City Lit Producer and Artistic Director Terry McCabe announced today that the theatre’s 2023-2024 season—its forty-third—will be his last on its staff. He has been City Lit’s artistic director since February 2005 and its producer since July 2016. He will retire at the end of June 2024 following the close of both the season and the theatre’s fiscal year.
His final season at City Lit will comprise three world premieres—a play, a literary adaptation, and a short musical—as well as the Chicago premiere of a play by its resident playwright and the first local full production in over seventy years of a modern classic. “I love working at City Lit, and I am jazzed about the new season” McCabe said, “but I look forward to being home for dinner every night.” An announcement concerning McCabe’s successor will be made soon.
City Lit’s forty-third season will open with the world premiere of The Innocence of Seduction by Chicago playwright Mark Pracht, the second play in his projected “Four-Color Trilogy” of plays set during the early years of the comic book industry. The first play in the trilogy, The Mark of Kane, opened City Lit’s forty-second season. The Innocence of Seduction examines the 1950s Congressional investigation into the supposed link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the effect of the investigation on the careers of three persons: William Gaines, the originator of the horror genre of comic books; Matt Baker, a Black closeted gay artist of romance comics; and Janice Valleau, creator of a pioneering comics feature starring a woman detective. Pracht will direct. The Innocence of Seduction will run from August 25 through October 8, 2023. Press opening will be September 3, 2023.
The season’s second production will be a world premiere stage adaptation of the noir novel The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb, adapted by Chicago adaptor Shawna Tucker. Inspired by the crimes of West Virginia serial killer Harry Powers, who was executed in Grubb’s hometown in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children, The Night of the Hunter is about Henry “Preacher” Powell, who has LOVE tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and HATE on those of his left, and preys on widows in Depression-era West Virginia. Having killed Willa Harper, he zeroes in on her two children, John and Pearl, who he is convinced know where their late father has hidden ten thousand dollars. City Lit’s resident director, Brian Pastor, will direct. The Night of the Hunter will run from October 20 through December 3, 2023. Press opening will be October 29, 2023.
The third production of the season will be Two Nights in a Bar, a double bill of one-acts comprising the Chicago stage premiere of Waiting for Tina Meyer by Kristine Thatcher (with material by Larry Shue) and the world premiere of Text Me, a musical written and composed by Kingsley Day. Waiting for Tina Meyer is the only collaboration between Thatcher, City Lit's resident playwright, and Shue, the late playwright of the farces The Nerd and The Foreigner. Written while they were best friends and resident actors at Milwaukee Repertory Theater in the 1980s, it concerns a pair of best-friend actors--a man and a woman--sitting in a bar because the man is expecting to be met there by Tina Meyer, a woman he doesn't know who sent him a note backstage earlier that evening. Day's musical, Text Me, commissioned by City Lit as a companion piece to Thatcher and Shue's play, is a 21st Century look at the problem of meeting people. In this version of the bar, a group of people come to try to make connections--on their phones. Fittingly for our fractured times, all the songs in the show are solos. McCabe will direct both pieces. Two Nights in a Bar will run from March 8 through April 21, 2024. Press opening will be March 17, 2024.
The season will close with the first full production in Chicago since the early 1950s (though there have been concert readings from time to time) of Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, author of Cats and a series of letters to Groucho Marx, among other works. The play dramatizes the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the hands of knights loyal to Henry II in 1170. Eliot wrote it on commission to be performed in the sanctuary at Canterbury Cathedral, the room where Becket was murdered; his depiction of the killing draws from the eye-witness account of Edward Grim, a monk who was wounded trying to protect the Archbishop. City Lit’s production will be staged in the sanctuary of Edgewater Presbyterian Church, the building in which City Lit resides. McCabe will direct. Murder in the Cathedral will run from May 3 through June 16, 2024.
City Lit Season 43 subscriptions are available at $99.00, good for all performances, or $77.00 for preview performances. Subscriptions may be ordered online at www.citylit.org or purchased over the phone by calling 773-293-3682. Single tickets for the Season 43 are priced at $30 for previews and $34 for regular performances and will be on sale soon. Senior prices are $25 for previews and $29 for regular performances. Students and military are $12.00 for all performances.
McCABE BIO
Terry McCabe has worked in Chicago theatre since 1980, when he assisted director Michael Maggio on a production of Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky at Northlight, at the time called North Light Repertory Theatre. He joined the staff at the Body Politic Theatre in 1981 as assistant to artistic director James O’Reilly; two years later he used the money he made there to found Stormfield Theatre Company. Stormfield specialized in new plays by Chicago writers. Of its thirteen productions, eleven were world premieres, including the first three plays by future Tony-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan. Stormfield’s production of Logan’s Hauptmann was the first Chicago theatre production to play by invitation at the Edinburgh International Arts Festival, where it won a Fringe First award. When McCabe closed Stormfield in 1988, it had just won its second consecutive non-Equity Jeff for Best Production and was entirely debt-free.
