By Emily GlazerPLAY Writer

Picture this: Guy meets girl at NU, three years later they marry and 27 years later they receive a Tony award. Sound like a dream? It’s reality, and here’s the story to prove it.

“As I recall, it was 1969,” says Dennis Zacek, MA School of Speech ’65, Ph.D ’70 , as he begins to delve into the story of his history with wife Marcelle McVay, Weinberg ’70. Zacek was a senior graduate assistant, on his way to earning his Ph.D. in theatre, and McVay was an undergrad at the time.

“But she was not my student, let’s get this clear,” Zacek says. Zacek was the acting lab instructor and happened to teach some of McVay’s friends. He became “acquainted” with McVay in “The Grill,” then a huge gathering spot in the bottom of Cahn Auditorium. The two would meet by the magnolia tree right by Cahn, McVay says.

Zacek also recalled “being fond” of the Shakespeare Garden. “We spent many a courtship moment there,” he says.

After finishing up their studies at Northwestern, Zacek and McVay married in 1972. They have been married for 34 years.

Zacek initially acted and directed at the Victory Gardens Theater before becoming an advisory board member, and McVay became the first full-time employee there.

In 2001 Victory Gardens received the Tony Award for Regional Theatre. “The call came, and we didn’t get a head’s up,” Zacek says. “I thought it was someone’s idea of a perverse joke!”

“It was such an affirmation of the work we’ve been doing for such a long period of time,” McVay adds.

This October, Victory Gardens added the Biograph Theater, where the play Denmark inaugurated the theater and held its world premiere.

“We’ve been very blessed and supported by so many people. The journey has been a great one,” McVay says. “To be able to find someone you can share a life’s work with is extraordinary and rare.”

– Emily Glazer