Milwaukee Chamber Theatre was founded in 1975 by local actors Montgomery Davis and Ruth Schudson, who envisioned a place where audiences could open their minds to new ideas and Milwaukee’s theatre professionals could broaden their skills and apply their craft. After functioning as a “roving” company for 18 years, MCT moved into the Broadway Theatre Center in 1993.

Memorable productions during Davis’s tenure as artistic director ranged from Sheridan’s The School for Scandal to Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell to Donald Margulies’s Dinner With Friends. In 1997, MCT’s staging of Angels in America: Perestroika became the highest grossing play in the theater’s history. From 1983 to 2002, MCT was the only theatre company in the U.S. to produce an annual Shaw Festival.

Davis retired in 2005 and was succeeded as artistic director by C. Michael Wright, who helped rescue MCT from financial peril. Under his leadership, MCT began its annual Young Playwrights Series and the Montgomery Davis Play Development Series, honoring the company’s founding artistic director, who died in 2007.