Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST) is a non-profit, professional theater company located at Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois. Its more than six hundred annual performances performed 48 weeks of the year include its critically acclaimed Shakespeare series, its World's Stage touring productions, and youth and family oriented programming concentrated in the summer. The theater had garnered 77 Joseph Jefferson awards and three Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2008, it was the winner of the Regional Theatre Tony Award.

The company's present artistic director Barbara Gaines founded CST in 1986, when it began performances on the roof of the Red Lion Pub in the city's Lincoln Park neighborhood. In 1999, the company received permission to build its permanent home: a two-venue facility at Navy Pier.

Productions at CST include works from the Shakespearean canon as well as other plays and musicals. In addition to its own original productions, CST also hosts touring productions from other theatres.

Chicago Shakespeare Theater is part of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America (STAA) and National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

CST was founded as the Chicago Shakespeare Workshop by current Artistic Director Barbara Gaines in 1986, a name which was changed a year later to the Chicago Shakespeare Repertory and finally in 1999 to Chicago Shakespeare Theater. It performed its first twelve seasons in residency at the Ruth Page Theater, where it performed titles ranging from better-known Shakespeare plays such as Hamlet and King Lear as well as lesser-known titles such as Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens. Although the theater was critically lauded for its innovative approach to classic works, it was limited by the age and spatial restrictions of the Ruth Page Theater and began looking for a new performance space in the late 1990s.

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