History of the Company

In 1999, Stockyards Theatre Project presented its first theatrical piece, Windy Big-Headed City at Breadline Theatre. It was followed by A Chicca Looks at 25: A Memoir for the Stage at The Playground. Both plays were written by Stockyards’ Founder and first Artistic Director Jill Elaine Hughes.

In 2000, Stockyards created a festival of short plays by women playwrights entitled Femme Fatalities: Four One Act Plays By Women, mounted at The Performance Loft. That summer, Stockyards Theatre Project presented the world premiere of Don’t Promise by award-winning Latina playwright Silvia Gonzalez S. The play, produced at Breadline Theatre, addressed a number of women’s issues – most notably the position of women and religion in patriarchal society. “Stockyards Theatre Project’s newest show, Don’t Promise, is a glowing example of Stockyards’ commitment to bringing more interesting productions to the city of Chicago.” (ChicagoActors.com). This year also saw Stockyards producing its first annual Women’s Performance Art Festival, which the Chicago Sun-Times praised as “…the purist woman’s performance event in Chicago.”

The next year, 2001, was fruitful, yielding yet another world premiere in Damn the Torpedoes!!, an absurdist satire of capitalist media culture written by Ms. Hughes and mounted at the Heartland Studio Theatre. On May 6 at Katerina’s coffeehouse, Stockyards presented a staged reading of British playwright Alex Court’s Anarkali at Jallozai, a work-in-progress that focused on the plight of women under the Afghan Taliban. Later that year, Histrionics: Four Plays by Women on Psychology, Sex and General Madness was performed at the Heartland Studio Theater. This play examined the world of therapy, HMOs, mental institutions and holistic healing. Kim Wilson of the Chicago Reader wrote, “This production…is well-crafted and enjoyable.” That fall, Stockyards also presented the 2nd Annual Women’s Performance Art Festival.

In 2002, Stockyards Theatre Project began its trend of telling stories of historical women by producing The Rape of Nanking…According to Minnie by Margaret G. Waterstreet, presented at the Chicago Cultural Center Studio Theatre. In the Chicago Tribune, Lucia Mauro wrote, “What emerged was a great tale of courage and crushing futility.” In the spring of 2002, Running From The Red Girl by Linda Eisenstein (one of our pieces from the Histrionics production in 2001) was a part of the Bailiwick’s All Girl Revue 3. Following the success of the first two festivals, Stockyards continued with its 3rd Women’s Performance Art Festival. In December of 2002, Lunacy opened in the Athenaeum First Floor Studio. Written by Patricia Weaver-Francisco, Lunacy tells the story of thirteen American women pilots who were initially part of the first U.S. space program. The women successfully completed the preliminary physical and psychological testing given the Mercury astronauts, but their participation in the program was abruptly cancelled and those women faded from public view.

On March 3, 2003, Stockyards Theatre Project was one of the many theater companies participating in The Lysistrata Project with their performance at Stage Left. The success of the reading led to the Pro-Peace Series, a number of staged readings focusing on pro-peace writing; a representative from Not In Our Name facilitated a discussion at the end of each reading. Katie Carey Govier and Jill Elaine Hughes also represented Stockyards at 2003’s Theatre Fever at the Chicago Cultural Center. During the summer, Katie Carey Govier was named Artistic Director and Francesca Peppiatt was named Managing Director of Stockyards. Ms. Govier arranged a collaboration with the Women’s Theatre Alliance of Chicago for the Salon Series, a bi-monthly event that promotes women’s leadership in the Chicago theatre community and provides a unique network for theatre artists to share in their artistic diversity. In October, Stockyards presented Breaking the Cycle: 4th Annual Women’s Performance Art Festival. Stockyards then joined with Velocity, a youth-centered arts organization, for the On-Camera Audition Workshop that November.

In January 2004, collaborating with the Women’s Theatre Alliance, Stockyards worked on The New Play Development Workshop run by Ms. Peppiatt, an Emmy-nominated writer. This program offers women playwrights the opportunity to develop new works in a workshop environment leading up to a public reading of that work at the Theatre Building Chicago. The Salon Series continued with staged readings of Karen Zacarias’ The Sins of Sor Juana; an adaptation of stories by Dorothy Parker by Jenniffer J. Thusing, No Sense Saying Goodnight; and an evening of four short plays by female playwrights. For the first time, Stockyards was approached to produce works developed by others. The first such production was Tom Kepinski’s Duet for One, a two-women show at Victory Gardens Theater, for which co-star Michele DiMaso won a Jeff Citation as Best Actress – Play. Next was Anne Ludlum’s Shame the Devin! An Audience with Fanny Kemble at the Majestic Midway, which Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times called, “a smart, vivid and often surprising one-woman show…a work of impressive sweep as was the life of its subject.” Another world premier for Stockyards was Bald Grace, Pirate Queen, written by Marki Shalloe and starring Artistic Director, Katie Carey Govier as the Irish pirate, Grace O’Malley. In a review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Christopher Piatt called the show “both vicious and visceral…it’s surprisingly fun to watch… a solid ensemble…as warm as a hearth and as stout as a pint of Guinness, [Govier is] game for the material she’s given.” Stockyards was back at Links Hall again for Rebel Princesses: 5th Annual Women’s Performance Art Festival.

