Robert Sickinger
Open-knowledge reference entry
William Robert Sickinger (November 7, 1926 – May 9, 2013) was an American theater director, based in Chicago. He was regarded as the founder of "off-Loop" theater, the Chicago equivalent of Off-Broadway. He often cast non-professional actors in his productions, and in doing so occasionally found new talent such as David Mamet, Marilu Henner, Jim Jacobs, and Mike Nussbaum, all of whom were Sickinger proteges.
Early life
Raised in Philadelphia, Sickinger was drafted into the United States Army while still at school and served in the Philippines during the Second World War. He subsequently resumed his studies at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, where he trained as a teacher and first discovered theater.
Chicago theater
Sickinger was able to convince a local movie theater owner to rent him space, and produced a number of plays in this venue during the early 1950s. He was later hired by Hull House Association director Paul Jans to run a theater programme in Chicago. Sickinger chose to produce "challenging, sometimes distressing contemporary plays" on subjects that had never been seen on Chicago stages, mounting productions by Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Athol Fugard, and Amiri Baraka. Though his choices raised eyebrows, critics generally praised his productions as "revelatory".
Sickinger founded the Uptown Theater, as well as other theaters in more deprived areas of Chicago.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Sickinger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.