If you had founded a small professional theater company in Chicago before the mid-70s and wanted to open it in a storefront, you couldn’t have done it without the risk of getting closed down by the city. Before that, you had to call yourself a “club,” as Playwrights Theater Club did in 1953 when they rented a former Chinese restaurant on LaSalle Street. Or you could call yourself a “cabaret,” as Second City did when they rented a former Chinese laundry on Wells in 1959. If you were part of a troupe of like-minded theater artists and wanted to rent temporary space from a multitheater venue, you couldn’t do it because there was, at that time in Chicago, no such thing.
That one-hour meeting with the mayor resulted in the easing of constraints on these emerging theaters, and it wasn’t long before Chicago began to see companies popping up in the nooks and crannies of found spaces, giving rise to one of the most vital aspects of Chicago’s theater scene today.
Jim’s ambitions in life and career never seemed to run in a straight line. His passions, interests, and curiosity guided the path that he made by walking. “He was a true visionary,” says Phillips, “His heart and spirit went into everything he did.”
William Russo, a composer and chair of the Columbia College Music Department, was another artist who knocked on Shiflett’s door. He was looking for a performance space for his Chicago Free Theater and the rock cantatas he wrote. Shiflett told Russo he could perform in the bowling alley upstairs where the gutters still separated the maple floor into lanes. The audience of 150, Shiflett remembered, was seated in the area where bowlers had once sat at tables keeping score. Patrons soon were lining up to get in, 300 a night. Between Russo’s Chicago Free Theater, Sills’s Story Theatre, and the Oxford Pub, which had moved into the Artful Dodger space, once-dark Lincoln Avenue was lighting up.
By 1979, Shiflett admitted, “I was burned out” and he stepped down as director. “He was physically exhausted,” Shawn Shiflett remembers. “It was rough. We never had any money, even though people thought we did, and there were always arguments about that. Those years were the most dramatic and the most rewarding of his life.”
Rev. James Allen Shiflett, DD, is survived by his second wife of 40 years, Jean Shiflett, and six children from two marriages—Drew Shiflett, Melissa Shiflett, and Shawn Shiflett from his marriage to his first wife, Betty Shiflett, and stepchildren Terri Likowski, Steven Dopp, and Daniel Dopp.
