Welcome to American Blues Theater’s 30th Anniversary season “Seeing is Believing”. Working in Ensemble theater demands collaboration, self-awareness, and an unwavering belief that the collective is stronger than its individual members. It also requires unconditional love and trust from both its artists and supporters.

A revival of The Rainmaker is the perfect way to celebrate our incredible existence. During an interview, playwright N. Richard Nash said, “There is beauty in reality, beauty in the balances of nature, no matter how brutal the imbalances; beauty in the togetherness of people, which sadly, must sometimes be measured by loneliness; beauty in seeing the fact and naming it the fact.”

During the past three decades, we experienced fruitful harvests and debilitating droughts. At times we struggled to pay our bills. We’ve been nomads and held homesteads. We planted roots in five different venues around Chicago and returned to our original location. Our first production in 1985 was housed in this very venue.

We dream of more than we have; we live on less. We’ve redefined our identity, and most importantly – we renewed our faith in each other. This is the essential Chicago storefront theater credo.

Let The Rainmaker inspire you to find beauty in your life; your family. Name both the abundant and difficult times as facts. Allow yourself to dream as a child and yet live realistically as an adult.

As Lizzie and Starbuck teach us – “It’s no good to live in your dreams. It’s no good to live outside [your dreams] either. Somewhere between the two.”

-Gwendolyn Whiteside

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