Chicago Dramatists
I wanted to give a shout out to Chicago Dramatists, a venerable playwrights-focused institution, founded in the 1986 by Russ Tutterow and a handful of local playwrights. It exists to develop new plays and provide a professional environment for nurturing new and existing Chicago playwrights at every stage of their evolution. They envision a world in which every dramatic writer, regardless of background or experience, has the support, training, and tools to explore their artistic vision, express themselves fully, and realize their creative potential. Sadly, Russ Tutterow died in 2015 but his legacy lives on with CD.
Since its founding, Chicago Dramatists has offered a roster of playwriting and screenwriting courses ranging from beginning playwrighting to writing musicals and one-person shows. An extremely popular class, Scene Workshop offered by These classes usually offer opportunities to not only attend weekly classes with other playwrights but to then see the work in readings at some point.
I joined this group as a Network Playwright many years ago when I first began my adult playwriting life. I was navigating the Chicago theatre and writing scene on my own, and I found Chicago Dramatists (at the time called Chicago Dramatists Workshop) and began to get my sea legs.
The Network Playwright program was established to create an affiliate group of writers who help support the organization and in return receive an array of benefits, the main one being online reading nights, and careful review of your work by one of the Resident Playwrights. I had some great experiences with this group in the 90s. In those years I had only written a few plays and Russ Tutterow took an interest in them and mentored one of my plays in particular (Person or Persons Unknown). Needless to say that gave my esteem a boost. I don’t think I was in a place to really understand what his interest could have meant to me – I was too weird about my writing and its worthiness – but have always appreciated his kindness and support at that early time.
I’ve taken quite a few classes with Chicago Dramatists. My favorite was the Deadline Workshop, where eight playwrights wrote 10 pages every week for the same 4-5 actors. Over the seven weeks you could build the first act of a play. It was a joy to bring pages for the actors every week. The class always culminated in a staged reading in the their theatre. Working with active energized actors was gratifying and something every newbie playwright should do for a period of time.
After a long hiatus – long story – where I could not write or write very much, I rejoined the group a few years ago just after COVID and recently attended a live, in-person event on Saturday February 10, held in the Russ Tutterow Theatre. This was an event featuring Pulitzer Prize winner, Martyna Majok, who it turns out also took classes at Chicago Dramatists back in the day!