Loy A. Webb’s His Shadow: A Parable, enjoyed an enviable premiere run at Berwyn’s 16th Street Theater this fall. The play, about a Black football player torn between his own ambition and a call to social activism, won strong reviews for the story, the three-member cast, the direction, and every other element of the production. It wasn’t until October 20, a day after closing, that the show’s behind-the-scenes drama erupted on social media.
The complaints were aimed primarily at artistic director Ann Filmer, who cofounded 16th Street in 2007 as a program of the North Berwyn Park District that would bring Equity theater at a bargain price to the park district’s 49-seat cultural center theater. In line with its mission of “inclusivity and affordability,” 16th Street has produced 63 plays by Illinois playwrights, 54 plays by women, 36 plays by writers of color, and 25 world premieres. With a top ticket price of $22 (less for Berwyn residents) and its location in a historically blue-collar, now mainly Latinx community, 16th Street has built a reputation as a gritty professional theater of the people.
A lot of these complaints—minus the racism—strike a familiar chord for Josh Sobel, who directed Koalas at 16th Street a year ago and is now in graduate school at California Institute of the Arts. Sobel, who isn’t Black, told me he encountered “sheer unprofessionalism, willful ignorance, and an unwillingness to listen or engage” from the 16th Street administration. McKown, he added, was “the one person I could go to there and be heard.”
Filmer says she can’t comment. Vallez says the North Berwyn Park District is conducting an investigation. v
