Aug. 27--The news this week that Rich Cotovsky, one of the great unvarnished characters of the Chicago theater, will be hanging it up at Angel Island after 30 years of the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company deserves some reflection.
Mary-Arrchie has survived so long mostly due to the dedication of that one man, but also because it was a theater company with a home, albeit above a convenience store that got sleazier with the years. But the same forces of gentrification that are pushing out the neighboring Strawdog Theatre (Strawdog is moving, not folding) are killing off the second-floor walk-up space where Cotovsky has plied his trade all these years.
For most of the last three decades, the 3800 block of Sheridan Road and its environs have been outside the more fashionable boundaries of Lakeview and Wrigleyville. No more. The developers are coming, and Cotovsky has lost his lease. Time to go, he has figured. Enough is enough. The next Mary-Arrchie season will be the last Cotovsky hurrah.
Cotovsky, who is 61 years old, has a particular place in Chicago theater history. In the late 1990s, when there was a rift in his company, he is said to have spat out these words to those moving on: "You are nothing but a splinter group." And thus a fine Chicago theater company of that name was born. Mary-Arrchie, though, outlasted them.
I spent a fair bit of time at Mary-Arrchie over 25 of its 30 years. It was never an arts organization focused on growth nor on marketing nor on expansion. And the notion of long-range planning was as foreign to the gestalt at Mary-Arrchie as sin is to an angel. There were more than a few excruciating shows. But there also were some unforgettable nights.
In 1997, Kirsten Kelly directed the superb "Gut Girls," a play by Sarah Daniels about a group of women who cut up meat for a living. This three-hour opus about butchery -- raw meat hung from the rafters -- was what Mary-Arrchie liked to think of as summer theater.
Cotovsky himself starred in "The Pawnbroker," a memorably moving, deeply sad 1999 piece about a Holocaust survivor living in obscurity. That was what Mary-Arrchie liked to think of as a holiday show.
In the early 2000s, Mary-Arrchie had a number of run-ins with newly rigorous city inspectors: closing, reopening, closing, reopening again and so on. But the lights were very much on for "Mojo," a fine production of the Jez Butterworth play about the London rock scene, staged by a then-obscure director named David Cromer. This was one of Cromer's early collaborations with sound designer and composer Joshua Schmidt; the two would work again together on the justly acclaimed off-Broadway production of "The Adding Machine." The cast of "Mojo" included an actor named Hans Fleischmann, a performer who showed up many times at Mary-Arrchie, often banging heads with Cotovsky, often resulting in compelling work.
Cromer was already making his name when he returned to Mary-Arrchie to stage "Cherrywood: The Modern Comparable," a play that re-created a weekend night in the college town of Austin, Texas, featuring a cast larger than a sold-out house at Angel Island Theater, as its venue was known. There were 49 actors on the stage, 49 "willing to bleed for Cromer actors," I said in my 2010 review. There were, I wrote, "microdramas in every corner." Often true at Mary-Arrchie.
"Cherrywood" was, all in all, an unforgettable study in all things Chicago theater. Cromer always liked Mary-Arrchie. In interviews with me, he would always say that Cotovsky let him do what Cromer wanted to do, which is usually the best way to deal with a director like Cromer.
Actually, Cotovsky let most people he liked do what they wanted, and, of course, he did what he wanted. For a long time.
The most successful show in Mary-Arrchie history was Fleischmann's reimagining of Tennessee William's "The Glass Menagerie," wherein the great work of poetic drama was viewed through the glass of Tom's bottles of booze. It was, for my money, also the best show in Mary-Arrchie history, and one of the only shows from that venue ever to move to another venue for an extended run ("Superior Donuts" was another hit).
Predictably, Cotovsky was ambivalent about the success of "The Glass Menagerie," for Cotovsky was always ambivalent about success, if viewed in the language that is traditionally understood to mean big audience, long runs, money. Those were not the value system of the theater's long-running festival, "Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins."
Other newer theaters now do the kinds of shows only Mary-Arrchie used to do. There has been a persistent critique that Mary-Arrchie has been a boys club. Most theaters like this one have their natural life, and their death is from natural causes and part of a healthy artistic ecosystem.
But both Mary-Arrchie and Cotovsky were -- are, still -- unique entities. Theater here was always a blood sport.
Cotovsky (a pharmacist by day) will no doubt still be part of the storefront universe. But the institution with the weird name will become condos or some tower of commerce and residence.
Pity. As I drove down Sheridan Road, the light burning late into the night on the second floor was always a perverse comfort.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
