Seeing ‘Red’: Benefactors pay tribute to Goodman’s season opener
WITH ELIZABETH HAMEL October 3, 2011 7:10PM
Left to right: Season Opening Benefit co-chairs Roger and Julie Baskes, Linda and Peter Bynoe, Sherry and Tom Barrat.
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Updated: November 15, 2011 10:35AM
One of fall’s most festive fetes, the Goodman Theatre Season Opening Benefit, held last Tuesday at the Modern Wing of the Art Institute, welcomed more than 400 of Chicago’s most generous philanthropists and avid supporters of the arts to celebrate a year of accomplishments and look to the future of the downtown performing house.
Partygoers donned rosy frocks or scarlet sweaters in honor of the Goodman’s season opener, “Red,” the Tony Award-winning play by John Logan. A longtime Evanston resident who graduated from Northwestern University in 1983, Logan credits much of his success as a lauded playwright and Hollywood screenwriter to his time on the local theater scene, saying, “I started as a starving Chicago playwright at 21 and have learned all of what I do here.”
He continued, “It is deeply fulfilling to be able to produce this play at the Goodman with Bob Falls, since he is, in my opinion, the great American theater director.”
The evening began with cocktails and continued with dinner and a short awards program in which Patricia Cox, the Goodman’s outgoing chairwoman of trustees; Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; James Rondeau, contemporary art director at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Logan were honored for their commitments to the performing and visual arts. Other familiar faces spotted among the crimson-clad crowd included Penny Pritzker, Desiree Rogers, Sandra and Jack Guthman, Susan and Lew Manilow, Bill and Vicki Hood, and Renee and Lester Crown. Goodman Women’s Board president Joan Clifford and incoming Board of Trustees Chairwoman Ruth Ann Gillis were also seen working the room during a dinner of grilled beef tenderloin, greeting old and new friends at the various tables.
Following dinner, guests boarded buses to shuttle them to the theater to take in a 90-minute performance of “Red,” a taut, thrilling drama centered on artist Mark Rothko and his fictional assistant, which runs at the Goodman through Oct. 30.
Individual tickets were $500, and a record-breaking $450,000 was raised by the gala (co-chaired by Sherry and Tom Barrat, Julie and Roger Baskes, Peter and Linda Bynoe and Sara F. Szold) to benefit the Goodman Theatre.
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