Ennenbach honored for 55 years with Stage 212 in La Salle

Joe Ennenbach won a nationwide award for his theater work. Typically, he tried to keep the news to himself. His peers at Stage 212 found out, anyway.

Ennenbach will be saluted at Nov. 25 banquet to celebrate the La Salle theater company’s 55th anniversary. And even if the La Salle resident hadn’t won the Robert E. Gard Award, his name would be mentioned prominently for his innumerable contributions to the local stage.

The Robert E. Gard Superior Volunteer Award is presented by the American Association of Community Theatre and is given to a longtime thespian who notches at least 25 years with his or her theater company. The award was conferred this summer and the modest Ennenbach didn’t exactly shout the news from the rooftops.

“Tooting my own horn would not be the most appropriate thing,” Ennebach said. “But the word did get around, so that’s OK, too.”

Stage 212 veterans were pleasantly surprised to learn about the belated award, but not at all surprised the modest and self-effacing Ennenbach didn’t tell anybody.

“He’s soft-spoken,” agreed Larry Kelsey, a longtime actor-director for Stage 212, “but when he believes in something he makes his case.”

Ennenbach is, in fact, a retired attorney who’d making his case since he was admitted to the bar in 1980. It was while he studied journalism, however, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign he was drawn to the theater.

“Recruited” might be a better word. He had friends at college who were staging a play and who asked him to write news releases to promote the show. Eventually he was elected to the board and became more deeply involved in production..

“You hang around a theater group long enough and eventually you decide you belong on stage,” Ennenbach said. “Once you act, you think you might be a decent director. It’s an avocation I really backed into.”

Ennenbach graduated from Illinois in 1970 and spent most of that decade in journalism. He covered basketball games for the NewsTribune and was a newscaster for WLPO and WCMY and spent his off hours acting, directing or writing programs for Stage 212.

He continued his Stage 212 association even after leaving the Illinois Valley for Chicago, where he worked at industrial publications and then earned a law degree from the John Marshall Law School, now the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.

Ennebach practiced in Illinois and Wisconsin and eventually specialized in collections and criminal law. Carving out time for theater was challenging, he acknowledged, but his wife Maryann was “unstinting” in her support for his avocation.

“You find time to do what you love to do,” he said.

Despite his workload, Ennenbach directed 20 productions, served eight terms as president of the Stage 212 board, chaired numerous committees and, with his legal experience, drafting bylaws and policy. This year, he celebrated 50 years’ continuous service to the board.

One day, fellow stage veteran Natalie Smigel quizzed him at length about his tenure. Ennenbach politely answered her queries – unaware she’d nominated him for the Gard award – and detailed his contributions not only to Stage 212 but also to Engle Lane in Streator, Morris Theatre Guild and Festival 56 in Princeton.

Smigel said she had learned of the Gard Award and immediately thought of Ennenbach, though she was unsure what the competition would be like for a national award.

“We’d never nominated anyone for any of the AACT awards so I wasn’t sure how it was going to work,” Smigel said. “But it did. I was very excited he was chosen for the award.”

Ennenbach was honored at a June 16 ceremony during AACTFest 2023 National Theatre Festival in Louisville, Kentucky.

“It was nice to be recognized,” Ennenbach said, “but my mixed feeling is how much recognition you should get for something that you enjoy.”