These days, small, independent, and adventurous theaters are so much a part of this city’s fabric it would seem a desolate place without them; but when Robert Sickinger came here in 1963, what he found was just that. “I believe in the grass-roots theater,” he said then. “You can’t build an interest in the theater in a city by importing shows. You’ve got to grow them from within.”

In his Northwestern University doctoral thesis “Hull-House Theatre: An Analytical and Evaluative History,” Stuart J. Hecht cites a proposal by Sickinger and Jans in which they call the city a “theatrical desert.” Sickinger intended Hull House to become an oasis in that desert by providing an alternative to the diet of Broadway road shows and conventional community groups that then constituted Chicago theater.

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Sickinger built under the Hull House aegis an elaborate network of activity including several theaters, a touring company, a “chamber theater” that performed staged readings in people’s homes, acting classes, and a writers’ workshop. The hub of all this was the Jane Addams Center, located in a former American Legion hall at Broadway and Belmont; the Hattie Callner Memorial Theater, named after an associate of Jane Addams’s, opened in 1963 with Frank Gilroy’s much-admired offBroadway hit Who’ll Save the Plowboy?

For the most part, audiences flocked to the shows. As for the critics, Sickinger vacillated between being their darling and their devil–which didn’t matter much to him one way or the other.

Today, the proliferation of neighborhood-based theaters, which have almost entirely supplanted the Loop as the focus of theatrical activity, remain as Sickinger’s legacy. Several major off-Loop theaters were founded by Hull House alumni, and most of the theater spaces whose creation Sickinger oversaw are still in use. Sickinger, though, no longer works in theater. At 62, long since divorced from Selma, remarried and with a large family, he runs an answering service in New York.

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/C.M. Hardt.