The mammoth gray box looks like a half-finished swimming pool, but don’t expect water to slosh in the space when it is completed — unless perhaps someone is adapting Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” for the stage.
Don’t expect seats, either — at least not the kind that are screwed permanently into place. TimeLine Theatre likes to surprise audiences, making things unpredictable for every new production.
Few outside of the theater company could have predicted that this $46 million project would be rising now along North Broadway in the Uptown neighborhood. Not after a COVID-19 pandemic darkened Chicago theaters for more than a year, plunging into full-blown crisis an industry already troubled by declining philanthropy and changing viewer habits. Even now, theaters across the city are struggling to sell tickets.
TimeLine’s new theater, scheduled to open next spring, is a big risk, but it also speaks to the company’s faith in entertainment. For almost three decades, the theater has pulled in sell-out crowds with plays that reach into the past to illuminate present-day social and political issues.
“A new place for art, education and community in Uptown,” reads the sign hanging from the cyclone fence surrounding TimeLine Theatre’s soon-to-be new home.
TimeLine’s new five-story theater, sandwiched between Sun Wah BBQ and a personal injury law firm, will feature, among other things, a 250-seat black box theater, exhibit galleries, a combined bar and cafe. The theater will more than double the capacity of TimeLine’s previous Lake View home.
“To build a building like this, it required public investment, it required private investment and it required a lot of belief through those dark days of the pandemic,” said TimeLine’s charismatic artistic director, PJ Powers, during a recent tour of the still shell-like structure at 5035 N. Broadway.
From wandering thespians to major players
TimeLine’s roots stretch back to 1997, when six DePaul University graduates started a theater company, each tossing in $50 to get things off the ground. They were wandering thespians at first, finding a permanent home two years later on the second floor of a 110-year-old church building at 615 W. Wellington Ave.
“The rise of TimeLine … has been steady and impressive,” former Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss wrote back in 2004. “The company has a specific mission: to produce plays that illuminate the impact of history on society. … the choices of plays have been bold, daring and imaginative.”
Top-notch actors, directors and a canny approach to picking productions have helped fuel that rise.
“They are not up there taking risks on things that they don’t think are going to work. They know their audience,” said Damon Kiely, an associate dean at DePaul University’s theater school. Kiely, who has known Powers for many years, has also directed two shows at TimeLine.
TimeLine’s work has earned dozens of Jeff Awards through the years, including 11 for outstanding production. A typical play runs for about a month, but the folks at TimeLine found themselves stretching some runs to 13 weeks to accommodate the demand, Powers said.
Still, audiences had to endure the old church’s musty odor, radiators gurgling and hissing, as well as actors who were occasionally plunged into darkness when the power went out.
“It was a second floor, no elevator, no central AC on a side street tucked inside a courtyard entrance,” Powers said.
And, as Mica Cole, TimeLine’s executive director, put it: “The space itself inherently limited the stories we were able to tell. When you’re a history-based theater, there are stories large and small.”
The price tag doubles
In 2005, TimeLine set out to find a new home on the North Side. Right from the start, they could sell their company’s future to potential donors because they had a long and distinguished past. They also had Powers, who possesses the zeal and mesmerizing gaze of an evangelical preacher.
“He’s very charming, he’s very infectious … and seemingly [has an] endless supply of energy,” Kiely said.
He needed it; anyone who has tried to raise money to build a theater from scratch will say it’s a Herculean task.
“There are days when I go, I can’t do another lunch or another dinner. But when you tell people what you are doing, they get excited about it,” said Tim Evans, the executive director of Northlight Theatre, which is set to open in its new downtown Evanston space next fall. Evans and his staff spent eight years raising the money to build the theater.
“My motto is: A ‘no’ is a ‘maybe,’” Evans added.
Anecdotally, “What people say is that PJ walks into a room and walks out with million-dollar checks,” Kiely said.
Then-Ald. Harry Osterman said he “rolled out the red carpet” for TimeLine in his North Side ward. He personally drove Powers and others from one potential site to another.
“We saw that with TimeLine, it’s going to bring thousands and thousands of people to come see their performances and support the local businesses along Argyle or in Andersonville,” Osterman said.
