he biggest challenge facing Boston, according to an article written by Boston Globe arts reporter Maureen Dezell (December 17, 2000), is a lack of affordable and flexible theatre space for the city's medium-sized companies.

She begins by citing some of the woes faced by groups like The Sugan Theatre Company, which over the past two years has had hits on its hands with Conor McPherson's St. Nicholas and Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane.  Demand far outstripped seating capacity, but Sugan could find no other location to offer more performances after its run at the Boston Center for the Arts had run out. There just simply was no room at any theatre inn in Boston. Dezell concludes that "the cramped, compromised state of local stages is hobbling Boston theater's collective ability to...take its place among American theater's second cities, such as Chicago and Seattle."

Much of the evidence she brings to bear seems to support her point.  For instance, American Repertory Theatre and Huntington Theatre Company, both celebrated regional theatre companies, do not own the spaces in which they operate because of their affiliations with Harvard University and Boston University. They have to plan their seasons around student and faculty demands on stages. And neither has a real second stage at its disposal. (By contrast, Trinity Repertory Company in Providence has three stages and full_time access to all of them.)

Another crimp in production capacity is that there are very few 200- to 400-seat theatres in Boston, and the ones that do exist do not have complete property control over their spaces.  The Boston Center for the Arts is part of a larger cultural complex that is struggling financially and is plagued by poor management.  The residency program at the BCA -- which at the moment includes Sugan, the SpeakEasy Stage Company, Pilgrim Theatre, and Theater Offensive -- has been helpful to those companies, but the two theatres at the BCA are still makeshift spaces, with limited production capacities.

However, the situation has not gone unnoticed, and some plans are in effect to enhance local theater capacity. Early in October 2000, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced a city appropriation of$4 million to help build a 350_seat second stage for the Huntington and a 200_seat theater designed for resident companies at the BCA. The New Repertory Theatre is huddling with Watertown Arts on the Charles to be the resident company at a new theater planned for a nonprofit arts center at the former US Army Arsenal site on the banks of the Charles River.  The Merrimack Repertory Theatre, currently a lessee of the city of Lowell, plans to collaborate with the city and Middlesex Community College to develop a new performing arts center in which Merrimack would be the resident company.

Emerson College has plans to expand its theatre facilities, as does the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, which plans to renovate the lobby and perhaps the backstage at the Shubert Theatre.  There is some talk of also opening up currently closed theatres as part of the upscaling going on in the Washington Street/Chinatown area, including the rapidly decaying Opera House (once owned by Sarah Caldwell), but neighbors, the city, and the developers have yet to come to an agreement about how to do that.

Across the river in Cambridge, The Nora Theatre Company and Underground Railway Theater, with help from the city of Cambridge, are close to signing a long_term lease agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish a theatre in an MIT-owned building.  The Constellation Performing Arts and Film Center in Kendall Square, just rising out of the ground, will supposedly hold a recital hall for classical and early music, a second hall designed for jazz, folk, gospel, and world music, a state_of_the_art motion_picture theater, and a "jewel box" theater for intimate performances. (However, consultant and philanthropist Glenn KnicKrehm, the prime mover and funder of the Constellation center, stated clearly that while the jewel_box hall should be well_suited for presenting experimental theater, "it is not going to be a playhouse.")

The upshot of all of this is that while Boston and Cambridge have theatrical energy, they have few places to put it, depending, as most of them do, on the kindness of strangers for a place to play. This negatively affects production in at least two ways. Theatre audiences, unlike music audiences, do not travel to follow their favorite companies.  As Catherine Peterson, executive director of ARTS/Boston, states, "It's really hard for a theater company to bring your audience with you. It's different for classical_music companies.  They perform in churches, and move from one to another, and that's accepted."

The other is that without more alternate spaces, theatres cannot do good development work. For instance, American Repertory Theatre has used the stage at the Hasty Pudding building for logistic as well as artistic reasons because the company can't produce on its main stage at the Loeb Drama Center for six weeks during each of Harvard's academic semesters, when undergraduates use the drama center.  Rob Orchard, ART's managing director, compares second stages such as the Hasty Pudding to "greenhouses," where new work can be grown while the main stage is being used for other purposes.  As Orchard says, "Every resident theater _- every viable theater -_ has to have a more formal public performance space and a space that is smaller, with a more relaxed atmosphere, to develop new work and experiment."

In fact, Nicholas Martin took the job as artistic director of the Huntington on the condition that the company gain access to a second performance space. The Huntington announced its partnership with the BCA within months of Martin's arrival.

But with theater space as limited as it is, the flourishing of Boston theater could easily be thwarted, said Carmel O'Reilly, artistic director of Sugan. "With the way things are, none of us can take what we're doing to the next level."

Other News

Merrimack Repertory company has a new artistic director, Charles Towers. His first order of business, according to the press release, is reevaluating the theatre's needs, especially its relationship with the city of Lowell, from whom it rents its current theatre space.

Playwright Emily Mann will be playwright-in-residence with Boston Theatre Works for the express purpose of revising and presenting her play Meshugah, which had a production at Trinity Repertory Company in spring 2000 with which Mann was not completely pleased. Mann had connected with Jason Slavick of BTW, who had done his director's master at Trinity, and was pleased with his suggestions for revisions. On December 19, 2000, BTW held an invitation-only reading for comments and feedback, with plans to mount a full production in the spring.

Jon Robin Baitz's adaptation of Hedda Gabler (with Kate Burton, Richard Burton's daughter, as the eponymous unwieldy female) opens at the Huntington this month. (I say that the "adaptation" opens since some criticized Baitz's work when this version of Ibsen's play opened at the Williamstown (MA) Theatre Festival this past summer, saying that it had less to do with Ibsen and more to do with making the play easier on the American ear.)

Rumor has it that Oskar Eustis, artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company, has been interviewing for the job of artistic director of Yale Repertory Company and dean of the Yale School of Drama. No word yet from Eustis or Yale whether the rumors are true.

The search for a new artistic director at American Repertory Theatre to replace Robert Brustein is now officially open, subject to no more divagations by Maestro Brustein. The talk is of splitting the position into artistic and management tracks.

Tina Packer, artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, just returned from England where she met with architects, scholars, and historians slated to build a replica of Shakespeare's Rose Theatre on their new 62-acre compound in the Berkshires.

© 2000 Michael Bettencourt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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