It’s a proud time for us here at Northlight, as two plays that you first saw here have premiered in New York to strong reviews.  Grace, a play that opened on Broadway this week, appeared here at Northlight in the 2005 season.  It was directed by Dexter Bullard and starred the gifted Chicagoan Michael Shannon, with Dexter’s wife Tiff designing the clothes.  All three have gone on to the Broadway production. It got tremendous reviews here and provoked some really wonderful responses from our audiences.

I had seen Grace at Woolly Mammoth in Washington D.C. and some years before that I had met Craig Wright, its author, at the Humana Festival. After Grace, we commissioned Lady from Craig for Michael Shannon, which I directed here at Northlight and Better Late which we commissioned for John Mahoney and Mike Nussbaum which was co-written by Craig and Larry Gelbart. Both of these plays were worked on in Interplay, our reading/commissioning series, and it is that fact which makes us most proud.

At the time Craig wrote: “I’ve certainly never had a creative producing partner that was so willing to take risks with me, not just betting on me, but betting with me. Of course, I’m thinking mostly of BJ Jones when I say –he’s got a lot of guts.”

Then Jeffrey Hatcher’s Ten Chimneys, which was our biggest hit last season, opened at the Pecadillo Theatre in New York was well received by the NY Times.  We presented Ten Chimneys in our Interplay series, after a visit that David Ira Goldstein, Jeff Hatcher and I took to the Lunts’ Wisconsin estate. David Ira remembers it as a suggestion I made that it would be a great idea for a play, and he may be right I don’t know, but really and more importantly it was the work he and Hatcher did on the play both in Interplay and at David’s Arizona Theatre Company, which got it to NY. Last week Hatcher wrote, “the two of you are the godfathers of Ten Chimneys (if not of soul).” He is too kind.

I am most proud of what we do here at Northlight. I don’t think we get enough credit for it frankly. But it is for for the artists who have something to say and a way and need to say it that we do this work. It is for the actors and directors and designers who want to share their talents with you. But more importantly it is for you, our audience and our subscribers that we take these risks. Why, after all, are we here; certainly not for the critics. Their job is to judge not to enjoy.

You saw these plays first at Northlight. And I hope you are as proud of that as we are.