Scott Vehill, artistic force behind Prop Thtr, dies at 68

Chicago Tribune

07-07-2025

Scott Vehill was the co-founder and longtime artistic director of Chicago's Prop Thtr, a scrappy, experimental theater company that throughout its 44-year history has staged intense, intellectually challenging plays, often on shoestring budgets, and put an emphasis on new work.
'Scott made a lot of things happen,' said Stefan Brun, Prop's co-founder with Vehill in 1980 and the group's executive director. 'He was the vision guy, and somebody else would follow up. He had vision, he really cared about the people, and … he loved the stories.'
Vehill, 68, died of complications from Parkinson's disease on June 5 at his Lincoln Park home, said his wife of 30 years, Kristen.
Born in Detroit, Vehill grew up in the Southwest Side's Marquette Park neighborhood and later in north suburban Wildwood. After graduating from Warren Township High School in Gurnee, Vehill attended downstate Monmouth College before transferring to Columbia College Chicago.
After producing student theater together at Columbia, Vehill and Brun founded Prop in a space that formerly housed a strip joint on an off-the-beaten-track stretch of North Lincoln Avenue. With a program of nontraditional performance, European and Beat Generation theater, Prop had to fight to survive and attract audiences, Brun said.
'We started it together, but he is the one who held it,' Brun said. 'Many other people came through, including (onetime managing director) Jonathan Lavan and (onetime artistic director) Olivia Lilley, but Scott was Prop. There was no ruling aesthetic — the show we were currently doing was who we were.'
Vehill kept the theater company moving forward after Brun left Chicago in 1987 for Germany. Although his title was artistic director, he was a jack-of-all-trades, directing performances, co-authoring plays and, as Tribune theater critic Chris Jones wrote in 2000, finding ways 'to pay utility bills, keep the doors open at a variety of rented spaces and produce … forms of esoteric theater in dark garages with the minimum of financial resources.'
Prop put up three to four productions a year. Some pushed the boundaries — a 1986 staging of 'Biker Macbeth,' an adaptation of the Shakespeare play, drew a stinging review from the Tribune — while others, such as the 1988 staging of Vehill's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel 'The Last Words of Dutch Schultz,' garnered critical praise.
'Everything about him was bigger than life,' said Charles Pike, a co-star of the Burroughs adaptation. 'Scott embraced chaos. He saw that sometimes things needed to be broken, and he did not hesitate to break them. He had a heart for the outcast, for the underdog. He was a sucker for a good Chicago story. And we both embraced Beat literature and wanted to make sure that future generations saw (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti, (Jack) Kerouac and Burroughs the way he saw them.'
Vehill directed plays by Neil Gray Giuntoli, who also co-starred in Prop's staging of 'The Last Words of Dutch Schultz,' and Paul Peditto, who was part of the old Igloo theater group. Vehill collaborated often with Peditto, both at Igloo and also at Chicago's bygone Live Bait Theater, where in 1991, the duo staged 'BUK,' a drama inspired by the life and work of poet Charles Bukowski.
Prop's hard-hitting, commercially successful and critically acclaimed 1994 stage adaptation of Nelson Algren's 'Never Come Morning' garnered nine awards at the annual Joseph Jefferson Citation Awards for productions operating without Actors' Equity contracts — still a record for a non-Equity production. Vehill subsequently tried, without success, to raise money to turn the novel into a film.
In 1995, Vehill directed Prop's spoof of former President Ronald Reagan's life before politics, in a play titled 'Reagan: Dementia in Absentia — An Unauthorized Tribute.' Two years later, Vehill staged Peditto's '1,001 Afternoons in Chicago,' a play inspired by screenwriter Ben Hecht's daily columns from the early 1920s in the Chicago Daily News.
In 2000, Vehill directed a play about countercultural writer Terry Southern. In 2004, he directed 'Struggling Truths,' a fable exploring the origins of Tibet's conflicts with China.
'It's like a Brechtian parable and the audience, who will be literally divided into two sections, must decide which is the truth about Tibet,' Vehill said of 'Struggling Truths.' 'Was it a people's revolution that got rid of a feudal regime or was it an embattled Buddhist theocracy threatened by a totalitarian state? Both sides will try to stir up an audience to back their cause.'
In 2006, Vehill oversaw the staging of Prop's biggest hit ever, 'Hizzoner,' a critical and popular success featuring Giuntoli playing Mayor Richard J. Daley. In a 2006 review, Jones called it a 'thoroughly gripping … bio-drama' that was not to be missed 'for students of the old man and the city he maybe hurt and maybe saved.'
The production of 'Hizzoner' was in keeping with Jones' 2002 assessment in the Tribune that Prop is a theater company that is 'proudly blue-collar' and 'cheerfully intellectual,' with 'hard-working and mature creative leaders.'
In the late 1990s, Vehill helped found the National New Play Network, a consortium of theaters from around the country committed to showcasing new work. Prop became the Chicago hub of the network, whose rolling world premiere program simultaneously brings new productions to partner theaters across the U.S.
More than a decade ago, illness caused Vehill to pull back from Prop, his wife said. For the past two years, about 20 or so friends gathered monthly at Vehill's home to bring the homebound Vehill art in the form of songs, readings and even visual artwork, in what were affectionately called 'Scotty Salons,' his wife said.
'Kristen told me that the therapeutic benefit lasted for several days afterward,' said Keith Fort, who chair's Prop's board and organized the salons. 'That's the healing power of art.'
In addition to his wife, Vehill is survived by three sisters, Julie 'Gigi' Paddock, Trisha Peck and Jaime Freiler; and a brother, Raoul.
A celebration of life will take place from 5 to 11 p.m. on Friday, July 18, at Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California Ave.