This was the second play I’ve seen in a church in the past 13 months (see blog on Forty-Two Stories). As with the last one, there were bothersome stairs to navigate, in this case steep ones leading into a basement that, at least based upon the signage, had only one exit (even the No Exit Cafe has two).

The St. Sebastian Players are a membership-based theater company. If you, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland have a barn and want to put on a show, there is a handy website with information on how to start a membership-based company.

The League of Chicago Theaters says that it has over 200 members, including the St. Sebastian Players. By my quick count, with this addition, I now have seen shows produced by at least 45 of them.

The beauty of a neighborhood company like St. Sebastian producing a play like Front Page is that the show has a large cast, which can help bring in customers. There were 20 actors, and we may have been the only two audience members who didn’t know any of them personally, although I admit knowing one of the company’s Board members.  In particular, the actor playing Hildy Johnson displayed physical comedy skills, as well as the ability to speak rapid-fire dialogue in the manner we expect from this show (though not in the same league as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the 1940 movie adaptation His Girl Friday, or Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien in the 1931 movie version, which, help me, I still recall watching on TV in my unproductive childhood).

The theater had a nice period-evoking set, including (spoiler alert) the iconic roll top desk used in the show to hide Earl Williams after he breaks out of jail (nothing like an escapist show about an escapee). We were very impressed by the actor’s ability to cram himself into the desk for an extended period of time. Apparently many more people suffer from stage fright (up to 80%!) than claustrophobia (perhaps 5-10%), so perhaps the inside of the desk was a welcome relief for him.