About’s last fight?

FACING THE MUSIC Recent Chicago theater transplants Metzgar and Dildine must take the recession head-on.

Photo: Andrew Nawrocki

In the economic downturn, nonprofit theaters across the country have declared states of emergency. Shakespeare Santa Cruz, San Francisco’s Magic Theatre and two Massachusetts theaters, Beverly’s North Shore Music Theatre and Worcester’s Foothills Theatre Company, are among the companies that have issued CTA-like doomsday pronouncements seeking immediate injections of hundreds of thousands of dollars—or it’ll be curtains for good.

Compared to the tremors elsewhere, Chicago’s theaters seemed relatively stable through the winter. Companies ranging from Steppenwolf and Court to the Neo-Futurists announced production extensions due to demand; last month, the League of Chicago Theatres issued a pulse-taking report indicating that half of its member theaters were seeing attendance hold steady or increase.

But not everything is rosy. After especially urgent year-end donation requests, the House Theatre of Chicago in January canceled the final show of its season, Justin D.M. Palmer’s Alan Infinitum.

Then, in late February, About Face Theatre, an Equity outfit nearly a decade the House’s senior, made an even more surprising announcement: Its own season closer, Ann-Marie Healy’s What Once We Felt, was being postponed to focus on a last-gasp (and gasp-inducing) $300,000 fund-raising campaign. “We need by March 15 to have half of that in hand, or else we won’t be able to continue,” says artistic director Bonnie Metzgar during an interview at the company’s Uptown office.

All the more jarring: About Face’s decision comes less than nine months into Metzgar’s tenure. Eric Rosen, who cofounded the LGBT-themed company in 1995, left last year to take the helm at Kansas City Rep; Metzgar left a post at Brown University to replace him, bringing along her colleague Rick Dildine to serve as managing director.

“We started the year with a budget of a little over a million dollars,” says Dildine, noting that he and Metzgar have revised that budget four times since their fiscal year began in September. “At this point, with taking What Once We Felt out, we’ve cut more than 30 percent.”

Those cuts and increased fund-raising efforts haven’t been enough to balance the budget, leading Metzgar and her board into public crisis mode. “Unless we’re able to stabilize the company, it’s impossible to work week to week not knowing what your reality’s going to be,” she says. (Of the $300,000 that must be raised, Metzgar says about one third consists of preexisting debt she and Dildine inherited, another third is shortfalls in ticket sales that didn’t meet projections based on previous, nonrecession seasons, and the remaining third is needed to establish a baseline of cash credit necessary for day-to-day business operations.)

For many arts nonprofits the size of About Face and the House, unfortunately, working week to week is their reality. Smaller companies without payroll or other fixed expenses can more easily roll with the punches; institutions the size of Steppenwolf or Goodman have deep-pocketed donors and budgets large enough to survive economic hiccups. (As Chicago magazine accounted last month in its salary report, the 300 grand that’s life or death for companies like About Face is equal to or less than the individual annual compensation of Goodman’s Robert Falls and Chicago Shakespeare’s Barbara Gaines.)

Midlevel companies with budgets between $250,000 and $1 million are the most at risk, the League reports; 70 percent of Chicago companies of that size report decreased ticket sales, with nearly as many lagging in contributed income.

Many theaters this size, particularly in Chicago, also face the challenges of itinerancy; producing in varying spaces can make fund-raising needs unpredictable. And many organizations at these levels don’t have much room for error in their budgets. “It’s common for a lot of theaters to only have two or three payrolls in their cash flow,” says arts marketing and development consultant Adam Thurman, who blogs about the nonprofit arts. “If they have a surplus, rather than set it aside, they roll it into next year’s budget and increase line items: hire more actors, increase staff pay. I understand that, but then something like [the downturn] happens. Then what?”

Metzgar emphasizes that, given its youth program, keeping About Face going is about more than theater. “If we go away, it’s not like there’s just less art in the world,” she says. “It’s these kids that we work with, this support system that they’re used to leaning on. It creates a devastating hole in the community.” Metzgar adds: “When you hear what the impact is on their lives—that sealed the deal for me to come here.”

Admirably, Metzgar has teamed the youth ensemble with theater professionals in an October reading of The Laramie Project and in last month’s smashing update of Stupid Kids. “There’s intergenerational exchange, artist to artist, that’s really important,” she says, “but also we have a longer-term vision of: Every time someone comes to an About Face event, there’s exposure to the youth perspective.”

She hopes to shake things up in the programming department as well. “I don’t want to think of programming as just plays,” she says. Having founded the Joe’s Pub cabaret series in her time at New York’s Public Theater, Metzgar says, “I like events. Sometimes it’s only 30 minutes long, and it’s not really a play, so maybe you do it for six performances. A season doesn’t have to be three plays that each run six weeks.”

Both Metzgar and Dildine express confidence that About Face’s supporters will come through; in fact, a third of their goal has already been met. “I’m happy to be a leader in crisis time,” Metzgar says. “We didn’t come to this organization just so it could close its doors.”

Follow the fund-raising campaign at aboutfacetheatre.com.

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