Living the actor's life -- plus baby
Jon Cunningham is living the American dream. He is married to his high school sweetheart, the girl he met and fell in love with at James B. Conant High School in Hoffman Estates.
He's started a family. And he loves his work.
This is where his American dream may differ from the one our great-grandparents chased. Cunningham works as an actor. He currently stars in "Jon and Jen," Andrew Lippa and Tom Greenwald's well-regarded musical now playing at Highland Park's Apple Tree Theatre. And when he is not doing that job he has another one - he's a stay-at-home dad, taking care of his 2½-year-old at his home in Schaumburg.
"We do have a baby sitter when time gets tight," Cunningham says. "My wife works full-time. But between acting jobs there are long stretches where I am it, the stay-at-home dad."
Cunningham loves his family and he loves theater. This life gives him both. The funny thing is that Cunningham didn't know theater would be so important. Yes, he did plays in high school. But when he went to the University of Illinois in Urbana he thought he would be a science guy.
"I started as physics major," Cunningham says. "My teacher at Conant really got me interested me in physics. I really had a strong math and physics background." But he was cast in a play his freshman year and that took over his life. His grades suffered; he switched majors.
"I graduated with a degree in communications," Cunningham says. Then he followed a group of his theater friends to Chicago, where they founded a small theater company, the White Horse Theatre. The White Horse, now defunct, specialized in highly polished, low-budget productions of seldom-done contemporary musicals. Their inaugural production was a critically acclaimed take on Stephen Sondheim's problematic show, "Merrily We Roll Along." (The show is considered difficult because the story is told backward; the characters are middle-aged at the start of the show and young at the end.)
Cunningham had one of the leads in that show. After that debut, Cunningham just kept getting work in both musicals and nonmusical plays. His current show, Andrew Lippa's off-Broadways "Jon and Jen," is a two-person show about a woman and her relationship with two men named Jon - a brother who is killed in Vietnam and a son, named after the deceased brother. Both Jons are played by Cunningham.
"The first act chronicles (Jon's and Jen's) lives as brother and sister," Cunningham says, "(My character is) born when she is 7 and we see our relationship as it progresses from 1952 to 1970 and how we cope with the different facts of our lives; an abusive father, drugs and Vietnam. And in the second act I play the son. That act goes from 1972 to 1990. We see how the mother-son relationship is affected by the mother's upbringing and the death of her brother."
The story sounds a little dark, but Cunningham assures that the show has its uplifting moments.
"It is very emotional," Cunningham says. "The people who have seen it already have told me how moved they were. There is so much in that play that is universal. It speaks to so much that is going on."
What attracts Cunningham to the show is how challenging it is. "It is pretty vocally demanding," Cunningham says. "It is mostly sung. There are maybe 22 songs in the show. And because there are only two of us in the show most of our costume changes happen on stage." Cunningham pauses and then adds, "The show is a heck of a lot of fun to sing."
• "Jon and Jen" runs through Jan. 4 at Apple Tree Theatre at the Karger Center, 1850 Green Bay Road, Highland Park. For tickets call (847) 432-4335 or go to www.appletreetheatre.com/boxoffice/boxoffice.html.