Editor’s be aware: This is only one of our tales and selling authors and artists in Evanston.
Adam Langer is type of from Evanston and from Chicago.
As a child rising up within the Chicago space, he lived in Rogers Park, however went to Baker Demonstration College in Evanston earlier than attending Evanston Township Excessive College.
“My father thought-about himself an Evanston taxpayer, if not an precise resident of Evanston,” Langer stated. “Presumably, a few years later, that may be an issue for us. However on the time, it appeared nearly authorized. Whether or not [legal] Or not, I used to be a youngster. I did not test.”
Regardless of the preliminary embarrassment of being a “Chicago child” at ETHS, Langer stated he is at all times considered Rogers Park as an extension of Evanston, fairly than a separate metropolis. He spent many summers going to Lighthouse Seashore, and a few of his finest associates to this present day are the folks he met in highschool.
“It wasn’t actually my precise house, however it appears very very similar to his hometown,” he stated.
He and his household ended up on Chicago’s North Aspect after his grandparents immigrated from Jap Europe to a West Aspect ghetto within the Twenties. Apparently, whereas rising up in a quiet, close-knit avenue of Jewish households in Rogers Park, he truly considered Evanston as the massive, thrilling metropolis he could not wait to discover.
After ETHS, Langer went to Vassar School in New York earlier than returning to Chicago and dealing his approach by means of among the metropolis’s hottest media organizations and radio stations, together with The Chicago Reader, WBEZ, WBBM, and WXRT. Finally, he moved to New York Metropolis, the place he grew to become a novelist and government editor for The Washington Put up straight forwarda non-profit Jewish information group.
Langer has written seven books, and his newest novel, Cyclorama, delves into the experiences and lives of the solid of a theater present at a fictional highschool in Central Evanston. The story is drawn from Langer’s recollections of ETHS and his time engaged on theatrical productions there.
“I wished to inform the tales of those characters and the place they ended up, and it made sense to set them in a world I knew so effectively. It is 1982, the North Aspect of Chicago and the northern suburbs of Chicago, and Evanston and Wilmette and Skokie.” And I used to be writing from reminiscence, to not say the whole lot in This [book] already occurred. However I used to be writing in a world I may bear in mind, which made it simpler to jot down about and produce it to life.”
The ebook additionally options an abrasive and considerably abusive drama instructor and theater program director. As many Evanstonians know and a few will bear in mind, dozens of former college students have completed so Allegations of sexual assault and misconduct v. Bruce Sewerth, former drama instructor at ETHS.
Only a few years in the past, the varsity settled a lawsuit towards Siewerth for $100,000. Langer truly acted in highschool productions directed by Seywerth a number of a long time in the past. Seewerth was, in actual fact, somebody Langer thought of whereas writing the ebook, however he additionally wished to make use of this story for example of a bigger development of abusive authority figures.
“The early Nineteen Eighties was a time of outrageous boundary crossing by grownup authority figures. He is not only a man operating a dictatorial and abusive theater program at Evanston Township Excessive College.” “There are hordes of those tales. And since writing that ebook, folks have contacted me not solely from Chicago and its northern suburbs, however from everywhere in the nation saying, ‘It jogs my memory of that have I had, I had a coach like that, a supervisor like that, I I examined it.”
And although Langer did not reside in Evanston or Chicago for a few years, he nonetheless spoke of his time right here with nice admiration and nostalgia. With so many proficient and engaged folks concentrated in a single place, he stated he finds it stunning that there aren’t extra novels, motion pictures, and TV exhibits set in Evanston.
“Evanston is attention-grabbing in that it is a microcosm of an city expertise in a really intense setting, and highschool is type of a microcosm,” Langer stated.
“He was so numerous, so energetic, so intellectually engaged, so artistic… To be in such a energetic setting and surrounded by an extremely proficient group of people who find themselves on the forefront of so many fields as we converse now was intoxicating in a approach.” .”