For links to media coverage of our theatre activities, see News.
We are deeply indebted to Chicago theatre and the artists who make it. Thanks to the fearless artistry embodied in the best of Chicago theatre, we feel more deeply, perceive more broadly, empathize more meaningfully, and have a heightened sense of community and joy. The stories brought to life on Chicago stages have enabled us to experience vicariously the life journeys of people we never encountered in the homogeneous rural communities where we grew up. We have been further blessed to get to know many theatre artists on a personal level, and have reveled in their friendship and learned bounteous life lessons from their openness, wisdom, and humanism.
Bio Sketch
Michael:
- Born in Georgia, raised in Kentucky
- Resided in Kentucky, Tennessee, California, and Illinois
- Education: University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee, and Stanford University
- Profession: Computer Scientist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Author: Scientific Computing: An Introductory Survey
Mona:
- Born and raised in Virginia
- Resided in Virginia, Tennessee, California, and Illinois
- Education: Virginia Tech
- Profession: Information Technology (worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, IBM, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to some questions we’re often asked:
- How did you two meet?
- When and why did you start coming to Chicago?
- How did you get so interested in theatre?
- In planning what shows to see, and in reflecting on them afterwards, to what extent do you two agree?
- What’s the origin of the handwritten calendars you use for your theatre schedule?
How did you two meet?
Our paths first crossed in the summer of 1974 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where Michael had been working for a few years and Mona was starting her first job after graduating from Virginia Tech. About five weeks after meeting, Michael left for graduate school at Stanford, and we began writing daily letters to each other (this was many years before email was invented!). We saw each other every few months when Michael would fly back east for a quick visit, but we basically got to know each other through letters and occasional phone calls (at exorbitant pre-cellphone long-distance rates!). We got married in December 1975, and began our life together in Menlo Park, California.
When and why did you start coming to Chicago?
Our first trip to Chicago was in 1980. We made the 10-hour drive from our home in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for Chicagoland’s architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright homes, Michigan Avenue, etc.) and shopping (for books, records, and sheet music). Our first theatre production in the Chicago area was 1993’s City of Angels at Drury Lane Oakbrook, followed by a trip downtown in 1994 for Goodman’s A Little Night Music (for more info on these productions, see our lists of favorite Musicals (non-Sondheim) and Stephen Sondheim Musicals). In 1991, we happily cut the 10-hour drive down to 2.5 hours when we moved from eastern Tennessee to Champaign.
How did you get so interested in theatre?
Our love affair with theatre has an unorthodox backstory, which began a few years before we met …
Michael’s story: I was born in Atlanta, Georgia but grew up in rural western Kentucky. My earliest awareness of the theatre was in my early teens when an older cousin gave me a book of “25 great modern plays” that she had used for a theatre appreciation course in college. The book began with plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, O’Casey, etc., then proceeded through the American masters O’Neill, Williams, Miller, and Inge, some of whom were still writing new plays at the time. I eagerly read the plays, but I didn’t expect I would ever see them performed on stage, since there was no live theatre in the area. I acquired many additional books of plays, including two books of one-act plays by a new playwright named Edward Albee, who would soon have a big hit with his first full-length play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My big break came on a family vacation to St. Louis (the nearest big city) in my mid-teens. We were there mainly for Cardinals baseball and the zoo, but the hotel in which we stayed happened to house a live theatre. My parents weren’t interested in attending, but since it was right there in the hotel, they agreed to let me go by myself. Thus, I experienced my first-ever live theatre performance, a production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. I can’t claim that I understood everything about the play, but I was riveted by seeing and hearing the script come to life right there in the same room with me. I was hooked. The following year our family vacation was to Louisville, where under similar circumstances I attended (again by myself) a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms at the brand new Actors Theatre of Louisville. Perhaps it is not surprising that my eventual theatre mania sprouted from these two classic psycho-sexual dramas. I next attended a number of student productions in college at the University of Kentucky, and subsequently at the University of Tennessee while I worked at nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is where Mona and I met just before I left for graduate school at Stanford University in California.
Mona’s story: I grew up on the east coast of Virginia. We had fabulous freshly caught seafood, but no live theatre. In fact, I lived in a county that didn’t even have a movie theatre, and only one drive-in, which was near a marshland and as a result had very robust mosquitos. My first brush with live theatre was in grades 6-8, playing piano for class productions of Gilbert and Sullivan classics. My first theatre experience as an audience member came shortly thereafter, in 1966 when a state-wide touring production of The Subject Was Roses by Frank D. Gilroy was performed in the auditorium of my school for the entire student body. The play had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the previous year, but that didn’t cut any ice with the rowdy students at this particular performance. When I was in 11th grade, I got to see my first live show in a more conducive setting—Camelot, performed in a theatre located in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (ironically, the same institution that was responsible for the touring production of The Subject Was Roses that I had seen two years earlier). The trip was a thank-you from a friend I had accompanied in a 4-H talent competition, and the experience was revelatory. But I had little opportunity for theatre-going while in college at Virginia Tech, so I would have to make up for lost time later!
Our married life started in California, but the rigors of graduate school limited our theatre going to occasional productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas by the Stanford Savoyards. Upon returning to Tennessee and ORNL, we focused mainly on our careers but made periodic visits to Chicago, largely motivated by our interest in architecture. We moved to Champaign-Urbana in 1991 to work at the University of Illinois, which allowed us to make much more frequent visits to Chicago. We dipped our toes back into the theatrical waters with student productions at the university and at the local community theatre, the Station Theatre in Urbana, and subsequently branched out to Chicago and beyond—with the results documented on this website!
In planning what shows to see, and in reflecting on them afterwards, to what extent do you two agree?
Our theatrical tastes are remarkably similar, and we agree perhaps 99% of the time.
What’s the origin of the handwritten calendars you use for your theatre schedule?
Once we started going to lots of theatre, scheduling became more challenging and the standard week- or month-views available in online calendars weren’t sufficient. So Mona started making handwritten calendar sheets that captured about three months on a page. That wider view made it easier to envision scheduling options (e.g., to shoe-horn in yet another show) and optimize travel for double-headers. The hand-made calendars also included indicators like whether we had secured reservations yet and the expected running time of a show. The main downside of the paper calendars has been dealing with wet paper and runny ink when we’ve experienced classic Chicago downpours, with rain soaking contents of pockets and purse. Recreating the calendar sheets can take a couple of hours, aided by the backup in Michael’s online calendar.
