Citadel Theatre to produce ‘A Jukebox for the Algonquin’ April 18 to May 18

How many of us, facing an unappealing summer job, were told by our parents that we should stick with it because we would somehow benefit from the experience? Skokie-based playwright and actor Paul Stroili can testify to the wisdom of that advice. A summer job in a senior care center that he held back in his student days inspired him to write the comedy “A Jukebox for The Algonquin,” and its success has opened up more opportunities as a playwright for this longtime Chicago actor. The comedy premiered in 2023 at the Purple Rose Theatre, founded by stage and screen actor Jeff Daniels, where it became one of the best selling shows in the history of that Chelsea, Michigan, theater. Since then, seven more productions of it have been announced, including the upcoming staging at Citadel Theatre in Lake Forest from April 18 to May 18. Stroili also has a new play, “My Mother and the Ohio/Michigan War” opening at the Purple Rose Theatre this month.

“I had a menial job at a senior residential facility and I thought it was going to be boring,” Stroili said, “but I got to know and enjoy the residents so much that the experience stayed with me.”

The people he met at that facility inspired the characters he created for “A Jukebox for the Algonquin,” which he insists is not “a play about old people, it’s a play about people who have lived longer.”

In his play, one of the older residents, an African American widower named Johnny, desperately wants to acquire a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox for their recreation room, which is called the Algonquin. He’s found a used model selling for $3,000, but he and the other residents have no way of coming up with that much money. That is, not until Peg, a new resident in the independent living unit, comes up with a most unusual and illegal scheme to raise the cash.

Johnny’s fellow residents at the Placid Pines Senior Care Center include Dennis, a gay man in his 60s who uses a wheelchair, and the vision-impaired, socially conscious Annie. Audiences also meet some of the employees; there’s the maintenance man Chuck, a middle-aged man with a past who’s a probationary employee; his younger co-worker Tyler, and the no-nonsense administrator Josefina.

Citadel’s production of “A Jukebox for the Algonquin” is just the latest event in Paul Stroili’s long career in the Chicago theater community. He moved to Chicago from New York in 1987 right after attending the State University of New York at New Paltz.

“I chose to move to Chicago because it was a city with a good arts scene in which you could afford to live, unlike New York City, where you might have to work two or three jobs just to pay the rent. How does that leave you time to start a theater company?”

Stroili worked in the Chicago storefront theater scene as one of the original members of the CT20 Ensemble and the Illegitimate Players, a company that created satires of classics, with titles like “The Glass Mendacity” and “Of Grapes and Nuts.” He was in the original Chicago cast of the long-running “Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding,” but in 1996 he left Chicago for Los Angeles, where he did a lot of film and TV work as well as creating and touring in his own one-man show, “Straight Up with a Twist,” which enjoyed over 1,000 performances nationwide culminating in an extended Off Broadway run.

He returned to the Chicago area in 2016 to direct the revival of “Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding” and has kept the area as his home base, currently living in Skokie.

“Chicago has a wonderful Midwestern vibe,” he said. “The creative community is supportive of each other. There’s a real sense of building something together — as when artists band together to create a storefront company, just as my friends and I did in the ‘80s and people continue to do today. It doesn’t have the sort of ‘showcase mentality’ you find in some other cities, where many projects are done with the intention of them leading to film or television. Here, people are looking to create theater that will stand on its own.”

Citadel Theatre is in residence in the West Campus of the Lake Forest School District at 300 S. Waukegan Road, Lake Forest. Further information and ticketing is available on the company’s website at citadeltheatre.org.