Don Hall

Nationalities

Don Hall is a Chicago-based theater artist, writer, and radio professional who arrived in the city in 1989, trained at the Second City Training Center under Marty DeMaat, and co-founded WNEP Theater, one of Chicago's most sustained Off-Loop companies. WNEP operated for more than two decades producing experimental ensemble work, including the Post-Mortem improvised obituary-play format, while Hall maintained parallel careers in comedy (ComedySportz Chicago), public radio (WBEZ Events Director), storytelling (The Moth StorySlam), and cultural journalism (Literate Ape co-founder).

Don Hall arrived in Chicago on April 7, 1989, as a former Actors' Equity member who had grown dissatisfied with commercial theater. He let his union status lapse and enrolled in the Second City Training Center, studying improvisation under Marty DeMaat, who served as the Center's Creative Director and was known for his humanistic, emotionally grounded approach to improvisation pedagogy. After completing the training program, Hall joined Joe Janes and Jeff Hoover, two fellow graduates, to form the ensemble that became WNEP Theater.

WNEP Theater, which stood for Works No One Else Produces, operated for more than two decades as one of Chicago's most adventurous Off-Loop theater companies. Notable productions included Metaluna (1996), a large-scale multi-stage work; Apocalypse (1999), featuring twenty-five television sets; Let There Be Light (2004), based on John Huston's wartime documentary about psychological trauma; and The (Edward) Hopper Project, a collaboration among eighteen performers exploring the visual world of the American painter through ensemble performance. Post-Mortem was an ongoing format in which performers created improvised 75-minute plays derived from that day's newspaper obituaries, applying the improvisational principle of responding to actual, immediate material to content drawn from the public record rather than from audience suggestion.

Hall also performed improvisational comedy with ComedySportz Chicago, the long-form competitive improv organization, and co-founded Level 6, an ensemble of improvisers and sketch comedians that explored the territory between improv performance and scripted theatrical work.

He worked at WBEZ, Chicago Public Media's NPR affiliate, from approximately 2007 to 2017, beginning as house manager for Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! and advancing to Events Director, a role in which he orchestrated a 17,000-person outdoor broadcast at Millennium Park, applying the logistical and audience-management skills developed across two decades of live performance work to a major public radio event.

From approximately 2012 to 2017 Hall hosted The Moth StorySlam in Chicago at Haymarket Pub and Brewery, presiding over approximately fifty-eight regular slams and eight Grand Slams and introducing more than 700 individual storytellers to the stage. In 2016 he co-founded Literate Ape, an online arts and culture magazine with more than fifteen regular contributors, and has published personal essays under the byline 'Attention of Fools' on Substack. After thirty years in Chicago he relocated in 2019.

Historical Context

WNEP Theater's founding in the early 1990s placed Hall within the generation of Chicago improv-trained practitioners who used the skills of ensemble listening, spontaneous commitment, and collaborative problem-solving as a foundation for experimental theatrical work rather than for comedy performance. The company's name, Works No One Else Produces, signaled its deliberate orientation toward theatrical ambition that commercial and institutional venues would not support, and its sustained operation across more than two decades represents a significant period of continuous output for a small-company, volunteer-driven theatrical enterprise.

The Post-Mortem format, in which performers created fully improvised 75-minute plays from that day's newspaper obituaries, represents one of the more sustained formal innovations in applied improvisation in the Chicago Off-Loop context. By deriving performance material from obituaries, the format connected the theatrical event to the actual texture of civic life on the day of performance, creating a form of radical liveness that differed from audience-suggestion-based improv by anchoring the improvised material in the public record rather than in performer invention. The format required performers to find emotional investment in the lives of strangers described in brief newspaper notices and to construct narrative structure from those fragments in real time before an audience.

Marty DeMaat's influence on Hall's foundational training oriented him toward the humanistic and emotionally committed dimensions of improv practice, an orientation that shaped WNEP's theatrical approach and distinguished it from comedy-focused improv work. DeMaat's emphasis on personal truth and emotional authenticity in improvisational performance provided the pedagogical foundation for the kind of serious ensemble theatrical work that WNEP pursued across its two-decade run.

Hall's sustained engagement with Chicago's cultural ecology, across theater, radio, storytelling, and journalism, documents the breadth of application available to a practitioner trained in improvisational listening and spontaneous collaboration, tracking the migration of improv-derived skills across institutional contexts that are not conventionally associated with improvisational comedy.

Legacy

WNEP Theater's twenty-plus-year run produced work that influenced Chicago's Off-Loop theater community's understanding of what improvisationally trained theater-makers could attempt with minimal institutional support. The company's practice of creating ambitious, high-stakes productions with small casts and limited budgets demonstrated that improv training provided not just comedic facility but a problem-solving orientation and collaborative ethics applicable to any theatrical context, including large-scale visual and conceptual work.

Hall's Moth StorySlam hosting, through which he presided over more than 700 individual stories across regular and grand slam events, connected the improv community's skills of listening and real-time presence to the storytelling performance tradition. The StorySlam format, like improv, depends on performers working with unscripted or lightly prepared material before live audiences, and Hall's experience in both forms made him an effective host of that event. His co-founding of Literate Ape extended his practice into written criticism and cultural commentary for a Chicago-rooted audience, maintaining engaged critical attention to local performance culture.

Hall's career trajectory from Second City Training Center student to experimental theater co-founder to public radio Events Director to Moth StorySlam host documents the breadth of professional contexts in which improvisational training can serve as a foundational practice, and his sustained Chicago presence across thirty years provides a record of the diverse institutional life available to an improv-trained theater artist committed to a particular city's cultural ecology.