GhostLight chicagoshakes announces new leadership team Edward Hall and Kimberly Motes take over on Navy Pier; saying goodbye to Deb Acker and Jeffrey Carlson. | ✍️ kerryreid
for nearly a decade, bringing it back from near-bankruptcy through a renewed emphasis on new work. Hall founded the all-male ensemble-based Propeller Theatre in 1997 and toured their productions throughout Asia and the United States.
He is slated to directWhile Hall brings the international perspective, Motes’s background seems to dovetail nicely with Chicago Shakes’s emphasis on family programming and community outreach. She was the managing director of Minneapolis’s Tony Award-winningand spearheaded strategic planning around increasing the theater’s “equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice efforts to eliminate barriers to participation for those underrepresented in theater,” according to a Chicago Shakes press release. It is perhaps worth noting that Hall and Motes are also white, which means that Davis of Steppenwolf and Christopher Chase Carter of Mercury Theater Chicago remain the only Black artistic directors at larger theaters in Chicago at the moment. Northlight Theatre under B.J. Jones and Court Theatre under Charles Newell are among the largest theaters in the area that haven’t changed leadership since 2020.Saying farewell to Deborah Acker and Jeffrey Carlson Two artists with connections to Chicago Shakespeare died July 6. Deborah Acker , the longtime production stage manager for the company whose tenure stretched back to the Ruth Page years, died at age 69. Actor and teacher Jeffrey Carlson, who performed there twice but who found his longtime teaching partner Susan Hart through Chicago Shakespeare, died at age 48. Chicago Shakespeare’s public statement on Acker said, “We are heartbroken at the loss of Deb Acker, our beloved stage manager for over 30 years. She was not only a brilliant theatermaker but also a generous, thoughtful, and wickedly funny person. In her extraordinary tenure at the theater, she led over 100 productions and worked with thousands of actors, directors, designers, and artists from Chicago and around the world. She was a woman of grit and wit and wisdom.” Sound designer and composer Lindsay Jones, who created the sound and music for many Chicago Shakespeare productions, says, “What Deb really excelled at was being able to work under incredible pressure and make everyone feel like they were supported and everything is calm and is going to be OK. She managed to have a great sense of humor about it while she did that. You wouldn’t know necessarily how special that was unless you went around the country like I do, and constantly put yourself in this situation and see how different people handle it, to be able to know that Deb Acker was truly exceptional in how she handled that stuff.” What encompassed “that stuff”? In a Facebook tribute to Acker, Jones wrote, “By the time I first met Deb, she had already been at Chicago Shakespeare for a very long time, and you could sorta tell that she had really seen it all. She definitely had. And here I was, coming in with all kinds of ideas, which I’m positive totally drove her crazy. ‘I need you to call this cue a second and a half before the sword goes into the body.’ ‘Seriously?’ I was totally serious. And she would sigh and then write it in pencil in her book while loudly repeating what she wrote. ‘SOUND CUE EIGHTY-SEVEN POINT FIVE—ONE AND A HALF SECONDS BEFORE THE SWORD GOES INTO THE BODY.’ But you know what? She fucking nailed that cue every time. And I was totally dead serious when I would get on com afterwards to tell her that she totally fucking nailed it and I wanted to have her babies.” Joan Claussen, lighting crew head at Chicago Shakes and a longtime friend of Acker’s, notes that she first met Acker on one of her first jobs out of college, working backstage on a 1987 production ofat the Briar Street Theatre. “She was fun, on top of it at work, and I immediately respected her.” She adds, “We worked so closely together for so long that it became almost automatic. I could tell from her intake of breath where the ‘go’ [order for the cue] was going to come.” Claussen created a private Facebook page for people to share memories of Acker and notes that her sense of humor has been mentioned repeatedly. Claussen also points out that Acker was a mentor for many women in stage management and technical theater over her long career.Carlson made history by playing the first trans character on a daytime drama in 2006 on
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