If you haven’t already, dust off your picnic blankets and lawn chairs in preparation for the upcoming fifth annual Shakespeare in the Park, which will mark the end of Forest Theatre Company’s 2024-2025 run.
After this Shakespeare in the Park, Forest Theatre Company will launch its first year-round season – and its first in collaboration with Madison Street Theater in Oak Park – bringing together the only two year-round nonprofit theater organizations in the area to build up professional theater in the western suburbs.
“We can do a lot more than we can solo,” said Richard Corley, founder of Forest Theatre Company, of the new partnership. Madison Street Theater, which rents its space to other organizations, provides a stage and administrative support to Forest Theatre Company’s acting and production work.
“We both bring different points of view to the table and are looking to maximize what we can do for our community,” said Lisa Green, managing director at Madison Street Theater. “We can’t do this many productions from the ground up. We don’t have the resources,” Green added. “This is a known value to us. We know the work they produce is good.”
Their partnership started last year, when Forest Theatre Company, then Forest Park Theatre, put on “The Misanthrope” at Madison Street Theater. It was the group’s first indoor production since Corley started Shakespeare in the park in 2021, and it nearly sold out.
Shakespeare in the Park
Aug. 8, 9, 10, 15, 16 and 17
Marking the end of the 2024-2025 season, this year’s free Shakespeare in the Park play will be “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” performed outside at the Altenheim. The play is thought to be Shakespeare’s last, written just a few years before his death in 1616.
“It’s a beautiful play about friendship and the effects of war on love, friendship and marriage. It’s also the queerest thing I think Shakespeare ever wrote,” Corley said. “He was open to love in all its forms,” he added, exploring “love between people of the same sex, how is that love different from loving a person of the opposite sex, how is it similar, how do we measure that?”
“The Two Noble Kinsmen” centers on two lifelong best friends who “talk to each other like they’re in love,” Corley said. It also stars Emilia, who’s only ever had one love in her life – a woman who died. When the two friends both fall in love with Emilia, she’s forced to choose between them.
Taking place in a patriarchal, misogynistic world, the play explores the power of women and explores questions Corley said society is still asking itself today: “We’re still unsure about things like sexuality, gender and what part the political system should play,” Corley said. “That’s why I want to do it right now.”
Electra
Nov. 13 – 23
Come fall, Forest Theatre Company will launch its first year-round season with Sophocles’ “Electra,” a play about justice and the law, Corley said. In “Electra,” a woman’s mother kills her father, and her brother is exiled. The woman waits for her brother to return to avenge their father.
Corley said he’s been wanting to put on the Greek tragedy for years, specifically the rarely produced version adapted by American poet Ezra Pound, who lived much of his life in Europe. Pound was arrested for treason in his support for Hitler and Mussolini, pled insanity, and helped translate “Electra” while in a United States hospital.
“The notion of war, revenge, treatment of the guilty and the innocent – those become very personal to him translating this play,” Corley said. He added that Pound includes American vernacular and idioms throughout the play, while leaving several Greek lines untranslated. “It doesn’t absolve contradiction but allows contradiction to be the nucleus of the play.”
The Illusion
Jan. 29 – Feb. 8
At the start of next year, Forest Theatre Company and Madison Street Theater are putting on their first co-production with “The Illusion.” This play follows a lawyer who drives his son away, then travels to find a wizard, who tells the father visions of his son’s adventurous and perilous life.
Corley said “The Illusion” covers themes of loss and longing but is romantic and funny with lots of sword fighting and mystery. It’s also a representation of the company and theater’s new partnership.
“The theater itself is said to be an illusion about life,” Corley said. “I thought the community could celebrate the essential part of the theater with this play. It’s an announcement of our two theaters coming together.”
Green – who spent two decades as a photographer and has danced her whole life – doesn’t have a theater background but says she’s excited to learn more about the production side of things, especially through “The Illusion.”
“It’s an interesting story and you don’t know where it’s going,” Green said. She added that Madison Street Theater puts on many musicals. And though she’s a self-proclaimed “musical nut,” Forest Theatre Company’s plays aren’t as formulaic.
“It’s a departure from what tends to be there, and that’s really exciting for us,” Green said.
Corley said opening night of “The Illusion” will be a benefit. For $125 per ticket, attendees get a buffet and wine tasting along with the play.
Arms and the Man
April 23 – May 3
Next spring, Forest Theatre Company is producing “Arms and the Man,” a comedy by George Bernard Shaw set in 1885 at the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian War. The play tells the story of an engaged Bulgarian woman who comes face-to-face with a soldier fighting for Serbia, becoming torn between two men.
Corley said “Arms and the Man” is a story about the absurdity of war and patriotism. He chose the play with input from the cast of “The Misanthrope,” who will all star in “Arms and the Man.”
Supporting local theater
In its 2026-2027 season, Forest Theatre Company will launch Classics Now, “our opportunity to find Chicago playwrights, support their work and bring their work to the western suburbs,” Corley said.
Forest Theatre Company will call for submissions of new plays. Throughout the season, Corley said there will be several evenings where the company and its actors work with a chosen playwright on their script – all to develop Forest Theatre Company’s identity and support emerging Chicagoland playwrights.
The effort is an expansion of local theater at a time when other institutions are struggling. For example, Dominican University announced this year that it’s ending admissions to its theater arts program. But Corley and his wife teach at the University of Illinois Chicago’s theater program, and Corley said the program’s enrollment has increased – something that needs to continue to cultivate the local arts.
“We all want musicians and actors,” Green said of the need to keep funding theater programs. “Where do you think Brad Pitt came from? You don’t just fall off the turnip truck and have these schools. You have to learn it before people can do these jobs.”
“This attack on free speech and the arts and trans rights – which are all a piece of a plan to centralize power – has a chilling effect on everyone’s ability to create opportunity for the arts,” Corley said. He added that, historically, “theater is one of the first things autocrats shut down.”
But Corley and Green aren’t too worried about their future, as long as they have community support and funding. So, the two are working on “building a patron base that is as excited about what we’re doing as we are,” Green said.
Corley said each play that Forest Theatre Company produces costs about $30,000, including funds to pay all actors and crew members.
“If the communities that we’re discussing want year-round high-quality professional theater in their lap, they have to support it,” Corley said. “We’ve got the art, the space, now we need the community.”
Forest Theatre Company is starting a subscription service that offers discounts on Thursday night previews of plays and on opening nights with hors d’oeuvres and a complementary drink. Visit forest-theatre.org to learn more.
