Jenna Fischer has been a TV star (Pam Beesly in the iconic NBC hit comedy “The Office”), a bestselling author (for “The Office BFFs,” with Angela Kinsey), an award-winning podcaster (“Office Ladies”) and a breast cancer awareness advocate (she’s a survivor).
Yet she still has personal bucket list items she’s excited to conquer. Returning to theater is one of them.
Fischer is about to get her chance in Chicago. She stars in “Ashland Avenue,” which is in previews this week at the Goodman Theatre Downtown and kicks off the historic theater’s centennial season.
On a recent afternoon, in a meeting room in the Goodman, Fischer appears motivated. She’s fresh out of one of the first full rehearsals of the show from beginning to end and feeling enthusiastic about the progress.
Of the part, Fischer says, “I’m getting to fulfill my dream a little early.”
Relaxed, and funny, she candidly veers from subject to subject, from: her two kids, to living in Los Angeles away from family (both Fischer and her husband, Lee Kirk, are native Midwesterners), to life before and after “The Office,” to her bout with breast cancer. And for those wondering — yes, there are a few moments where she flashes a Pam Beesly smile.
“What I want to do from now on is theater,” said Fischer, who is temporarily living in Chicago for the role. She said her plan was to get back on stage after her kids graduated from high school. “I was a theater major. I started my career doing the Los Angeles equivalent of storefront theater. It’s where my heart is.”
But opportunity came earlier. Fischer’s kids have not yet graduated from high school, but Kirk, a Hollywood screenwriter (“The Giant Mechanical Man,” “Ordinary World”), wrote a stage play that captured her at first read, in part because it’s not a role she thinks people would expect her to play. Fischer portrays Sam, a woman trying to maneuver herself out of the shadow of her aging father (Francis Guinan), whose empire of TV shops has dwindled down to the final store. He wants Sam to take over, and revitalize, the family business. Sam wants to be a writer.
Fischer didn’t originally intend to have the part.
“The character was not created for me. He did not sit down to write a play for me,” she said of her husband. Instead, Kirk wrote about the city of Chicago, fueled by his fond memories of Saint Ed, the theater company he started with his college buddies, as well as nostalgia for changing neighborhoods and holding on to the past. (Before decamping for Los Angeles, Kirk studied theater at DePaul, and after graduating in 1996, he tried his hand at storefront theater postgraduation, starting a company with a group of fellow DePaul grads, including Sean Gunn, of “Guardians of the Galaxy” fame, in the historic Chopin playhouse. Back then, the lobby had the bones of a potential coffee shop — a sink, a refrigerator and a counter — and Kirk and his college buddies offered to flip it into a functional cafe in exchange for theater space.)
“This is the gift of him knowing me so intimately,” said Fischer. “The city of Chicago was the inspiration for the play. He told me when he decided it was going to be a play about a father and a daughter, when the daughter started talking, he heard my voice. And so then he kind of wrote toward that.”
“Jenna and I see a lot of theater together, and I read a lot of plays,” said Kirk. A trip to Chicago in 2023 to watch a friend in a play was the final spark that got his pen moving. “I would sit down every morning and think about Chicago, and think about the winter in Chicago, think about Ashland Avenue. And that was what I needed to get my way into this play.”
“That street goes through so many neighborhoods,” he explains, “so everybody can kind of imagine that this TV shop is in their neighborhood.”
At the Goodman, the set-building is underway. Tech workers are buzzing around the stage putting the finishing touches on a replica of a storefront TV video shop. The set clearly represents a shop owner stuck in yesteryear: large flat-screen TVs with for sale signs look like afterthoughts alongside large prominent displays of dusty old-timey televisions.
Chicago theater veteran Francis Guinan plays Pete, Fischer’s father.
“He’s had the shop for over 40 years,” explains Fischer.
The overbearing Pete is the sun in which Fischer’s character, Sam, orbits, yet she desperately needs to extract herself from his aspirations.
“It’s not a comedy,” Fischer hedges. “But it’s funny.”
Fischer is the latest in a series of big name leading actresses who, under the direction of Goodman artistic director Susan Booth, are making a leap to theater from TV (Booth’s “The Penelopiad” starred Jennifer Morrison from the Fox drama, “House,” and last season, Oscar winner Helen Hunt starred in Booth’s “Betrayal”). Booth, who says the string of stars is unintentional, said this production started when Kirk blindly sent a copy of the script to a Goodman staffer. The script eventually made it to Booth’s desk.
“I was 20 pages in, and I was smitten,” said Booth. “I could tell this was written by someone who loved this city real hard. By the time I got to the end of it, I knew I wanted the theater to do it, but I also knew the dangerous thing, which was that I wanted to direct it.”
Fischer’s journey back into theater also comes on the heels of her personal battle with breast cancer.
“My whole 2024 was breast cancer treatment,” said Fischer, who is now cancer-free. “And incidentally, that’s when [Kirk] was writing this play. And the thing is, going through something like that, it just really puts stuff in perspective. You see how you don’t actually have all the time in the world. You get this sense of your own mortality.”
For her, this role has the potential to mark a new beginning.
“I drove to L.A because I wanted to be on a comedy television show that was on TV every week,” she said thinking back to her younger self. “So when that happened, it was a little bit like, I have nothing else to aspire to. My dream came true. So the rest is kind of gravy. But I love theater so much, and it is what I want to do.”
Mike Davis is a theater reporter who covers stages across Chicago.