Playwright, actress, and founder of the Lake Forrest Playhouse, Mary Aldis was a central figure in Chicago’s noncommercial theater community in the 1910s and 1920s, a movement she referred to as a “Dramatic Renaissance.” In the preface to Plays for Small Stages, Aldis wrote: “In the midst of all this dramatic stir, this unrest of expression, certain ones, weary of being onlookers, arise and announce, ‘We too will act.’ And others cry out, ‘We too will write.’ So the Amateur providing his own cue, makes his entrance, and after being regarded a bit askance by ‘The Profession’ is allowed to play his part.” About her first collection of plays, Aldis wrote: “I never thought of publishing these plays until Margaret Anderson of Little Review fame wanted to print Extreme Unction. . . . My conservative family were startled by the picture of me on the cover.”1 To found the company, Harriet Monroe remembered, Aldis “tore out partitions in an old frame cottage . . . and converted it into a practicable little playhouse. . . . This done, she proceeded to make actors out of some of her neighbors . . . holding them to a rigid schedule of rehearsals, and soothing agitated amateur nerves by posting a motto in the green room, ‘Remember, this is for fun.’”2