A PREFACE

Two Articles, One Dataset

This preface introduces two companion pieces built from the same five years of data. They ask different questions of it.

Madie Doppelt’s article, Chicago Theater’s Minority is The Global Majority, tracks the racial breakdown of actors hired across Chicagoland’s Equity theatres from 2021/22 through 2025/26. It asks: who is actually getting cast, and has that changed since 2020?

Connor Ermir Bradshaw’s article, The Data Behind the Drama, tracks the playwright gender breakdown of productions over the same period — specifically, whether the work was a world premiere or a revival, and who wrote it. It asks: whose plays get staged, and does it matter whether the work is new?

Read separately, each makes its own argument. Read together, they’re two angles on the same front-facing question: who is Chicago theatre actually for?

Why We Counted

Throughout our artistic careers, we have constantly worked in tandem. From undergrad to years after, our interests and sensibilities have overlapped. And we’re better for it! (Iron sharpens iron, and all that.) So when we independently arrived at the idea(s) of tracking Chicago theater statistics over the last five years, it was no surprise. Because of this shared interest, we were also able to readily verify the other’s information. Data reconciliation played a massive part in the confidence we feel sharing the findings. And we couldn’t have done that without the other’s support (whether that be helpful notes about how often a production may have been re-mounted or whether a theatre company was still operating).

What drove this: a deep interest in knowing what is literally happening on our city’s biggest stages. Which theaters are producing more new work? Which are sticking to the classics? Which companies are producing more plays centering people of color? These are all questions that artists anecdotally discuss and ponder. But we wanted to offer an unvarnished view of what’s actually happened.

This shouldn’t seem like a large undertaking. But it was. And that’s because the city sorely lacks context and readily-available information. This lack extends to the ways decisions are made in the city’s vaunted theatre institutions. 2020 was a watershed moment for our country and for this theatre community. From public commitments to DEI to internal admin restructures, Chicago equity theatre leaders were determined to chart a more sustainable path. A path built on greater understanding and inclusion. The decisions about these initiatives and promises, however, remain insulated from the broader public. That’s not surprising. But it is added context for the information gap we directly experienced in this project.

We learned something throughout this process: Visibility is clearly not the goal in 2026. Dealer’s choice on whether you feel that’s strategic or merely a consequence of increasingly-thinned administrative offices. All to say: there is no “bad guy” here. There is simply what is and what isn’t.

The 29 Theatres

The guidelines for included theaters were simple:

1. Is the theatre equity?

2. Is the theatre in the Chicagoland area?

3. Was the theater active for the entire five years these two articles cover?

We recognize “Chicagoland” is a pretty broad statement. Depending on whom you ask, it could even include parts of Missouri. Some theaters, such as Buffalo Ensemble Theatre, are based in places such as Glen Elyn. Others are based in Chicago proper.

As you’ll read in other parts of this preface, the information about/for Chicago area theaters is, let’s say it together, impossible to find. That’s not hyperbole. The most reliable sources itemizing equity theaters were either woefully out-of-date blog posts from 2018 (yes, really) or incomplete listicles. The question of what makes for a Chicagoland theater is a good one. Our answer was: Does it feel like it could be? Is it appearing on some of these aforementioned lists? Is it receiving Chicago area awards? Has it, seemingly, partnered with other Chicago area theaters?

The science leaned on an imprecise definition, admittedly. But it was thorough. So, without further ado, here are the Chicagoland theatre companies we assembled:

• A Red Orchid Theatre

• About Face Theater

• American Blues Theatre

• Artists’ Ensemble Theater

• Black Ensemble Theatre

• Buffalo Theatre Ensemble

• Chicago Children’s Theater

• Chicago Shakespeare Theater

• Court Theatre

• Drury Lane Theatre

• Goodman Theatre

• Lookingglass Theatre Company

• Marriott Theatre

• Music Theater Works

• Northlight Theatre

• Oak Park Festival Theatre

• Paramount Theatre

• Porchlight Music Theater

• Raven Theatre

• Remy Bumppo Theatre Company

• Rivendell Theatre Ensemble

• Shattered Globe

• Steep Theatre

• Steppenwolf Theatre Company

• Teatro Vista

• The Gift Theatre

• Theater Wit

• Timeline Theatre Company

• Writers Theatre

More of a visual person? Here is a map we created representing the exact locations these theaters primarily/solely operate.

One note: Congo Square Theatre was an active Equity company through much of this period and ceased operations in October 2024. Their closure left Court Theatre as the sole Equity company on Chicago’s South Side — a fact worth keeping in mind when reading the geographic spread of the data.

Equity v. Non-Equity

Do we just hate non-equity theatre? Is that why we didn't include it in this analysis? Not at all! The decision here was a practical one: Chicago’s storefront and non-Equity scene is (gloriously) hard to bound. The time investment involved with offering a full and accurate depiction of Chicago Theatre would be immense.

Relatedly, equity contracts mark out the field’s institutional core: the houses with the subscribers, the budgets, the press attention, and the staying power to set the terms of what “Chicago theatre” is taken to mean.

Worth saying plainly: That boundary almost certainly undercounts the newest, most adventurous work, which tends to live in the scrappier rooms this study leaves out. Keep that thumb on the scale as you read. (Or keep that metaphorical thumbtack pinned, as it were.)

Publicly Available Disclosure

As noted in prior sections, the lack of any singular “source of truth” made the research component of this venture difficult. Full stop. This is not an indictment of the overworked theatre pros tasked with updating websites and production archives and cast lists. But it is recognition that corroborating shows/cast lists/playwrights/etc involved a high degree of cross-referencing between any of the following: owned sites, reviews, cast announcements, resumes found on agency websites, About the Artists, Jeff award nominations, Broadway world releases, publicly-available Facebook posts, theatre-run Instagram pages, and more.

And if this sounds like a lot of sources to you, you’d be correct. Involved in this work was reconciling apparent discrepancies between sources. For example, a theatre’s website may have listed a show in its 2021-22 season. A review would indicate it happened in 2023. This didn’t happen once or twice. It was an incredibly common occurrence. Treat this as a disclaimer: We tabulated everything we could reasonably verify with a high degree of certainty. But we, and the sources we used to get this information, are not infallible.

To that end, if you see any glaring omissions, stunning inclusions, or otherwise have corrections about the data’s veracity, please email us! We are invested in making sure the story, and data, is as accurate as possible.

In the spirit of transparency, here are the cross-sections and full datasets from each article:

• Madie’s Dataset

• Connor’s Dataset