The building they eventually chose, a former warehouse, appeared to have decent bones and it was just steps from the new Red Line Argyle stop. TimeLine bought the building at the end of 2018 for $2.7 million. They hired an architect in the summer of 2019. Four $1 million gifts followed in quick succession for a project with a then-$20 million price tag. The future could not have looked brighter.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The words “suspended,” “canceled,” “postponed” hastily went up on marquees across the city as life retreated from public spaces.
The lights stayed off at TimeLine for almost two years. The price tag for the new project would eventually more than double to $46 million — in part because it turned out the original building couldn’t accommodate a theater and would need to be gutted. Inflation and supply-chain issues also contributed to the surging cost.
Some in the theater community asked TimeLine leadership if it was wise to keep going with the project.
“We were committed to that neighborhood and that location. Starting over would have cost even more,” said Elizabeth Auman, who is overseeing TimeLine’s move to Uptown.
Kiely still marvels at how Powers, Auman and others at TimeLine persevered.
“To raise $20 million is a big deal. To have to keep stretching it to raise $46 million — I don’t know how they did it,” Kiely said.
Said John Sterling, a major project donor and the TimeLine’s Board of Directors’ immediate past president: “We definitely had some very agonizing conversations.”
Somewhat to their surprise, no one pulled their donations; in fact, money kept coming in — from foundations, but mostly from individuals.
The largest single chunk: $10 million in redevelopment-geared tax increment financing money from the City of Chicago — a sum the City Council approved 3 hours into its Oct. 9, 2024 meeting agenda. Osterman said city administrators and his colleagues on the City Council envisioned what tens of thousands of theatergoers annually could mean for the Uptown neighborhood.
“From a city perspective, it’s kind of what TIFs were designed to do: to spark economic development,” Osterman said.
Auman recalled how she felt when the City Council finally signed off on the money: “I walked out of there with the adrenaline dropping because everything had been working to this. So I was a little bit like, ‘Oh gosh, I can breathe now.'”
A theater emerges from a gutted warehouse
On a recent late-summer morning, Auman led the Chicago Sun-Times on a hard hat tour of the new building, still mostly all hulking concrete beams and pillars — and hard to envision as a theater complex.
That didn’t stop Auman from gushing about what’s to come — a glass-front, three-story atrium and a performance space that will change for every new show. The new space will open with Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”
“We have catwalks! We’ve never had those before. We’re very excited,” Auman said.
Veterans of the Chicago theater world say the true test for TimeLine may come further down the road.
“Anything with the arts — of course to a certain extent is a risk because the arts are very responsive to … what’s happening with economics,” said Ellen Placey Wadey, who oversees funding for small arts organizations for the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation. “When you get into a new space, then you have to maintain that, right? Those first couple of years can be really hard.”
The theater world’s struggles didn’t end when the pandemic did. A 2025 survey of 292 Illinois arts and culture organizations, the vast majority located in the Chicago area, found that more than half are “actively scaling back operations,” including laying off staff, freezing pay and canceling offerings, says the nonprofit arts advocacy group Arts Alliance Illinois.
For an up-close look at the art industry’s uncertainty, the folks at TimeLine need only glance down the road at the boarded-up Uptown Theatre, which first opened its doors as a movie palace 100 years ago as of August.
“When I was mayor-elect, I said we were gonna make that an entertainment district and bring back the Uptown Theatre. You’re gonna see now that investment bear fruition…for the entire neighborhood. Uptown was an eyesore. Now, it’s gonna be a place for entertainment and jobs,” then-mayor Rahm Emanuel said in 2018 to announce a $75 million restoration project that never got off the ground.
Despite the 2018 announcement, the theater’s hoped-for rebirth has still not materialized, illustrating how difficult it can be to pull together public and private financing for such an endeavor.
The TimeLine leaders see beyond the crumbling Uptown Theatre when they express their vision for the neighborhood with their new home as an anchor.
Said Powers: “We’ve been drawn to this neighborhood for a whole host of reasons. Those of us who started this company 28 years ago, including myself, we would go to the Green Mill [Cocktail Lounge on Broadway] every Thursday night for big band night after we had some of our early meetings. … The Uptown Theatre is obviously the grand dame, the crown jewel. If it happens, that will be incredible and something to celebrate.”