If you’re putting on a play in Chicago, Richard Eisenhardt would love to receive your press release. Understand he can’t guarantee he’ll attend your production–his schedule allows him to see only 125 to 200 plays a year–but he’ll certainly publicize it for you and wish you a most successful run.
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Eisenhardt manages to churn out between 50 and 150 copies a week of Theater ’93. He does all the work for his newsletter in the wood-paneled basement of the modest Lakeview home he shares with his 83-year-old mother, Eunice Nesselroth, and Shari, his loyal boxer. He works on the publication on nights when he isn’t attending theater. During the day he’s an accountant for the Chicago & North Western railroad, a job he’s held for 39 years.
He drops off Theater ’93 at different theaters every week–the Goodman one week, the Candlelight the next, or maybe Marriott’s Lincolnshire. “Usually I’ll take as many as I can carry, because I don’t have a car–I don’t drive. That’s one reason I’m able to afford it, because I don’t have the expenses of insurance and a car and that. The house here I own with my mother, and it’s all paid for. I don’t smoke, that’s another thing. I’m not married–not that I wouldn’t want to get married, but right now I just feel that I don’t have the time to have any serious type of relationship like that because I’m hardly ever home. The whole month of September, out of 30 days I think I was out of the house 28 days–at the theater mostly.”
“I’m easy-going but I have a temper,” he writes. “I’m very introverted and shy around people until I get to know them. It’s hard for people to sometimes tell this about me. I don’t like phonies or people who are constantly negative 98% of the time. I feel these people lack something in life and are this way to be controversial and for attention. I try to be open and honest with people as long as they want to communicate, which many people don’t know how to do.”
The fall is especially busy for Eisenhardt, a time when he indulges in his other spectator passion–professional hockey. A Blackhawks season-ticket holder for 35 years, he occasionally skips a premiere or a preview to attend a game.
