From the rear of the stage in the theater at the new Beverly Arts Center, it looks like someone got the proportions wrong. The stage is too big. It stretches out toward the audience like an ocean, overwhelming the mere dozen rows of seats that sit facing it like so many chairs on a distant strip of beach. “It’s deeper than the Steppenwolf stage,” says architect John Morris. “By six feet. We can put an 80-piece orchestra and 100 voices here. Hubbard Street [Dance Chicago] can come in and find everything they need.”
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The BAC theater has 420 seats, upholstered in high-grade remnants of deep red, gold, purple, and blue, randomly mixed and brilliant in a room that otherwise resembles a concrete canyon. Gray, shot-blasted concrete block was used for walls throughout the 40,000-square-foot, $10 million building (at Western and 111th), which also contains art, music, and dance studios, classrooms, a cafe, a gallery, and a black-box theater. The concrete block was specified by Morris’s partner on the job, Wheeler Kearns Architects, who designed everything but the theater spaces. But Morris didn’t object. He has designed nearly all of the small to midsize new local theaters–including the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, Raven, Noble Fool, the Old Town School of Folk Music’s recital hall, Northlight, and the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre–and when he has his way they look more like operating rooms, with all the apparatus exposed, than like the plush palaces of old. When the new Steppenwolf, Morris’s favorite project, opened in 1991, Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp pronounced it a sophisticated “machine for the production of plays.” In its purest form, the Morris theater has no more than 650 seats and is a high-tech, alternate-reality capsule designed to make sure that wonderful things can happen onstage and nothing will come between them and the audience.
The firm of James, Morris & Kutyla worked on Steppenwolf’s new home from 1986 to 1991, during which other theater assignments, like Live Bait and Organic, began to roll in. “It snowballed into a not-very-lucrative practice,” Morris recalls. “We never made as much as our employees.” When a dip in the economy came along in ’91, he decided to split. For the next couple of years, teaming with two other architects, he chased a trio of high-profile projects: the Goodman, the Chicago Music and Dance Theatre, and Centre East. “We marketed a lot but didn’t get any of those,” he says, and by November of ’93 he was a one-man shop doing “whatever came through the door.” In the spring of ’94, things started to pick up. Now Morris Architects/Planners has six employees in Chicago and a one-person New York office. Their work in progress includes new quarters for Lookingglass Theatre (where Morris is a board member) in the Water Tower pumping station; a Michael Cullen theater going up across from the Old Town School on Lincoln; the Noble Horse, at 1410 N. Orleans; a street-level entry with an elevator for the Athenaeum; and community theaters in Antioch and Hammond.
