\u201cThe Office,\u201d<\/a> spanning a whopping 201 episodes over nine seasons between 2005 and 2013. The content includes an epic \u201crewatch\u201d analysis, wherein the \u201cOffice Ladies\u201d watched all 201 episodes again, reached out to a bunch of fellow members of their creative teams and analyzed them down to the slightest details. Humorously and very popularly so.<\/p>\n\u201cThe podcast has a bunch of women listeners who all have banded together, and they are going to come and see our play,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur play\u201d is actually \u201cAshland Avenue,\u201d a brand-new work penned by Fischer\u2019s husband Lee Kirk and set in an old-school appliance sales and repair store (once a chain, alas) on the titular Chicago street, precise address unspecified.<\/p>\n
Kirk spent around five formative years in Chicago, living just off Ashland and studying at the Theatre School at DePaul University alongside Judy Greer and then working in Chicago\u2019s storefront scene in the late 1990s, founding a company called Saint Ed at the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park. Fischer says the play resulted from Kirk\u2019s sense, on a relatively recent return from Los Angeles to visit his old haunts, that much of old Chicago had disappeared. Ergo, the nostalgic dramedy, wherein Francis Guinan plays the titular and venerable proprietor of Phil\u2019s TV and Radio, and Fischer plays his daughter, Sam.<\/p>\n
So she had an in when it came to casting, although that cut both ways, given her fame.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Lee started hearing my voice in the character as he got deeper into the play,\u201d Fischer says. \u201cSam runs this shop with her dad and she and he, a big personality, have been inseparable since Sam\u2019s mother died when Sam was very little. But Sam has some dreams of her own. As she sees the TV shop might be coming to an end, she sees an opportunity for an exit. A chance to ask herself, who is she? Outside of her dad\u2019s dreams and aspirations. Meanwhile, her dad does not want to let go of her or the shop. That\u2019s the struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fischer has not, however, sought any exit from her work on \u201cThe Office,\u201d a series that remains very much alive, thanks to it finding a new audience via streaming. Some actors might choose to step away from such a thing, or even be frustrated by it or it being brought up in interviews, but Fischer clearly enjoys every last moment of her good fortune from a former era, even now.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are so many people,\u201d Fischer says, \u201cwho meet the love of their lives at an \u2018Office\u2019 trivia contest at a bar. The show just brings people together. It\u2019s the coolest thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presumably she still is recognized. \u201cIt always takes me by surprise, weirdly\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ll just be in my head and someone will recognize me and I\u2019m shy so I always then have this moment of adjustment as I haven\u2019t really ever got used to it. But people are always so nice.\u201d<\/p>\n
One would imagine it has calmed down a little?<\/p>\n
\u201cActually the opposite. \u2018The Office\u2019 on streaming has made it so. It\u2019s funny. The kids of the people who watched it live on television now watch it; some of those kids don\u2019t even know it was ever on NBC. They have no idea. So they get very confused because I am now 20 years older than the person they watch running around on their screen. So there is always that moment of adjustment.\u201d<\/p>\n
All that said, she says, there is more of her in the character she is playing in director Susan V. Booth\u2019s production of \u201cAshland Avenue\u201d than was the case with Pam. \u201cSam is far more like me,\u201d Fischer says. \u201cShe\u2019s a repressed artist, just like Pam, but she\u2019s also a little feistier.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many people still think \u201cThe Office\u201d was improvised, just as they do Second City, but it was always fully scripted.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh yes,\u201d Fischer says, \u201cthere were a lot of pauses and ellipses in the scripts. People were trying to express themselves but doing it poorly. They also had to write in the choreography of the camera because that was the nature of the mockumentary style and sometimes we knew the cameras were filming us and sometimes we didn\u2019t. So our guard went down and the camera might be hidden in the kitchen and shooting through the blinds. And, of course, we often had to talk directly to the camera. That was very exciting to play. And there was, by the way, a very theater-company kind of element to all of that. We all were there living and breathing it. We all had to sit in the background of each other\u2019s scenes to create the idea of a working office.\u201d<\/p>\n
She pauses. \u201cIt was magic. I\u2019ve never quite been able to capture that again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe on \u201cAshland Avenue\u201d on Dearborn Street? \u201cI know I want to do this play for a long as I possibly can,\u201d Fischer says.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cAshland Avenue\u201d runs through Oct. 12 (extended) at Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.; 312-443-3800 and www.goodmantheatre.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO \u2014 Although a self-described nerd of the theater, and a woman who associates romance and falling in love with working in the theater, Jenna Fischer has not been on stage since Steve Martin\u2019s \u201cMeteor Shower\u201d at the Old Globe Theatre some nine years ago. \u201cI stepped away from acting in general a little bit,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2006050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[365827,308694,355958,363517,365829,365828],"class_list":["post-2006049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-ashland-avenue","tag-chicago","tag-jenna-fischer","tag-lee-kirk","tag-office-ladies","tag-pam-beesly"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Jenna-Fischer-of-\u2018The-Office-returns-to-the-stage-for.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2006049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2006050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2006049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2006049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2006049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}