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Michael Halberstam

Michael Halberstam

Artistic director | Writers Theatre of Glencoe | Class of 1986

An ode to Altgeld Hall, by the award-winning artistic director of the Writers Theatre of Glencoe:

"My family emigrated to the States so that my father could become chair of the math department and so I became somewhat intimately aware of the hallways and classrooms of that venerable building," says Michael Halberstam ('86).

“Not unlike the elegance and occasional impenetrability of mathematics, the building has a sort of impossible architecture. You can stroll down one corridor thinking that you are likely to emerge in the right place, only to find that you are stuck in a sort of living Escher drawing, a floor above where you need to be, and you must turn around and go back and take a different path to get to your destination.

“Probably easily understood by those who walk it habitually but a mystery to those of us on the outside.”