Tony Adler stepped down as the Reader‘s senior theater critic last month. He was an institution, having spent the better part of his career here, and his exit leaves behind a gap that the cultural community at large will have a hard time restoring. He joins Peter Margasak and J.R. Jones on the list of longtime arts writers at the paper to have left recently.
In defiance of time’s passing, the humble reviewer will do things like write a 7,000-word feature on Beau O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus, which Adler did in a 1994 issue of the Reader. O’Reilly, the perennially embattled north-side fringe scene’s elfin panjandrum and founder of Curious Theatre Branch, sat down with Adler over iced tea in Bucktown. Things were gloomy. There were troupes folding and theaters shuttering all over the place. “As of this spring day in 1993,” Adler observed with cold eyes, “Beau O’Reilly is the author of a pile of cunning, subversive performance works that will never be done a second time; the writer of many gorgeous songs that most people will never hear.” Adler had to have had in mind, writing that, what reviewing theater every week can be like. But he also had to have understood that the critic who goes to Bucktown to have iced tea with Beau O’Reilly (who still runs Curious Theatre Branch out of the Prop Thtr in Avondale and currently teaches at SAIC) or commits the extraordinary life story of Jenny Magnus to print, is first and foremost a chronicler.
A lifelong Evanstonian, Adler was as deeply invested in chronicling local theater as he was in enriching it. He contributed two indispensable articles to the Encyclopedia of Chicago on theater and improvisational theater, tracing the almost forgotten lineage from the early 20th century “little theater” movement to the present-day storefront scene. Another lesser-known side of Adler’s contribution is his role in cofounding the Actors Gymnasium, one of the leading circus and movement training facilities in the country. Chicago had long been a “kitchen sink drama” sort of town, as Adler once put it. You didn’t need a harness or a movement coach to do David Mamet and Terrence McNally.
