude. (She’s a mommy now. Tee hee!)

There’s that awkward stage door up right that goes to the back hallway, our only access point for the numerous crossovers that actors need to do to make entrances from the floor. Our wonderfully old doors are like instruments – they can softly and warmly click shut or slam a shudder through the entire space. The stage door is owned for all time by Marsha’s tumultuous entrance in a wedding dress at the top of Brilliant Traces, complete with a raging snow storm in the hallway / lobby provided by yours truly.

There’s our tile floor, which was exposed a couple years ago when the old laminate floor was removed. The change made the room much more reverberant, but around the same time we started creating temporary light grids on the floor and converting the entire space into thrust or in-the-round configurations. In bringing the action off the stage, we created a very different kind of intimacy in the space, where you can’t get more than 15 feet or so away from the action of the play. On our good days, the audience is immersed into the action of the play. When we combined this staging with the tragedy and shock of British Rail train crashes in The Permanent Way, the floor became a sort of ephemeral holy ground to us, where tragedy is recognized and hope is honored within the circle of the audience.

And then there’s the domed ceiling over the floor, which in Vox Pandora, Jared finally used in the way it was made to be used. As a sky.

Our space is certainly quirky. I haven’t mentioned the ways we’ve (safely and fire-code-approved) been able to pull enough power to run our dimmers off the historical wiring in the space, or the years we waited for dimmable control over our houselights, or the self-supporting scenery that we’ve built without ever so much as nailing into the historical wall to support it. Chris Piatt was right when he wrote of our staging of the Dining Room that we were showcasing the asset of our “queerly elegant” found space with the play, but I don’t think folks realize how deeply we care about this little bit of Chicago History that we call our home. We could have decided to perform Girl in the Goldfish Bowl elsewhere, but we wanted it here. The contract is almost in, and we’re already back rehearsing on a provisional basis. We have people on our side in the park district administration, who know that we care about this room and we’ve stuck with it when we could have let it go. The Park District I think is beginning to see that we’re willing to fight to be here right now, and that is helping them make us a priority (we’re not the only vendors with contract problems these days.) The Dining Room wasn’t just a showcase, it was a love letter. We were reborn in this room.

Do you have a corner of a theater that you will remember forever? Tell us about it.