Actor Harry Lennix plans to build ‘the Black version of Lincoln Center’ on Chicago’s South Side
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Actor Harry Lennix shot to fame by playing Terrence “Dresser” Williams in Robert Townsend’s “The Five Heartbeats” and Boyd Langton in Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse.” He currently appears in both “The Blacklist” and “Billions,” and is upcoming in Zack Snyder’s new Netflix series, “Army of the Dead,” wherein a group of mercenaries plan a heist on a Las Vegas casino by breaking quarantine during an outbreak of zombies.
But much of his attention at present rests on an old warehouse building located at 4343 S. Cottage Grove Ave. on Chicago’s South Side, where he intends to build both a two-theater complex to house (among others) the Congo Square Theatre Company and a new, nationally focused museum dedicated to Black contributions to the performing arts. Everything from dance to film to music to theater.
“This is both complicated and very simple,” the 56-year-old Lennix called to say over Thanksgiving weekend. “I want to find a means to archive the collective history of Black Americans in the performing arts. There is no institution that celebrates or houses that. And that is what the African American Museum of Performing Arts will do.”
“You might think of it,” Lennix went on, “as the Black version of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.”
The building is to be called the Lillian Marcie Center, named after both Lennix’s mother, Lillian, and one of his mentors on Chicago’s South Side, Marcella “Marcie” Gillie. After graduating from Northwestern University, Lennix began his career in Chicago theater and he retains ties both to the Congo Square Theatre and to Northlight Theatre in Skokie. The project was first publicly discussed in the fall of 2019, when the project was one of the first recipients of a loan from the new Chicago Community Loan Fund: Fifth Third Bank participated in a press conference to herald its involvement in the redevelopment of Bronzeville.
Plans have evolved considerably since then and the AAMPA now is set to launch as a free-standing non-profit entity, albeit virtually, in January. TaRon Patton is the new executive director.
Lennix has already acquired the physical building, alongside partners Keith and Aaron Giles and Mike Wordlaw. And a nonprofit entity has been created for the museum and operations. What remains is to raise much of the money for both the physical museum and the redevelopment into two performance spaces (a 320-seat mainstage and a 100-seat black box).
The brick structure in question is an old Marshall Field & Company warehouse building, built in 1913. Real estate sites list its size as about 25,000 square feet and it has been on the market several times over the last decade.
The building will look strangely familiar to anyone who travels down Broadway, near the corner of Belmont Avenue. It has a North Side twin, now the Briar Street Theatre and the longtime home of the Blue Man Group before that show was felled, at least temporarily, by both the pandemic and the financial woes of its owner, the Cirque du Soleil. (The South Side version is slightly larger and, for the record, there is another old Field’s warehouse on the Northwest Side, which is now a remodeled residential building).
Patton, the longtime executive director of Congo Square until 2019, found the building with Lennix when the two were looking for a new home for a theater company with which Lennix has retained a close involvement.
“I was telling Harry I thought there was going to be a migration to the South Side when it comes to arts spaces,” Patton said in an interview this week. Since the two first went looking, various other re-adaptive South Side arts-venue projects have either been completed or moved along, including the Green Line Performing Arts Center in Washington Park and the Rahm Emanuel administration’s plan to help Definition Theatre Company move to the former First House of Prayer church in the Woodlawn neighborhood.
Patton says she imagines this new theater as being a rental venue, not unlike the Royal George Theatre on the North Side, wherein resident arts groups like Congo Square could rent space without the hassle of owning their own building, and commercial producers with Broadway or off-Broadway type entertainments could reach a South Side audience that did not necessarily want to travel far to the north.
Although once buoyant on the South Side, the for-profit sector of live entertainment has of late lacked such a mid-sized venue there. Although they’ve been used by companies like Chicago’s Black Ensemble Theater, buildings like the Regal Theatre aren’t ideal for every show. Pattern said she imagined producers with a mid-sized show might find a whole new audience.
But what of the ambitious plans for a museum? Black contributions to all aspects of the performing arts are, after all, legion. They’re already a strong component of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture, not to mention the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the African American Museum of the Arts in DeLand, Florida, and, to some degree, both the DuSable Museum of African American History and the Chicago History Museum.
Lennix points out that none of those institutions are dedicated entirely to Black contributions to the performing arts, while Patton says that the intent of this new institution is to focus on telling the stories from the points of view of the actual artists. Both said that the plan is to feature interactive exhibits, not unlike the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, an institution that focuses heavily on first-person testimony and on education. The first virtual AAMPA exhibit — a tribute to the late actor Anthony Chisholm — will launch soon.
“The dream here,” Lennix said, “is to see the Cottage Avenue corridor become synonymous with Black culture.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
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