What is the responsibility of an arts organization to its local community? The answer to that question is far more complicated than you might think. And it is a key part of the legacy of Stephen J. Albert, the executive director of Chicago’s Court Theatre, who died Dec. 28 at the age of 66, a great loss to the city he had come to love.
Most cultural entities in the great industrial North American cities were founded not as places where the surrounding population could express their creativity, but as organizations that were designed to ennoble those cities by bringing world-class culture to their citizens’ doorsteps.
Museums competed to purchase the most impressive European masterworks, just as the orchestras of Chicago or Philadelphia tried to hire the most prestigious musical directors. With only very rare exceptions, the Cleveland Orchestra was not interested in Cleveland violinists, any more than the Art Institute of Chicago was inclined to exhibit the artists of the city’s Bridgeport neighborhood next to the work of Georges Seurat. For most of the lives of those institutions, that was seen as a kind of amateur enrichment, at best an education initiative, and not the main job of the flagship institutions.
Regional theaters followed much the same path. Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, had a mission to bring the world’s finest actors, and the most important playwrights in history, to what he truly saw as a cultural Midwestern wasteland. Not unlike the touring thespians who followed the American frontier, Guthrie didn’t care much for local writers or performers. His core belief was in the transformative power of the classics. He genuinely believed that the young people of Minneapolis deserved to see the highest caliber of Shakespearean actor performing the greatest dramatic poetry of human civilization, not the actor who lived down the block doing a one-man show about the local ‘hood.
In all areas of the arts, that model has hit serious trouble.
The Eurocentric cultural biases of those mostly white, male and affluent arts prophets have been laid bare. The notion of the canon — in art, theater and music — has been upended by those who see its manufacture as the work of elitists who lacked a global point of view or a commitment to equality. The Guthries of this world needed an audience to support their endeavors through attendance and philanthropic dollars, and that audience has been aging and dying off. Growing evidence — most recently, the annual report released by the New York-based nonprofit Theatre Communications Group in recent days — is that their commitment is not being replicated by their grandchildren.
Far fewer people are now willing to buy a subscription, sit down, shut up and appreciate what previous generations deemed to be worthy. They prefer to express themselves.
For cultural institutions across the country, this is a crisis of a scale not yet fully appreciated.
Court Theatre, which was founded as a summer theater in 1955, was formed eight years before the Guthrie Theater. But Court reached its professional stride under artistic director Nicholas Rudall in the early 1970s. Throughout most of its history, Court specialized in the classics, taking advantage of the highly educated and intellectual audience in Hyde Park. This is a distinguished history: Court became a national center for classical theater and one of the few places to see works by, say, lesser-known Renaissance authors from Spain.
But it rarely looked to Chicagoans to create its works and it was, for the most part, content to draw from the audience that had come to know the theater in the 1970s and 1980s. It did not pay much attention, say, to its location in the heart of Chicago’s South Side, home to one of the largest, best-educated and most important African-American communities in America.
During his tenure, and in partnership with the current artistic director Charles Newell, Albert did two crucial things.
One was to unapologetically draw the theater operationally and structurally closer to the University of Chicago, which provided both crucial financial stability (without which Court would have been in trouble) and a well of intellectual and cultural riches. At the point of Albert’s arrival in 2010, the university did not have an especially distinguished history of arts education or programming — certainly in companion to its other areas of expertise — and Court’s new interest in the university helped prompt it to step up its own game in art, theater and music. This sea change at such a great university has been underreported, but the new facilities and research it produced are of crucial import to the cultural wealth of the entire city.
Court and the university were linked from the beginning, of course, but previous theater administrations emphasized independence, fearing that Court would be defined as a student theater. Albert changed all that. He embraced the campus outside, moving Court closer to the relationship that the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., enjoys with Harvard University.
But that wasn’t his main legacy. Albert’s daughter, Jessica Albert, said last weekend that her father had quietly gone to a different church each Sunday morning. His aim, she said, was to introduce the theater to the pastors and congregants. And it worked.
When that outreach was combined with more diverse programming — a major rethinking of what “classic” really means on the South Side of Chicago — the result was a whole slew of new audience members. This new diversity at Court was palpable to anyone who had attended the theater for years. Diversity on stage is one thing, diversity of audience is far harder to achieve and surely more important.
It was not restricted to certain kinds of programming, either, for arts attendance often is a matter of habit. Once someone feels welcomed, acquires a feeling of ownership in an institution, he or she is far more likely to return, again and again. It is hard to overstate how much of a change at Court this represented, or how important the very visible results have turned out to be.
Albert did all that. In his professional life he was also a search consultant, and when his firm was hired to look for a new executive director at Court, he decided he was the best candidate. That prompted a critic to make a snarky comparison with the selection process that produced Dick Cheney as vice president of the United States. It was not a comparison that Albert appreciated, nor was it quickly forgotten.
But record shows that when Albert chose himself for the job in 2010, he was most definitely making the right decision. The evidence is all over the University of Chicago, and a hefty chunk of the South Side.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
