Double bind

TWIN FREAK The black comedy Mr. Marmalade had competing productions last fall from Chemically Imbalanced Comedy...

When rumors surfaced last spring that Lookingglass Theatre was planning a production of the Thornton Wilder classic Our Town for early 2009, tongues set to wagging on theater blogs and over pints at the city’s actor bars. The Hypocrites had long had an Our Town set to open in April of this year; Lookingglass’s would be coming nine months on its heels, a move that was characterized variously as shortsighted, overkill or just plain rude.

The Hypocrites’ production opened to rave reviews and sold-out houses and will return next month for a second run. Lookingglass’s version will no doubt be stylistically quite different; in the end, the Our Town flap likely will turn into a welcome study in contrasting aesthetic takes on the same chestnut. But when conflicts arose more recently over the cachet that comes with a Chicago premiere, we started to wonder who was minding the production-rights store.

In late February, Theatre Seven of Chicago announced its 2008 season. The young company—which burst onto the scene in early 2007 with a double bill of Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago and its resident playwright Marisa Wegrzyn’s Diversey Harbor—scheduled an original, ensemble-created piece and a Lanford Wilson rarity, but “the cornerstone of its 2008 season,” as a press release read, was the Chicago premiere of Josh Tobiessen’s Election Day.

...and Dog & Pony.

Theatre Seven had been introduced to New York playwright Tobiessen last summer, when Election Day followed Wegrzyn’s The Butcher of Baraboo at New York’s Second Stage Theatre Uptown Festival. Theatre Seven artistic director Brian Golden says his company began negotiating with Tobiessen and his agent in October, and by the time Theatre Seven announced its season, it had been assured that its production, opening this weekend, would be the Chicago premiere.

So Golden was perplexed, to say the least, when, months later, an unknown company called ensemble113 announced its own “Chicagoland premiere” of Election Day—opening two weeks prior to Theatre Seven’s.

Yet neither company was in the wrong. In March, Samuel French Inc. picked up Election Day’s licensing. Along with Dramatists Play Service, French is one of the two licensing houses that dominate the leasing of production rights to published plays.

French, unaware of Theatre Seven’s arrangement with Tobiessen, licensed Election Day to ensemble113, an ad hoc group of recent Niles North High School grads, for a one-weekend summer run in Skokie. Ensemble113 was equally unaware of Theatre Seven’s claim to the premiere but eventually agreed to drop the “premiere” language in its advertising. (Ensemble113’s members declined an interview request, but both Golden and reps for Samuel French confirm this version of events.)

The Election Day conflict is the most recent example of a common problem in Chicago theater. The licensing houses watch New York and L.A. like hawks, but there’s little oversight of cities not considered media centers. BackStage Theatre Company, the up-and-coming storefront operation, announced last May the Chicago premiere of John Kolvenbach’s On an Average Day for May 2009, without knowing that the new Equity company Route 66 had secured, but not yet announced, its own production (which opened last weekend). American Theater Company vet Stef Tovar, the artistic director of Route 66, didn’t know about BackStage’s plans until informed by TOC.

It’s a growing problem that caught notice in 2007 when storefront troupes Dog & Pony and Chemically Imbalanced Comedy both produced Noah Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade within a few months of each other.

In separate interviews, executives at Dramatists and Samuel French explained that production rights in the Chicago market rarely come with guarantees of exclusivity, whether they’re “professional” or “amateur,” Equity or not. All New York and L.A. productions require “special clearance” (otherwise known as approval from the playwright), but there’s no such automatic condition here—which explains next spring’s overlapping productions of Harold Pinter’s Old Times at Remy Bumppo and City Lit and of the Peter Barnes obscurity Red Noses by Strawdog and Hubris Productions.

While the artistic directors of the companies in this story played down the competition issue, most agreed they’d prefer to avoid duplication. (Particularly if one of the companies is higher-profile, it becomes that much harder for the smaller company to get media attention and reviews.) Short of the licensing houses choosing to apply blanket “special clearance” rules to Chicago—which, if Tobiessen had been approached, presumably would have nipped the Election Day conflict in the bud—the next best solution is for theaters to just ask. Both Dramatists and Samuel French say that if companies applying for rights inquire about other licenses in the area, they’ll check into it. Otherwise, our town will keep getting its theatrical ballot box stuffed.

Theatre Seven’s Election Day opens Saturday 9. Route 66’s On an Average Day is currently running.