The New National Pastime Theater with Artistic Director Laurence Bryan, Managing Director Keely Haddad-Null and Technical Director Joe Loffing Photo by Warren Winter / PSG The New National Pastime Theater, 941 W. Lawrence Ave. Chicago, IL 60640. In the heart of Uptown's Neighborhood Entertainment District. Like Nothing You've Ever Seen.       Celebrate 20 Years With The National Pastime Theater Est. 1992 After nearly twenty years in the old speakeasy, The National Pastime Theater is closing its doors...and unveiling Chicago's newest theatrical venue in the Uptown neighborhood. With the support of the 46th Ward Alderman James Cappleman NPT rediscovered the historic Masonic Hall on the forth floor of the Preston Bradley Center at 941 W. Lawrence, Chicago. The New NPT is located in the center of Chicago's most historic, notorious neighborhood and the center of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's deemed Neighborhood Entertainment District. The new theatrical venue opens to the public this Valentine's Day for The Beginning of the Big Time, a speakeasy-style Jazz Benefit, featuring the Fred Barr's Organ-Ization. All proceeds from this benefit go to the restoration of this historic theatrical space. The inaugural production reunites NPT's Founder and Artistic Director Laurence Bryan and NPT resident playwright Michael Sokoloff in the world premier A Bend in the Road, a brilliantly skewed take on American western expansion.

Our Mission

The National Pastime Theater strives to fill thousands of empty theater seats with generations of new theater audience, to stop this audience dead in their comfortable tracks and spur them to take an active role in their neighborhoods, communities and world.

Live theater must grab all generations and drag them–perhaps kicking and screaming–into an active role in our world.

Chicago is a perfect location for the type of theater that The National Pastime Theater Ensemble creates. We push ourselves and our audience to the limit. We aspire to bring people into the work, not just into the theater: we create terror, awe and strike down apathy. We sell not just tickets, we enable dreams.

The National Pastime Theater Ensemble (NPT) is like no other theater company. We are a company with a new reason for theater: setting to rights the jaded viewpoints of generations weaned on passive entertainment forms.

For twenty years, The National Pastime Theater has insured progress by producing dynamic and masterful live theater. In addition to producing live theater, NPT has fostered over one hundred and fifty emerging and staple Chicago theater companies. In an effort to expand our mission, NPT supports those itinerant theaters that present a similar focus to that of NPT's.