The Practical Theatre Company

The Practical Theatre Company was a Chicago-based theatre company founded by Northwestern University students and active throughout the 1980s. Its productions included new plays, satiric agitprop, rock and roll events, and a series of successful improvisational comedy revues. The PTC, whose motto was "Art is Good", is notable for the fact that the entire cast of its 1982 improvisational comedy revue, The Golden 50th Anniversary Jubilee (Brad Hall, Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Gary Kroeger and Paul Barrosse) was hired by Saturday Night Live.

At its peak in the mid-1980s, The Practical Theatre Company operated two theatre spaces: the 42-seat storefront John Lennon Auditorium in Evanston, Illinois and a 150-seat cabaret in Piper's Alley at North & Wells in Chicago. During that period, with its run of hit improvisational revues, the PTC briefly rivaled The Second City as Chicago's leading comedy troupe.

The Practical Theatre Company was founded in 1979 under the name Attack Theater at Northwestern University by Brad Hall, Paul Barrosse, Robert Mendel, and Angela Murphy as a not for profit theater company dedicated to the production of improvisational comedy and new plays. The company's first show, Clowns, a play about two improvisational comedians written and performed by artistic directors Hall and Barrosse, opened on April 11, 1979 at Shanley Hall on the NU campus. In September of '79, Attack Theatre's inaugural season closed with a pair of one-act plays staged at National College of Education: Playgrounds by Hall and On the Fritzz by Grace McKeaney and Lewis Black with a cast featuring Laura Innes.

In 1980, after officially changing its name to The Practical Theatre Company, the group moved to Evanston's Noyes Cultural Arts Center for its second season. Among the shows that season was the first of the group's improvisational comedy revues, Bag O' Fun. The show's mix of slapstick, satire, absurdist comedy, agitprop, and literary sophistication tied together with music and offbeat song and dance numbers established a unique style and format that the PTC would refine in more than a dozen revues over the next seven years.

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