From then until 2005, McCabe directed around Chicago on a free-lance basis at many theatres, including Victory Gardens Theater (where he forged a professional relationship with playwright Kristine Thatcher, now City Lit’s resident playwright, and from where his revival of Hauptmann transferred to off-Broadway), Court Theatre, National Jewish Theater, Body Politic (where he directed the Off-Loop movement’s first King Lear, with his former employer O’Reilly in the lead), Next Theatre, and Oak Park Festival Theatre. Among the many great Chicago actors he was privileged to work with during this period were William J. Norris, Barbara Robertson, Tom Mula, Thatcher, Nicholas Rudall, Stormfield alums Ann Whitney and Denis O’Hare, Linda Emond, Roger Mueller, Pauline Brailsford, Ernest Perry Jr, Alexandra Billings, and Gary Houston. He was also resident director at Wisdom Bridge Theatre for four years in the early 1990s, where he directed Hollis Resnik and Steve Carell in the world premiere of Tour de Farce, a comedy by Kingsley Day and Philip LaZebnik (creators of City Lit’s current show, the world premiere musical Aztec Human Sacrifice) that has since been produced across the country and in several European cities, and the Chicago premiere production of My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard, which transferred to Vienna’s English Theatre, thereby becoming the play’s Austrian premiere as well.
When he became City Lit’s artistic director in 2005, midway through its Season 25, it was a part-time theatre, dark for more than six months of each year. The board at the time had considered closing up shop altogether. Instead, they hired McCabe, who expanded the season and added ancillary programming (including the anti-censorship outreach program Books on the Chopping Block, now in its eighteenth year); to date he has either directed or overseen seventy-five City Lit productions, most of them world premieres of either plays or literary adaptations. Among these premieres have been Frank Galati’s adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Thatcher’s plays The Safe House and The Bloodhound Law (part of City Lit’s five-year commemoration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial), Paul Edwards’s adaptations of Peyton Place and a trio of Shirley Jackson novels, L.C. Bernadine and Spencer Huffman’s adaptation of the cowboy novel The Virginian, Mark Pracht’s The Mark of Kane, the first in his trilogy of plays about the history of the comic book industry, Nicholas Rudall’s final translation of a Greek tragedy, Prometheus Bound, McCabe and Marissa McKown’s adaptation of surfing culture’s founding document, the novel Gidget, Douglas Post’s plays Somebody Foreign and Thirty-Two Stories, and a handful of Sherlock Holmes adaptations by McCabe.
Mixed in with the world premieres have been revivals equally eclectic: Thatcher’s Voice of Good Hope, about pioneering Black congresswoman Barbara Jordan; the first Chicago production in 120 years of Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance; Post’s musical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows; Dashiell Hamlet, a film noir/Shakespeare mashup from 1980s Chicago, co-written (and directed at City Lit) by Mike Nussbaum; Oh Boy!, an almost forgotten Jerome Kern musical from 1917; Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, from the Golden Age of Spanish drama; and Harold Pinter’s Old Times and The Birthday Party, among many others. Since 2016 he has also served as City Lit’s producer.
ABOUT CITY LIT THEATER COMPANY:
City Lit is the seventh oldest theatre company in Chicago, behind only Goodman, Court, Northlight, Oak Park Festival, Steppenwolf, and Pegasus theatres. It was founded in 1979 with $210 pooled by Arnold Aprill, David Dillon, and Lorell Wyatt. For its current season, its 42nd, it operates with a budget slightly over $260,000. It was the first theatre in the nation devoted to stage adaptations of literary material. There were so few theatres in Chicago at the time of its founding that at City Lit’s launch event, the founders were able to read a congratulatory letter they had received from Tennessee Williams.
For four decades and counting, City Lit has explored fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoirs, songs, essays and drama in performance. A theatre that specializes in literary work communicates a commitment to certain civilizing influences—tradition imaginatively explored, a life of the mind, trust in an audience’s intelligence—that not every cultural outlet shares.
City Lit is located in the historic Edgewater Presbyterian Church building at 1020 West Bryn Mawr Avenue. Its work is supported in part by the MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Ivanhoe Theater Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Agency and is sponsored in part by A.R.T. League. An Illinois not-for-profit corporation and a 501(c)(3) federal tax-exempt organization, City Lit keeps ticket prices below the actual cost of producing plays and depends on the support of those who share its belief in the beauty and power of the spoken written word.
