City Lit Theater Company Records

Founded in 1979 in Chicago by Arnold Aprill, David Dillon and Lorell Wyatt, City Lit Theater Company became the first theater in the nation devoted to stage adaptations of literary material. Since that time, the theater has operated under the mission that “City Lit Theater is dedicated to the vitality and accessibility of the literary imagination…producing concert readings and full-stage productions of adaptations of literary material, scripted plays by language-oriented playwrights and original material developed especially for City Lit.”

City Lit has explored fiction, non-fiction, biography, essays and drama in performance while also presenting a wide array of voices. Among these are classic writers such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Oliver Goldsmith, Mark Twain, Colette and P.G. Wodehouse, as well as such contemporary writers as Alice Walker, W.P. Kinsella, Douglas Post, Raymond Carver and Edward Albee.

In 1984, City Lit made a commitment to using diverse casts to present their work. The company also sought to expand its repertoire to include plays by and about underrepresented groups, such as playwright Ruth Prawer Jhabvla and a series featuring the work of black women writers, headlined by an adaptation of Toni Cade Bambara’s Medley. In 1987, City Lit presented its first gay programming, No Apologies, which pre-dated both Bailiwick Theater’s popular Pride series and subsequent transformation into an LGBT production focused theater.

Over the years, City Lit has earned accolades and awards for its body of work, including Jeff Citations, Chicago’s local theater award, for A Tale of Two Cities (1985), Diggory’s Rag (1987), The Good Times are Killing Me (1990), Jeeves and the Mating Season (2002) and Taking Steps (2003), among others.

Despite the theater’s strong success during its first decade in the 1980s, the 1990s found the theater searching for a permanent home after bouncing around to various locations in northside neighborhoods and in the Loop. The multiple moves took their toll on the theater despite seasons that included popular draws like P.G. Wodehouse adaptations featuring the characters Bertie Wooster and Jeeves played by City Lit favorites Mark Richard and Page Hearn.

As a result, in 1999, the theater took a season-long hiatus to regroup. In early 2000, City Lit reopened inside the Edgewater Presbyterian Church on W. Bryn Mawr Avenue with a performance of 20/20 Hindsight: 20 Years, 20 Stories, using a pared-down concert-reading style which they had used to great success at their founding. As of 2021, the company still performed at this location.

In 2005, Terry McCabe, former Artistic Director and founder of Stormfield Theater, became the Artistic Director at City Lit.