No statue—but now Christiansen is the second drama critic in town to have a theatre named after him (the first is Claudia “Acidy” Cassidy, the longtime theatre and music critic of the Tribune, for whom the second-floor performance venue at the Chicago Cultural Center is named). Victory Gardens announced earlier this week that the newly renovated studio theatre on the second floor of the Biograph will be officially named in honor of Christiansen in an event on March 1. The critic who covered the rise of Chicago theatre as an international force—from that famous Highland Park church basement where Steppenwolf started out to the renaissance of the big Loop houses and hundreds of companies in between—now has a space of his own.

“It means a lot,” Christiansen says. “I knew the announcement was coming out about four or five weeks ago, but the decision was totally unexpected. It threw me for a loop. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. It’s just lovely.”

Christiansen has been following Victory Gardens since the company first started producing at the old Northside Auditorium at 3730 N. Clark (now the home of Metro). “There have been a lot of very distinguished shows presented at Victory Gardens and a lot of very fine playwrights,” says Christiansen of the company that will now put his name in brick-and-mortar.

Christiansen was also vocal in his support of Victory Gardens artistic director Dennis Zacek and then-managing director Marcelle McVay when they faced a challenge to their leadership from some members of the Victory Gardens board in 2000, who wanted to install a new executive over their heads and pursue new digs at the Royal George .

“It was a crucial point in the history of Victory Gardens ,” says Christiansen. “It just didn’t make sense to put this executive producer over them.”

The company went on to win a regional Tony Award in 2001 and to acquire their new home at the iconic Biograph, which opened in 2006. The intimate 109-seat studio space opened in fall of 2009 with Michael Golamco’s Year Zero.

Typically, Christiansen is more interested in talking about the work he’s seen over the years than the honor itself. He started out as a reporter for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago and joined the now-defunct Chicago Daily News a year later. From 1978-2002, he was at the Tribune, moving from a critic at large to arts and entertainment editor, and finally chief critic and senior writer. In 2004, his indispensable history of Chicago theatre, “A Theater of Our Own: 1,001 Nights in Chicago,” was published by Northwestern University Press.

Of course, a lot has happened in Chicago since 2004, including Victory Gardens ’ move to the Biograph and the national ascendancy of playwrights such as Tracy Letts and Keith Huff. Says Christiansen, “I worked on an afterword about two years ago, but Northwestern didn’t want to go that far. If it goes into a second printing, we might add it.”

He’s also shelved his plans to do a biography of Cassidy, whom he knew when he first started out in Chicago arts journalism. “In the end, I decided not to do it because it would be too hard a job. She did dance and classical music as well, and she had a particularly contentious relationship with the CSO. All that would have taken extremely hard reportorial digging. It’s not that she doesn’t deserve a biography, because she does. I just wasn’t able to take it on.”

Christiansen still gets out to several shows a month, though he says “The one place I’m not as knowledgeable now is in new works—brand-new works and brand-new theatres—as I think you have to do if you’re trying to cover the beat. Now I’m a reader who looks at reviews of new works and new theatres for what I might want to see.”

He praises Victory Gardens ’ embrace of new work, noting that the company “is on a roll at the moment. Chad Deity [Kristoffer Diaz’s New York-bound wrestling comedy, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity] was very energizing to them. Year Zero was a very fine piece about Asian Americans.” And of course, William Petersen made a triumphant return to Victory Gardens this past summer in David Harrower’s Blackbird, which became the biggest box-office hit in the company’s history.

Petersen, who told the Tribune’s Chris Jones that “Richard was the one guy who most influenced my career,” is repaying the favor by taking a lead role in the new Artists’ Tribute Fund at Victory Gardens in honor of Christiansen, designed to help defray some of the new-construction costs at the space. Other marquee names participating in the Fund include playwrights David Mamet, John Logan, Rick Cleveland, and Letts; actors John Mahoney, Deanna Dunagan, Joe Mantegna, Jeff Perry, George Wendt, and Michael Shannon; and directors, artistic directors, and executive directors from theatres around Chicago, including Martha Lavey, Bob Falls, Michael Halberstam, Barbara Gaines, BJ Jones, Gary Griffin, Frank Galati, Roche Schulfer, Tim Evans, and of course Zacek and current Victory Gardens executive director Jan Kallish.

Christiansen remembers seeing a show at the old space on North Clark where “you could watch snowflakes fall down on your head if you had the right seat, because there was a hole in the roof.” The theatre that will bear his name has no such structural eccentricities, but it is, says Christiansen, “a friendly atmosphere.” For the man who proved to be one of the greatest friends Chicago theatre has ever had, that’s just about perfect.