Chicago is teeming with theater groups, and in recent years, a lively subculture of theaters performing in semi-converted grocery stores and abandoned warehouses has sprung up, to the delight of audiences and critics. But many of the performance spaces are not even remotely up to city building codes, and “2003 may be remembered as a year not unlike 1999, a year in which the city cracked down, hard, on small theaters operating without a license… Unless the city streamlines the process by which a small theater can open its doors legally and affordably, 2003 may be remembered as the year the pendulum swung too far – and Chicago theater never quite recovered in full.”