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Lucky Seven
Young troupe Theatre Seven harbors a tricky remount.
Maybe it’s the blue baseball cap, or the fact that Theatre Seven’s 27-year-old artistic director, Brian Golden, showed up for our interview still sweaty from an intramural soccer game, but likening Theatre Seven’s upcoming transfer to a small-town sports team playing in the big leagues seems an appropriate analogy. The young company, only in its fourth season, is poised to take its 2007 production Diversey Harbor from its original 40-seat venue (the now-defunct Rogue Theater) to the 195-seat Greenhouse Theater Center main-stage space, formerly Victory Gardens.
The math alone is daunting—195 seats for each show, four shows per week, five consecutive weeks—making a grand total of 3,900 seats to be filled. “I’m not an idiot,” says Golden, an Iowa native (and former teen Jeopardy! loser) who also directs the show. “Of course I’m worried this thing isn’t going to go exactly as I planned.”
To be fair, it’s a calculated risk. Diversey Harbor received critical acclaim two years ago for its intimate and admirably nontwee portrayal of the Chicago twentysomething experience. The product, assuming it translates to a larger space, is not the risky part. The play was penned by reputable Chicago playwright Marisa Wegrzyn, who, in addition to being a company member of Theatre Seven, is working on commissions for both Steppenwolf and Yale Rep. “Basically, we come third after those two,” Golden admits.
Diversey Harbor takes place on the frigid Chicago lakefront over the course of one night, during which four restless hipsters piece together the disappearance of a young North Side woman. The four interwoven monologues slowly reveal the characters’ connections to each other and to the missing girl, while painting a vivid portrait of the city through the lens of Generation Y.
Formed in 2006 by six grads of Washington University in St. Louis and one Cornish College of the Arts alum (making a final total of, yes, seven), Theatre Seven has produced nine plays to date—four during last year’s season alone. Currently, Golden is tweaking the theater’s mission, from simply producing “new plays, world premieres and forgotten classics” to focusing on pieces that are either set in or speak to Chicago specifically. That new mission is at the center of Diversey Harbor’s remount; it’s a show by young Chicagoans for young Chicagoans, written by a sixth-generation Chicagoan. “We’ve just been waiting to find the right place to produce this show again,” Golden says.
But the Greenhouse is a bigger stadium than the septet is used to playing in—and commensurately more expensive to rent. When talking about his company’s funding, Golden sounds like a polished politician on the campaign trail: “We’ve never received a grant, or any type of public funding, for that matter. We have about 80 donors, only four of whom have given over $1,000 dollars.”
So how can Theatre Seven afford the pricey $3,500 weekly rental fee for the Greenhouse main stage? In short, it can’t. Unlike most local theaters, Theatre Seven happens to be the lucky beneficiary of the current economic situation. When Greenhouse Theater Center general manager Jennifer Kincaid couldn’t find a renter for the spring main-stage slot (few nomadic companies had that kind of cash on hand), she remembered the Theatre Seven clan, one of whom Kincaid met when she moonlighted as a stage manager. “We try to work it out so quality companies can use this space,” she says of the troupe’s special, undisclosed fee.
Tickets are going for $18 a pop for all 20 shows. “We won’t break even,” Golden says. (In the nonprofit-theater world, it’s common to operate at a loss and still deem a show a success.)
“They haven’t presold any tickets,” says the woman working the Greenhouse box office three weeks before opening night. “Oh wait, no,” she says hurriedly. “They have three sold on April 24th.” She doesn’t look worried, though. Unlike the major theaters in town, midlevel places like the Greenhouse don’t do much advance presale business, at least not until a week before opening.
“You know, I was a professional poker player my first year out of college,” Golden says. “So compared to that, running a theater company is low-stress.” That might be true, but given his company has almost 4,000 seats to fill before summer arrives, there’s a chance he might be bluffing.
Diversey Harbor opens Tuesday 7.
