This season Northlight Theatre in Skokie launches its 40th anniversary with the Midwest premiere of Amanda Peet’s The Commons of Pensacola.
Founded in 1974 as the Evanston Theatre Company by Frank Galati, Mike Nussbaum and Greg Kandel, Northlight’s success is documented in the Northlight Theatre Collection. Researchers can visit the archive to see the theater’s premiere season’s programs for Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Hugh Leonard’s The Au-Pair Man and Steve Teisch’s Nourish the Beast. Along with programs, the collection includes other archival materials like posters and correspondence. In a letter to then artistic director Nussbaum, one theater-goer shared his impression of Jumpers, “We were so staggered by the excellence of the performance and production that we dared not come backstage for fear of blithering. I can’t imagine a more exciting evening in the theater.”
Among other treasures in the Northlight Theatre Collection are press releases, reviews and clippings for well received productions like The Club (1979) and City on the Make (1984). These items, along with the other records from the Chicago Theater Collection, are available to researchers in the Special Collections and Preservation Division of Chicago Public Library.
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