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Building the Entertainment Machine: Charles L. Mee's Time to Burn and the Performance of Postindustrial Decay in Chicago
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2016
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During his first mayoral campaign in January 1989, Richard M. Daley insisted that “Everybody talks about bringing manufacturing back. There aren't going to be any more soap factories on Clybourn Avenue[.] … The city is changing. You're not going to bring manufacturing back.” Although this was a controversial statement at the time and Mayor Daley later embraced promanufacturing policies, it reflected an awareness of a fundamental economic shift in Chicago. By the late 1980s, the city had lost over half of its post–World War II manufacturing jobs, and companies were continuing to leave the city for more space, lower taxes, and a less expensive labor force. In fact, only months after Daley's comments, Procter & Gamble announced that it would close its fifty-nine-year-old soap plant at 1232 West North Avenue on the North Branch of the Chicago River, eliminating 275 manufacturing jobs in the process. Deindustrialization was under way, causing anxiety for politicians and pain for factory workers, but a new economy that was focused on real estate, finance, and culture was emerging in Chicago.
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References
Endnotes
1. Charles L. Mee, Time to Burn, in C. Mee, History Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 251–329, at 264.
2. Quoted in Rast, Joel, “Manufacturing Industrial Decline: The Politics of Economic Change in Chicago, 1955–1998,” Journal of Urban Affairs 23.2 (2001): 175–90, at 185CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. Chicago had 668,000 industrial jobs in 1947. By 1982, that number had decreased to 277,000. Larry Bennett, The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 189.
4. This site is now occupied by a Home Depot, the kind of big-box retail that supports gentrifying renovation.
5. Pamela Sherrod, “Procter & Gamble to Shut City Plant: 275 Jobs to Be Cut on North Side,” Chicago Tribune, 20 July 1989.
6. Richard Christiansen, A Theater of Our Own: A History and Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 232.
7. Ibid., 266.
8. Terry Nichols Clark, “Introduction: Taking Entertainment Seriously,” in Research in Urban Policy: The City as an Entertainment Machine, ed. Terry Nichols Clark (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004), 1–17, at 7.
9. C. Mee, 253.
10. Ibid. The published script of Time to Burn, like much of Mee's work, is formatted as free-verse poetry with line breaks that suggest a sense of rhythm, isolate words and phrases, and create juxtapositions.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 254.
13. Joel Henning, “Gorky's Homeless Heroes in Modern-Day America,” Wall Street Journal, 4 March 1997, 16.
14. John Istel, “Sinewy Beauty: Landau and Mee Do Gorky at Steppenwolf,” Village Voice, 8 April 1997, 99.
15. Rast, 179.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 185.
19. John McCarron, “Blue Collar vs. White in Fight for Factories,” Chicago Tribune, 28 June 1987.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ben Joravsky, “No Entry, Gentry: New Rules for the Clybourn Corridor,” Chicago Reader, 1 September 1988.
24. McCarron, “Blue Collar vs. White Collar.”
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. John McCarron, “Zoned In but Moving Out,” Chicago Tribune, 12 January 2007.
28. C. Mee, 268–9, 274, 280.
29. Ibid., 304–5.
30. Mee, Erin B., “Shattered and Fucked Up and Full of Wreckage: The Words and Works of Charles L. Mee,” TDR: The Drama Review 46.3 (2002): 83–104, at 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31. Ibid., 86–7.
32. Reilly, Kara, “A Collage Reality (Re)Made: The Postmodern Dramaturgy of Charles L. Mee,” American Drama 14.2 (2005): 56–69, at 60 (quoting Benjamin), 62Google Scholar.
33. C. Mee, 254. Subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text.
34. Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006), 124.
35. According to Clark et al., “Tourists rose from 32 million in 1993 to 42.9 million in 1997, with the average business/convention traveler estimated to spend $242/day. This implies that the Chicago economic zone (DMA) took in $16 billion in 1997 and indirectly $29 billion.” Terry Nichols Clark, Richard Lloyd, Kenneth K. Wong, and Pushpam Jain, “Amenities Drive Urban Growth: A New Paradigm and Policy Linkages,” in Research in Urban Policy, 291–322, at 306.
36. Christiansen, Theater of Our Own, 223.
37. Ibid., 225, 223.
38. Ibid., 221.
39. “Timeline: From Highland Park to Lincoln Park,” Steppenwolf, www.steppenwolf.org/Ensemble/Timeline.aspx, accessed 4 August 2015.
40. Christiansen, Theater of Our Own, 232.
41. Ibid.
42. “End of the Zeroes: Operating Budgets Then and Now,” 16 December 2009, Newcity Stage, http://newcitystage.com/2009/12/16/end-of-the-zeroes-operating-budgets-then-and-now/, accessed 28 October 2013.
43. Bogart's Viewpoints system is an influential approach to stage direction that emphasizes movement in relation to time and space. For more details, see Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005).
44. Cummings, Scott T., “Love among the Ruins: The Plays of Charles L. Mee,” American Theatre 17.10 (2000): 18–22, 83–4, at 83Google Scholar.
45. Richard Christiansen, “Marks of a Masterpiece: Time to Burn Builds on Gorky's 1902 Work,” Chicago Tribune, 24 February 1997, E2.
46. Clark, “Introduction,” 2.
47. Ibid., 8.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Christiansen, Theater of Our Own, 265.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 265–6.
53. Ibid., 266.
54. “Study Outlines Chicago Theater Impact,” New York Times, 17 January 2007.
55. Ibid.
56. Christiansen, A Theater of Our Own, 267.
57. Robert Sharoff, “To Burnish the Loop, Chicago Turns to Live Theater,” New York Times, 3 January 1999, K7.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. “About Us,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater, www.chicagoshakes.com/about_us/about; “Our History,” Goodman Theatre, www.goodmantheatre.org/about/our-history; “History,” Lookingglass, http://lookingglasstheatre.org/about, all accessed 7 November 2015.
61. Lloyd, 125.
62. Ibid.
63. Joel Henning, “In the Windy City, a Drama of Cultural Renewal,” Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2000, A24.
64. Quoted in Ibid.
65. Quoted in Ibid.
66. Ibid. Significantly, this comparison points both to Mayor Daley's generosity to the arts and to the kinds of antidemocratic decision making that have long plagued Chicago politics.
67. Tax increment financing is a financial instrument that dedicates future property tax revenues to subsidizing commercial and real estate redevelopment in targeted neighborhoods. The widespread use of this tool in Chicago has produced controversy because of a lack of transparency, allegations of corruption, and the removal of revenue from the regular city budget, which funds education and other services. For a detailed analysis, see Weber, Rachel, “Selling City Futures: The Financialization of Urban Redevelopment Policy,” Economic Geography 86.3 (2010): 251–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68. Henning, “In the Windy City.”
69. Christiansen, “Marks of a Masterpiece,” 2.
70. Henning, “Gorky's Homeless Heroes.”
71. Ibid.
72. Istel.
73. Henning, “Gorky's Homeless Heroes.”