Theater writer Kris Vire was always a champion of Chicago’s scrappy storefront theater scene because he could relate to the little guy.
Mr. Vire was bartending on the North Side and running a blog called Storefront Rebellion, which reviewed storefront theater productions, when Christopher Piatt, who served as editor at Time Out Chicago at the time, reached out and gave him a shot as a critic for a major publication.
“Advocating for storefront and independent theaters, that’s his legacy, it’s what got him out of bed in the morning,” Piatt said.
“He came from the scrappy roots of ‘If you want to do something and you don’t know how, just start doing it’ and I think he appreciated theaters and artists who similarly found DIY ways to make it happen outside the margins without thinking about ‘Where’s this going to get me?’ or ‘Will it be marketable?’ but who instead were doing it for the sake of art and community rather than the end product,” said Steve Heisler, who worked with him at Time Out Chicago.
Mr. Vire died Monday from colon cancer and esophageal cancer. He was 47.
Mr. Vire studied theater at the University of Arkansas and was briefly an actor in storefront productions when he moved to Chicago in 2001 before he found his calling as a writer.
“We were both theater scene outsiders, he’s from Arkansas and I’m from a tiny town in Kansas, but he fully believed the real spirit and value of Chicago theater was in the storefronts and he relished the task of writing about people who made the shows and advocating the stuff he thought was good and being as honest as he could about the stuff he thought was bad,” Piatt said.
Mr. Vire spent about a decade at Time Out before starting a freelance career in 2018 that included bylines in the Chicago Sun-Times and The New York Times. He most recently worked as Arts and Culture Editor for Chicago magazine.
Mr. Vire attended big budget shows but preferred taking in theater with his notepad in hand at storefronts and basements and churches, “where people were going out of their way to create something that would create no industry buzz, but there’d be budding and flowing talent,” Heisler said.
“He was so vigilant about keeping on top of everything that was happening in the storefront community,” said Jonathan Green, former artistic director of Sideshow Theatre.
“He could reference something a tiny theater company had done 15 years before; and his writing was so witty. It was clear how much he cared about not only the Chicago theater community at large but especially these tiny companies that he thought would one day grow into larger institutions and become part of the story of Chicago theater,” Green said.
“He approached the theater scene kind of like a park ranger; he wanted to do anything he could to protect and conserve the ecosystem, on behalf of anybody who might enter it, including (hopefully) long after he was gone,” Piatt wrote in a remembrance of Mr. Vire.
Mr. Vire was born Aug. 23, 1977, in Arkansas to Keith Vire, a college professor, and Jan Vire, an elementary school teacher.
Mr. Vire, who lived in Edgewater, was also a founding member of Gapers Block, the Chicago-centric culture blog, in 2003.
He was engaged to be married to his longtime partner, Joe Torres.
“We just didn’t get a chance to do that. But we left nothing unsaid with one another, and were essentially married,” Torres said.
A private celebration of life is being planned.