Theater Talk
Charles Likar’s great contribution to Chicago theater was a piece of alchemy: he turned spirit into ink. To the cheek, grit, and yearning of our dramatic world he added the printed word. In 1987 the monthly magazine New Plays & Playwrights quietly appeared, and last fall there was another, Take Stage! Both pubs consist of interviews for the most part, and Likar’s strategy is elegantly simple: send it in and he’ll run it.
“–This playwright,” Likar went on, “is someone like me. And if they can do it, so can I.”
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Likar says theater people like New Plays & Playwrights because it’s chatty and unpretentious. “A playwright told me, ‘It’s just there. It is what it is.’” Take Stage! is no different, although officially it is edited by someone else. “Keith Cameron is a fellow I met who’s a bartender on Amtrak, and he was interested in participating in this newsletter because he wants to be in theater as soon as he gets enough tip money,” Likar explained. “So I said, you can be editor, and he said, sure.”
New Plays & Playwrights was just there, floating around Scenes coffee shop, for a long time before we had any idea who this guy Likar was. Our picture of him is still pretty sketchy. He’s 47, lives out in LaGrange Park, and at one time or another has acted, directed, and stage-managed. “I stage-managed a Broadway show,” he told us. “It was called The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake–it starred Jean Arthur. Now that was 1967. It never officially opened. We had three preview performances.”
Three months ago Likar was close to killing off his magazines. He wanted to get more involved in play creation on Foster Avenue and there was no time. Fortunately he discovered a director from Memphis named William Endsley who “is going to be actualizing certain projects I am conceiving.” Likar intends to develop and “audition” (hold staged readings of) new plays and channel the good ones to producers.
What does? we said.
“Now Pegasus, like two or three masochistic theaters a week who contact the Reader demanding to be reviewed, insists on making believe it’s a professional theater group doing professional-quality work,” wrote St. Edmund, by way of introducing the eager young troupe to our readership. He went on, “I know of few other areas where the level of self-delusion runs as high as it does in theater.”
