About the Exhibition

For more than a century, Hull-House has been a home for theatre in Chicago. From immigrant community productions at the turn of the twentieth century to the emergence of storefront theatre and contemporary performance, generations of artists, audiences, and neighbors have gathered at Hull-House to imagine new possibilities for civic life through the arts.

Act Well Your Part explores this remarkable legacy through rarely exhibited photographs, archival materials, historic posters, and a timeline tracing the evolution of theatre at Hull-House from the 1890s to the present. Visitors will encounter images of productions spanning generations, alongside large-scale reproductions of iconic Hull-House Theatre posters from the 1960s and beyond.

The exhibition takes its title from a phrase once emblazoned on the fire curtain of the original Hull-House Theatre: “Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies.” Drawn from a poem by Alexander Pope, the motto reflected a belief that participation in theatre could serve as a form of civic engagement—a conviction that shaped Hull-House’s cultural work for decades.

Theatre was central to Jane Addams’s vision for Hull-House. Early productions were staged in the drawing room of the Hull residence and in the settlement’s gymnasium before the opening of the 230-seat Hull-House Theatre in 1899. Over the decades that followed, Hull-House helped foster community theatre, the Little Theatre movement, improvisational theatre, and the development of Chicago’s celebrated non-profit theatre sector.

Accompanying the exhibition, Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies: Histories of Hull-House Theatre will be published by Hull-House Books in Fall 2026. Featuring newly commissioned essays alongside historic texts and archival materials, the volume offers the most comprehensive survey to date of Hull-House’s contributions to American theatre and Chicago cultural life.