Book Launch Party | Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies: Histories

The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum invites you to join a celebration of the publication of Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies: Histories of Hull-House Theatre. The evening will feature food, drink, and a special performance of songs from The Troll’s Holiday, an operetta based on a Norwegian myth, written and performed at Hull-House at the turn of the twentieth century.

For over a century, Hull-House played a vital role in the development of theatre in Chicago. From immigrant-led productions in the 1890s to the rise of community theatre, improvisation, and Chicago’s celebrated nonprofit theatre scene, Hull-House helped build the cultural infrastructure of one of the world’s great theatre cities. Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies: Histories of Hull-House Theatre is the first book to comprehensively survey this extraordinary legacy.

Edited by Matthew Randle-Bent, Liesl Olson, and Ross Jordan, the volume brings together newly commissioned scholarship, historic texts, oral histories, and contemporary conversations to explore how theatre functioned as a tool for civic engagement, community building, artistic experimentation, and social change. Spanning the settlement era (1889–1957), the Hull-House Association years (1963–2012), and the continuing influence of Hull-House on contemporary Chicago theatre, this richly illustrated volume restores Hull-House to its rightful place at the center of American theatre history.