LISTING INFORMATION
CITY LIT THEATER'S 2023-2024 SEASON:
The Innocence of Seduction
by Mark Pracht
WORLD PREMIERE
Directed by Mark Pracht
August 25- October 8, 2023
Previews August 25- September 2, 2023
Preview ticket prices $30.00, seniors $25.00, students and military $12.00 (all plus applicable fees)
Regular run Sunday, September 3 – October 8, 2023
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm; Sundays at 3 pm; Mondays Sept 25 and Oct 2 at 7:30 pm.
Regular run ticket prices $34.00, seniors $29.00, students and military $12 (all plus applicable fees)
Performances at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Chicago 60660
Info and tickets at www.citylit.org and by phone at 773-293-3682.
The second play in Mark Pracht’s projected “Four-Color Trilogy” of plays set during the early years of the comic book industry, The Innocence of Seduction examines the 1950s Congressional investigation into the supposed link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the effect of the investigation on the careers of three persons: William Gaines, the originator of the horror genre of comic books; Matt Baker, a Black closeted gay artist of romance comics; and Janice Valleau, creator of a pioneering comics feature starring a woman detective.
The Night of the Hunter
by David Grubb
WORLD PREMIERE ADAPTATION
Adapted by Shawna Tucker
directed by Brian Pastor
October 20 - December 3, 2023
Previews October 20 - 28, 2023
Preview ticket prices $30.00, seniors $25.00, students and military $12.00 (all plus applicable fees)
Regular run October 29 – December 3, 2023
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm, Sundays at 3 pm,. Mondays November 20 and 27 at 7:30 pm.
Regular run ticket prices $34.00, seniors $29.00, students and military $12 (all plus applicable fees)
Performances at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Chicago 60660
Info and tickets at www.citylit.org and by phone at 773-293-3682.
A world premiere stage adaptation of the noir novel The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb. Inspired by the crimes of West Virginia serial killer Harry Powers, who was executed in Grubb’s hometown in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children, The Night of the Hunter is about Henry “Preacher” Powell, who has LOVE tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and HATE on those of his left, and preys on widows in Depression-era West Virginia.
Two Nights in a Bar
A double bill of one-acts:
Waiting for Tina Meyer
by Kristine Thatcher (with material by Larry Shue)
CHICAGO PREMIERE
Text Me Music, Lyrics, and Book by Kingsley Day
WORLD PREMIERE
Directed by Terry McCabe
March 8 - April 21, 2024
(No performance Easter Sunday, March 31)
Previews March 8 -16, 2024
Preview ticket prices $30.00, seniors $25.00, students and military $12.00 (all plus applicable fees)
Regular run March 17– April 21, 2024
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm, Sundays at 3 pm. Mondays April 1, 8, 15 at 7:30 pm
No performance Easter Sunday, March 31
Regular run ticket prices $34.00, seniors $29.00, students and military $12 (all plus applicable fees)
Performances at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Chicago 60660 (Inside Edgewater Presbyterian Church)
Info and tickets at www.citylit.org and by phone at 773-293-3682.
A double bill of one-acts. Waiting for Tina Meyer concerns a pair of best-friend actors--a man and a woman--sitting in a bar because the man is expecting to be met there by Tina Meyer, a woman he doesn't know who sent him a note backstage earlier that evening. The musical Text Me is a 21st Century look at the problem of meeting people. In this version of the bar, a group of people come to try to make connections--on their phones.
Murder in the Cathedral
by T.S. Eliot
directed by Terry McCabe
May 3 - June 16, 2024
Previews May 3 – May 11, 2024
Preview ticket prices $30.00, seniors $25.00, students and military $12.00 (all plus applicable fees)
Regular run May 12 - June 16, 2024
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm. Sundays at 3 pm. Mondays June 3 and 10 at 7:30 pm.
Regular run ticket prices $34.00, seniors $29.00, students and military $12 (all plus applicable fees)
Performances at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Chicago 60660
Info and tickets at www.citylit.org and by phone at 773-293-3682.
Murder in the Cathedral dramatizes the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the hands of knights loyal to Henry II in 1170. Eliot wrote it on commission to be performed in the sanctuary at Canterbury Cathedral, the room where Becket was murdered; his depiction of the killing draws from the eye-witness account of Edward Grim, a monk who was wounded trying to protect the Archbishop. City Lit’s production will be staged in the sanctuary of Edgewater Presbyterian Church
