Rick Levine knows a good business idea when he hears it. Back in 1986, when Levine was box-office manager for Wisdom Bridge Theatre, coworker Emily Detmer asked him a question that set his entrepreneurial heartstrings a-twanging: “How come Chicago doesn’t have a theatrical bookstore?” Six months later, after surveying a slew of actors, writing a business plan, and learning that bankers will not “loan you money to sell things to people with no money,” Levine and Detmer opened Act I Bookstore at 2633 N. Halsted. They’d picked the low-rent “garden-level” space by plotting the highest concentration of League of Chicago Theatres members on a city map (60614 had about 40) and stocked it with 7,000 used books purchased from a New York store going out of the business. They had new books too, everything paid for with start-up cash borrowed from their families. The store flooded four times in the first year.
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Levine and Detmer carted their stock and the black metal bookshelves they’d painted themselves to their next location, 2632 N. Lincoln. There, after realizing their customers were driven by passion or professional urgency and wouldn’t split hairs about price, they phased out the used books and built their business on special orders. “If we didn’t have it in stock,” Levine says, “within a week we’d get it for them.” Then inspiration struck again. Looking for ways to promote the store, Levine dreamed up a quarterly book review. Steppenwolf’s Rondi Reed wrote about an acting book for the first issue; Tom Tresser reviewed a book on theater management; and the newsletter, which Levine dubbed PerformInk, took off. After two or three quarterly issues, he says, “We were asking ourselves, ‘Why doesn’t Chicago have a trade paper?’” Levine enlisted actress Belinda Bremner to dish news from the local casting agents, got non-Equity audition postings from Elayne LeTraunik, who was running an audition hot line, and took PerformInk biweekly, publishing it from a back room in the store. When Detmer left Act I in the early 90s to pursue an academic career, Levine had to go back to full-time store management, and editor Carrie Kaufman took over running the paper. In 1992, with circulation at 6,000, Levine sold it to her.
While Levine was busy with xBx, playwright and longtime Act I employee Brian Ness had been running Made to Measure. When Levine returned to the uniform trade paper last year, Ness went back to the bookstore–with an agreement that he’d buy in as an equal partner and they’d grow the business. Since ’97 the store had been located at 2540 N. Lincoln, in a cramped bunker wedged between the Apollo Theater and the el. Their lease ran out in January, and two weeks ago they signed a new one, on a space three blocks south and 50 percent larger, where they’ll be able to hold readings and other events. (Once a funeral parlor, it’s allegedly the spot where they laid out John Dillinger.) Ness and three other full-time employees will run the store; Levine, working from home, will apply what he learned at xBx to the store’s Internet site (act1bookstore.com), which he’s built into a 22,000-title giant–the largest theatrical bookstore on the Web. The Internet now accounts for about 5 percent of Act I’s business; Levine expects to take it to 25 percent or more. Act I has little competition on the Web (mainly from one store in New York and one in London) and, since the demise of Scenes (a combination theatrical bookstore and coffee shop) in the 90s, none in town. Though Borders and Barnes & Noble have been the ruination of most small dealers–“There were seven bookstores on Lincoln Avenue when we first came there,” Levine says; “now there are two, Powell’s and us”–he says the big chains, which often hire actors as salespeople, actually send customers his way.
