Chicago’s off-Loop theater is so focused on young and emerging talent that it’s easy to forget how barren the landscape was three decades ago, when Ruth Higgins moved to town. In 1969 she and her husband, Byron Schaffer Jr., founded Dinglefest Theatre Company, one of the off-Loop scene’s early success stories. Five years later Higgins started the Chicago Alliance for the Performing Arts, one of the first trade associations to serve the music, dance, and theater industries (not to be confused with the Chicago Association for the Performing Arts, which books the Chicago Theatre). Perhaps most important, in 1977 she and Schaffer opened the Theatre Building at 1225 W. Belmont, providing a welcome Lakeview space for scores of small companies. And in 1984 they relaunched Dinglefest as New Tuners Theatre, with a focus on developing new musicals. Higgins was widowed a decade ago, but now she’s remarrying and moving to the Netherlands with her 12-year-old daughter.
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Higgins remembers the early days fondly: she’d been teaching at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, and Schaffer was on the faculty at Northern Illinois University when they founded Dinglefest and began producing satirical comedies. “We would develop a new play each year, open it in the spring for a Chicago run, and then tour it throughout the midwest, east, and south in the fall and winter,” she recalls. Though Dinglefest was a nonprofit, it operated solidly in the black and at its peak had seven full-time employees. In 1976, Dinglefest began formulating a plan to lease the space on Belmont with Michael Cullen’s company, Travel Light Theatre, but in the end Higgins and Schaffer assumed control of the venue and decided it could best be used as an affordable rental space for small companies. “That meant we had to constantly raise money to subsidize the low rents theaters were paying,” says Higgins, “but we never doubted it was worth the effort.”
As she prepares to start the next act of her life, Higgins has tried to put the last three decades in perspective. Much of what’s happening now, she says, reminds her of the theater scene in the early 70s. “The city’s big downtown houses were empty then too,” she says. “Only they were more run-down because millions of dollars hadn’t been spent renovating them.” Those were exciting times, as the first waves of young thespians started moving to Chicago to found numerous small companies. “Back in the 1970s people had things they wanted to say,” she notes. “While now, unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of the theater here is self-indulgence. It’s kind of boring, really, because it’s about theater people doing theater for themselves, not for an audience.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
