It’s Curtains for Curtain Calls

Early last week, an item appeared in the entertainment section of the San Jose Mercury News. The headline: “What Went Awry At The Rep.”

No, the left coast isn’t interested in analyzing the immolation of our Charlotte Rep. Their own San Jose Repertory Theatre is starting off its 2006-2007 season carrying the weighty albatross of a $1.55 million deficit, nearly three times what Charlotte Rep’s deficit peaked at before it capsized.

Amid the alarm at San Jose Rep’s financial woes, is anybody really worried that the company might sink under its debt? Actually, yes. There is some concern that businessmen and City Council won’t foot the bill for yet another bailout.

But unlike Charlotte, the show goes on.

Founded in 1980, San Jose Rep grew financially flabby in Silicon Valley because, awash in the dot-com boom of the 1990s, theater artists, administrators and board members developed an “angel mentality,” according to former managing director David John. Somebody dripping with cyber-cash would always emerge amid Rep’s sea of troubles and throw them a life raft.

No such mentality exists here in buttoned-down Charlotte, that’s for sure. We’d rather bury the ledger — and the company — when the red ink goes over half a mil. Capitalizing a new theater company with a multi-million dollar campaign? Fuhgett-about-it. Wielding a seven-figure deficit in your city’s flagship theater company — or actually retiring such a debt? Surely, such follies are part of the happy-go-lucky California lifestyle and totally alien to the civilized Carolinas, right?

Wrong. On both counts.

Over in Greensboro, young and vibrant Triad Stage has just retired a debt that peaked at $900,000. That brings the total capitalization of the company — including the midwifing contributions that birthed Triad — to $6.1 million, according to Triad managing director Richard Whittington.

While Charlotte perpetually preoccupies itself with bricks and mortar — and balance sheets — community leaders in Greensboro have nurtured a new company and steadied its course when the aftermath of Sept. 11 wreaked havoc with Triad’s initial financial projections. Triad had the misfortune of opening in 2001 almost immediately after the 9/11 catastrophe.

The civic support began five years earlier, when Whittington and Triad artistic director Preston Lane migrated to Greensboro — after running a company in New Haven during their student years at Yale — with a $4 million business plan to plant an Equity company in the city’s foundering downtown. Support continued when expenses ballooned to $5 million during renovations to Triad’s home at the old Montgomery Ward building.

And it has continued through five rocky years. Or let’s say four. Triad is predicting its first-ever break-even balance sheet for the current fiscal year.

Whittington’s memories of a key fund-raiser, Hayes Clement, and his belief in the Triad vision will be particularly poignant to Charlotte theatergoers.

“What he kept talking about in those early days was that Greensboro was really struggling to figure out how to retain young people,” says Whittington. “And here Preston and I, who did not have ties to this area, were trying to knock on doors trying to get in to do a project that we felt would really help the cultural life of this community, take it to the next level. He couldn’t imagine allowing us to fail.”

Board members at Charlotte Rep, by contrast, believed so little in the artistic vision of its founder, Steve Umberger, that they whisked him out the door. When debt reached an estimated $600,000 — we never did get a firm number — these gutless adventurers threw up their hands and threw in the towel. They blamed Charlotte for not supporting Rep. Without really pleading for the people’s support.

Everybody in the arts community seems to gather at the County’s financial watering hole, the vaunted, beleaguered Char-Meck Arts & Science Council. Corporations, arts organizations, bean counters, dilettantes and the occasional artist are all in the pathetic melee.

If our Rep is dying, nobody in the tall glass downtown towers is listening. They gave at the office. To the ASC. It’s their job to bail out floundering arts organizations.

If Moving Poets Theatre of Dance can’t fit into a convenient niche or funding category — due to the unfortunate fact that they were utterly original and beyond category — we’ll let that die, too. No, it’s not our mandate to keep newborn companies afloat or help them grow, say ASC spokespersons.

They’re right. But unfortunately, they haven’t gotten their message across to the decision makers, the difference makers and the dilettantes who should comprise a visionary donor community. Artistically, growing arts companies here face slow strangulation.

So instead of new and growing arts troupes dotting the landscape, Charlotte’s visions of artsy sugarplums remain bricks-and-mortar. For fewer artists.

Renovations? You must be kidding. We don’t even do maintenance. The wood at the lip of the Belk Theater stage is starting to look splintered and shabby — before the PAC has been able to complete installation of the big 100-pipe organ that looms behind it, forever an empty shell. We move on. We move out.

Umberger has parachuted down to Sarasota, doing quite well, thank you. Moving Poets founder Till Schmidt-Rimpler is moving his company to Berlin. Like the Rep, Moving Poets appealed to the ASC. Unlike the Rep, Schmidt-Rimpler also mounted a people campaign. Same result.

Except Schmidt-Rimpler and his category-busting enterprise aren’t leaving any debt behind them. They just wanted to expand their vistas. They had this wild, crazy, radical notion that dancers, actors, visual artists and designers who live for their art should also be able to make a living while they lift up our quality of life.

“We told them in November of last year that we will make this season a make-or-break season,” says Schmidt-Rimpler of his final supplications to the ASC. “There were maybe two phone calls, which were basically about why we were considering to move away and what the problems are. That was pretty much it, I would say. And, of course, that they would hate to see us go, etc., blah, blah.”

Moving Poets began 10 years ago at the old Carolina Theatre. Then as now, the Carolina awaits renovation — though it is more likely doomed to demolition. Schmidt-Rimpler is preparing a farewell Poets performance in October, a fitting valedictory for a company whose early following stemmed from its production of Dracula, an undead Halloween tradition that made its rounds in multiple revivals.

In late-breaking news, Off-Tryon Theatre Company founder John Hartness tells us that he, too, is calling it a day. “Disbanding” is the word Hartness uses. If he does produce a show at Actor’s Theatre next spring, as previously reported here, it will be under a new banner.

Now doesn’t that make you want to go out and build another theater?

This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2006.