TWO SMALL CHICAGO COMPANIES announced last week that they are calling it quits – and the reasons will seem familiar to anyone who has toiled in the trenches of the itinerant and chronically underfunded storefront scene.
When the lights go down August 25 on BackStage Theatre Company’s current production of A Scent of Flowers by James Saunders, it will be the end of the company as well.
After 12 years and nearly 30 shows, BackStage has decided to fold its tents. And indeed, the fact that the company operated on an itinerant basis was one of the factors in the decision to shut down.
Interviewed via email, current artistic director Matthew Reeder, who has been serving in that capacity since 2008, says “Space rental was by far our most challenging logistical and financial hurdle for many years.”
BackStage, whose budget this season was $56,000 (up, notes Reeder, from $39,000 the year before) has most recently been renting from the Building Stage, which is tucked away in an industrial corridor in the West Loop.
“It was clearly our best option in terms of the quality of space and affordability,” says Reeder. “But the available slots were pretty challenging.”
Those slots – dead of winter and middle of summer – proved to be deadly for audiences. The company opened Caryl Churchill’s A Number in January, in the middle of the first major snowfall of the season, and this past month’s historic heat wave has also kept seats empty for A Scent of Flowers.
“We saw a disheartening drop in our audience attendance, and it started at the very beginning of this season,” says Reeder, adding that one of the problems with being itinerant is that “Audiences get confused, or tired of following a company all over the city.”
According to Reeder, the decision to cease operations was raised at the company’s annual meeting, with the final vote taken a couple of weeks later, after it was clear that ticket sales were below target for A Scent of Flowers. “I can tell you this much – it was not an easy decision.”
Amy Monday, a founding member and board chair for BackStage, said in an email “After the opening for A Scent of Flowers, many of our all-volunteer staff and board members announced plans to leave to pursue their own careers or spend more time with their growing families. Given the imminent staffing shortages and continuing difficulties with expanding our audience base, the Board made the decision to stop BackStage’s production activity.”
BackStage received nine non-Equity Jeff Award nominations over the years, with one award going to company member Rebekah Ward for her performance as Sabina in 2006’s production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth.
Caffeine Theatre ends after a decade
CAFFEINE THEATRE also announces its closing, nearly ten years to the day after it first appeared with Map, an ensemble-created collage of poems by Joy Harjo, at Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s Abbie Hoffman Festival.
Most recently, the company reprised their celebrated staging of Liz Duffy Adams’ homage to Restoration-era writer Aphra Behn, Or, at Theater on the Lake.
Interviewed by phone, founding artistic director Jen Shook, who left the company after the 2009-10 season to pursue a PhD, notes that Caffeine’s focus was always to “hearken back to the textual history of theater and exploring the intersection of poetry and theater.”
In practice, that led to productions as wide-ranging as a rare staging of Ion, modernist poet H.D.’s take on a Euripidean classic, to the musical Boojum! Truth, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll. The company also earned nine non-Equity Jeff nods, though they never took home a plaque.
Caffeine, like BackStage, was itinerant and according to Shook, operated mostly on budgets in the $20-$30,000 range until the last couple of seasons. The decision to end operations stems in part from the fact that associate artistic directors Kristin Idaszak and Dan Smith are both leaving town, and from producing artistic director Jason Beck’s recent entry into parenthood.
Shook observes “It’s really, really difficult in Chicago to make that leap from small to midsize or whatever the next thing is.” However, though Caffeine will no longer exist as a formal entity, Shook also says “With the collaborations that we have formed, I feel really certain that many of us will keep working together.”
Send notes of openings, closings, and other major events to kerryreid@comcast.net.
