Richard Corley is a man with a plan. Three years ago, in the spring of 2021, the UIC professor and theater director founded the Forest Park Theatre, the suburb’s first professional theater company since the Circle Theater moved to Oak Park in 2010 (and then subsequently relocated in 2012 to Chicago to intermittently produce shows before fading away).
Corley began simply, with low budget outdoor productions of Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare is a brand,” Corley said. “Free Shakespeare in the summer. People understand that. They bring their picnic. They bring their wine. They sit outside. And that way, you know, we introduced ourselves to the community.”
Corley was, in part, inspired by English actor and director Mark Rylance’s productions at the Globe Theatre in London, which attempted to recreate, as much as possible, the look and feel of Shakespeare’s original shows. No microphones, no sophisticated lighting, no powerful projection or sound systems.
“I saw the very first production that he did,” Corley said, “a ‘Henry V’ that was all male. And I remember thinking, this is the most radical theater in the world right now. And it’s so radical because there’s nothing, there’s no place to hide. The actor is completely naked. There’s no microphone. There’s no way you can disguise a weakness of a performance with lighting, which we do all the time.”
The Forest Park Theatre’s first production was a stripped-down “multi-racial, cross-gender” version of the Shakespeare comedy “As You Like It,” performed at the Roos Recreational Center in the summer of 2021. Their second production, “Imogen,” was Corley’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s unruly, hard to categorize play, “Cymbeline,” produced in the summer of 2022 at The Grove at Altenheim. Last summer’s play, “Measure for Measure,” was also done at The Grove at Altenheim.
The shows were successful. The Forest Park Theatre website boasts that their first two productions “served over a thousand people” each. But from the beginning, Corley wanted to do more; he dreamed of a professional year-round theater. “That would be a wonderful thing for this community,” he said.
When Corley, and his wife, Tanera Marshall, moved to Forest Park nine years ago, Corley did not intend to start a theater. Corley had done that very early in his career in the ‘80s in New York City, where he moved after getting his BFA in acting from University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The theater was called About Face Theatre, not affiliated with the theater of the same name in Chicago. Running a theater is a lot of work; eventually, after running it from 1984 to 1989, Corley moved on to work at The Acting Company (founded by the late John Houseman), where he was the associate producing director. After that, he became the artistic director at Madison Repertory Theater in Madison, Wisconsin. Along the way, Corley picked up a master’s degree in theatre history from Goddard College in 1990 and an MFA in directing in 2009 from Illinois State University.
Not bad for the son of factory workers – his parents worked in textile mills in Georgia and South Carolina – who was the first in his family to go to college. But Corley’s love for theater ran deep. He was first exposed to live theater when a group of actors performed a Christmas play at his school.
“I kind of grabbed onto that for some reason,” Corley recalled, “and I started doing local community theater and fell in love with the theater. I directed plays in high school and all of that.” Some high school theater kids lose the theater bug in college; Corley’s interest only deepened – and widened.
Corley, over the course of his career, has worked on an impressive array of shows, contemporary and classic, among them Tom Dulack’s play about Ezra Pound, “Incommunicado,” the Russian premiere of Tennessee Williams’ “Small Craft Warnings,” Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” and a version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” with Andre De Shields and Carrie Coon. He also noted that he has directed “18 of the 36 plays of William Shakespeare.”
“I’ve done a ton of Shakespeare, but I’ve also done a lot of world premieres. I’ve developed plays, I’m really interested in contemporary playwrights and playwriting,” Corley said, adding that while he was artistic director at Madison Rep he did “a lot of new work and a lot of classical work, as well.”
In 2010, Corley began teaching at UIC. His wife teaches there as well.
“I teach acting, I teach Shakespeare. My wife is a voice teacher. She teaches voice and speech and dialects. She works a lot in television and film. I’ve always just worked in the theater.”
At the same time, they moved to Forest Park “basically for convenience. We wanted to be near the blue line and get to UIC pretty quickly. But then when we moved out here, we were really surprised at how diverse it was in every way. Economically diverse, racially diverse, this whole community really surprised us.”
Forest Park was also, Corley noticed, a community that did not have its own professional year-round theater. Three seasons of successful free summer theater convinced Corley it was time to test the waters for a year-round theater — which is why The Forest Park Theatre initiated this past fall a reading series of plays by women.
“We started out [in October 2023] with an adaptation of Frankenstein by the Scottish playwright, Rona Munro. And it’s a very interesting adaptation. It is Mary Shelley telling the story of the writing of Frankenstein. And then [in November 2023] we did this play, “Actually,” by Anna Ziegler. This is a two-character play about [two college students who get] very drunk one night and spending the night together. And then the next morning, they have completely different stories about what happened. The audience gets to see how the stories match up.”
“The third play, [being performed January 25 and 28]is a play called “Spay” [by Chicago playwright Madison Fiedler]. That play was done at [Chicago theater] Rivendell like a year and a half ago. I went to see it there and I just loved the play. It’s set in Appalachia. It’s about a 20-year-old woman — she’s already had a child, she’s a recovering addict, and she is pregnant again. And a woman comes to sort of help her.” “Sort of” is the important phrase here, because, without revealing the twist, the woman has an agenda, and may not have the 20-year-old’s best interest at heart.
His future readings include African-American playwright Angelina Weld Grimke’s rarely performed 1916 play “Rachel” (February 22 and 25), about teacher coming to grips with a disturbing past; Polly Teale’s adaptation of Jane Eyre (March 7 and 10]) and, at the end of the season, a reading of a contemporary play, Siah Berlatsky’s “Malapert Love,” about a group of people who have all fallen in love with the wrong person, written in the style of Shakespearean comedy (May 2 and 5). The play was produced last year by the Chicago-based company The Artistic Home and won a non-equity Jeff Award.
What’s next on Corley’s agenda? In August, he wants to do either Shakespeare’s “The Two Noble Kinsmen” or “All’s Well that Ends Well.” And, more importantly, he would like a permanent home for his young company.
“We need a space. We need a theater. So, I am in discussions with the mayor of Forest Park [Rory Hoskins]. We are looking at places. We are talking to people. I want to use this reading series as a way to get people to think very seriously about getting us a space, donating us a space, a Chicago-style storefront theater where we can do the kind of work that they’re seeing in this reading series. Knock on wood, that’s what I’m hoping will come out of this. “