Another banner year for Stockyards was 2005, starting in May with Busting Out: A Voluptuous Evening of Comedy, four one-acts based on the theme of crushing the Beauty Myth. An off-night show at Stage Left Theater, it ran to packed houses. Then Katie Carey Govier’s “ferocious re-imagining” of Henry IV,Part I was performed at the Theatre Building. The adaptation maintained the language, themes and characters of Shakespeare’s classic, changing only the gender of most characters to women. The magnificent fights were choreographed by Angela Bonacasa, SAFD, and performed to great response by an ensemble of talented actresses and two actors. This was a major advancement to the Stockyards company. This year’s Women’s Performance Art Festival was presented in December and called …Destination…Excavation… In search of the ultimate destination, we excavate our lives to reveal our true selves. Start digging.

Stockyards Theatre Projects’ 2006 season began with a new version of Busting Out, again at Stage Left. It repeated the format of four one acts but took a new theme of time and age with Busting Out: Toying with the Tyranny of Time. “If the purpose of this Stockyards production is, as it claims, to ‘bust out of the stereotypes,’ its tuneful finale sends us home cheerful and fulfilled,” wrote Mary Shen Barnidge of the Windy City Times. Francesca Peppiatt also created a new program for the company called “Play for Keeps.” It is an outreach program to help actresses fill the void of few strong roles for women in theater by pairing actresses with writers to work on new ideas and develop them into one-act plays. With the number of participants larger than expected and the high quality of work created, this program was more successful than we could have been imagined. Staged readings were performed at the North Lakeside Cultural Center to appreciative crowds, and most people in the audience wanted to know how they could be involved in the program. It will begin its second year at the beginning of 2007. Stockyards will also continue to workshop and develop the plays from the first year of “Play for Keeps” in the hopes of creating premier performances in the future. The 7th Annual Women’s Performance Art Festival: Stay Centered, See the Humor and Carry On Regardless opens on October 20 and runs through the 22nd at Links Hall. The company’s Board of Directors is being beefed up by adding business professionals in the Chicago area so that we can achieve our financial and creative goals for Stockyards Theatre Project.



The Community to be Served

Stockyards Theatre Project serves the Chicagoland community, especially appealing to women. Our audiences are generally well-educated, young professionals involved in the arts. We hope to adapt the outreach program we created, “Play For Keeps,” to underprivileged schools in order to help young women discover their own voice by writing their stories and watching them performed by professionals.


Demographics

Over the past year, we have added more men to our audience and diversified both our audience and our participants.

Demographics: 75% women; approx. 65% are under 35. 75% are Caucasian; 10% African-American; 10% Latina and 5% other; 18% of our audience members are over 65 years old.

Participant Demographics: 85% of the participants in our events are female; 15% male. 86% are Caucasian; 4% African-American; 2% Hispanic; 1% Latina; 1% Asian-American and 6% other.


Mission Statement

Stockyards Theatre Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is devoted to “improving women’s lives via the theatre and performance art.” Stockyards Theatre Project serves as a collaborative, ongoing theatre project whose mission is to help support and promote women as theatre and performance artists, to explore gender roles and gender issues in the theatre arts, and to explore both traditional and experimental theatre and performance art. Stockyards Theatre Project is an enthusiastic venue for many women theatre artists. It is a sad fact that according to the theatrical literature canon, principle men's roles outnumber principle women's roles by an average of 3 to 1; fewer than 10% of working directors are women and the majority of published playwrights are men. Stage management and set/lighting design are also traditionally male careers. Stockyards Theatre Project actively works to change these statistics.

Stockyards Theatre Project is committed to:


providing a supportive venue for the advancement of women in the theatre arts;
providing a platform through which Chicago-based, female performance artists can submit and perform their work for a larger audience;
providing a supportive, enthusiastic venue for the many women theatre artists (directors, designers, technicians & writers) who often find it difficult to present their talent to the public in a theatre community dominated by men;
providing a place for talented women to work and focusing on women’s issues when selecting what works to perform, whether they are feminist re-examinations of theatrical classics, the premiere of new works (such as those by women playwrights nurtured in our “Play For Keeps” program).