Richard Cotovsky never did any theater when he was at Senn High School or Niles North, where he graduated. And he had nothing to do with theater at college, first at Southern Illinois, and then at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was a guitar-toting pharmacy major. But in his senior year, in 1976, perusing a course list and in need of an elective, his eye fell on Introduction to Theater.
It got him into the audience for the Saint Nicholas Theatre production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, with William H. Macy, J.J. Johnston, and Mike Nussbaum. “It was an eye-opener,” Cotovsky says. Like the rock ‘n’ roll he loved, Mamet’s explosive dialogue “was fast and loud, and every beat came down right on time.” He saw it a second time. And the next term at school, he signed up for two more theater classes.
Venturini found the Angel Island space, and when Mary-Arrchie moved there at the start of 1989, he brought in some associates, mostly fellow students from Columbia College. They pitched in on renovations and worked on the first shows—a production of Mamet’s Edmund, and the inaugural Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins festival, Mary-Arrchie’s annual performing arts tribute to Woodstock (named by critic Kerry Reid, then a member of the group). But the arrangement lasted less than a year. “They had their own ideas,” Cotovsky recalls. “They weren’t that interested in having me involved.” There was a power struggle, and the people who left formed a new company, the Splinter Group. At about the same time, DeAngelo also left. “It still pains me,” she says, “because this company was named after my parents.”
That night, 15 minutes into a mind-blowing performance of The Brig—a mid-20th-century piece of experimental theater directed by Jennifer Markowitz—the lights had gone out. All the lights. After a pause to see if the problem might be just a fuse, staffers booked return dates and handed out refunds, and the audience of 16 people and a cast of about the same size departed. Nobody was rattled.
