BY JONATHAN ABARBANEL
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| Click on illustration to see a larger version. |
Carrie L. Kaufman is lunching at Leona’s on Sheffield, just two doors down from the offices of PerformInk, of which Kaufman is owner, publisher and managing editor. She twirls the fettucine around her fork and rearranges the Alfredo-laced noodles like a bird builds a nest. A compulsive carbo-loader, she eats bagels for breakfast and pasta for lunch, and Leona’s is a frequent stop if not necessarily her favorite restaurant.
Perhaps the competitive athlete still lurks in Kaufman. She’s a dedicated golfer who shoots an honest 95, and thinks she could slice her strokes to the mid-80s if she ever had the time. She’s an even more dedicated cyclist who does 30 miles on summer weekends (down from 50 miles, she complains). During good weather, she often bikes from her Palmer Square home—via Evanston—to PerformInk’s 3rd Floor offices. Fortunately, the office bathroom has a shower, so Kaufman can wash the street off before settling down to work the phones, Word documents and spreadsheets.
She didn’t always want to be a rich and famous publisher, says this little girl from St. Louis who moved at age four to Las Vegas with her family. The first dreams were sports dreams. In high school, she was a Class A racquet ball player and not bad at basketball ("I could shoot, but I can’t jump and I’m not quick," she says now). "My goal as a teenager was to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and then it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. Then my goal was to be in Sports Illustrated, maybe one of the Faces in the Crowd. But it became clear that I’m a mediocre athlete at best. So then I switched, and I wanted to write for Sports Illustrated."
When the sports dream crashed around her, she made the playhouse her arena of choice. "If you don’t know who you are, theatre is a great place to figure it out. And I didn’t know who I was," she says. She attended Brandeis University and then Emerson College, both in Boston, graduating with a degree in playwriting and directing. She stuck around Boston for several years, stage managing and assistant directing in the small, outre (sic) theatres that were the equivalent of off-off-Loop. Call them off-Hub.
She had two day gigs during this time, one as a chauffeur (complete with uniform) with Julia Child as a frequent client (she also drove Eunice Kennedy and John Kenneth Galbraith), the other as a junior sports writer for the Boston Globe, mainly covering high school events. On one occasion, in the guise of a locker room interview, Kaufman traded chauffeur’s cap for shoulder pads and seduced the entire varsity offensive line of Cardinal Callahan Prep.
Just kidding.
The Boston Globe job, although entry level, was one for which many a journalism school grad would have killed, but Kaufman was a self-taught scrivener, having started writing for her high school paper, and cutting her teeth in Boston as a freelance writer for the Middlesex News in the Boston suburb of Framingham. The Globe job was the correct career path to writing for Sports Illustrated, but Kaufman already had relinquished that dream, too, in order to pursue theatre.
Still, she claims that Sports Illustrated taught her how to publish. She was a subscriber from the age of 12, and recalls how she would analyze each weekly issue, not just for content but also for format. "I learned about what sections were. Sports Illustrated had three main stories, and then little round-ups, and then they had a big story, and then they had the 19th Hole in the back, which was letters. People would write in about the swimsuit issue, and they’d say, 'Cancel my subscription.’ And they would publish the letters gleefully, and they wouldn’t answer back. I respected that. I saw real criticism of things that had been written. I don’t see that anymore in Sports Illustrated. I don’t see that anymore in most major magazines or newspapers. I learned how that works just by reading it and absorbing it."
Kaufman moved to Chicago almost by chance. She came to visit her brother in February 1990, and moved here in May, convinced that Chicagoans were far friendlier than Bostonians. Of course, she was aware of Chicago’s reputation for theatre, too. "I knew that the theatre community was bigger and more vibrant than it was in Boston. If I was going to do anything, it was going to be here. I came out here to write and direct."
Since she wanted to pursue theatre writing, Kaufman decided she didn’t want a journalism day gig. She thought a bookstore would be a good place to work—you know, high-paying and all that—and was delighted to discover Chicago had a theatre bookstore, Act I (see profile, p. 8). She called up founder/owner Rick Levine and asked if he needed anybody. "I called just as their typist quit, like an hour before. And Rick goes, 'Well, yeah, we need a typist for this newsletter we put out in the back of the store.’ So I came in and interviewed. I later learned that Rick asked Belinda Bremner if she thought I was overqualified. They laughed, but he hired me anyway. This was in June, 1990, a month after I got here."
The newsletter was PerformInk, which Levine had started as a quarterly in 1987, and expanded to a newsprint biweekly in 1989. Belinda Bremner, still a columnist for the paper, is the only PerformInk employee who predates Kaufman.
By summer’s end, Kaufman was working full-time at Act I, putting in 20 hours a week on PerformInk and 20 hours in the bookstore. By the end of the year, Levine had made her publisher. The paper had lost money in 1990 and Levine asked her to turn it around. She recalls Levine saying, "Look, I want this to be a real newspaper and I want it to make money. Your challenge is to take it over. You have a year. If you don’t do it, I’m going to close the paper down."
The paper didn’t make money in 1991, but Kaufman tripled revenues and improved content. "I had people calling me and saying, 'Hey, this is getting to be a better paper. I want to subscribe now. I was able to sign advertising contracts with no-brainers—like acting schools, hey!—and I was able to make something of it." In early 1992, Kaufman discussed a partnership with Levine, and then bought the paper outright for $12,000 on February 4, 1992. "I haven’t acted or directed since," she says.
The rest is history. Today, PerformInk has a circulation approaching 500,000 and grosses $57 million in annual revenues. Just kidding.
But with an estimated readership of 12,000, PerformInk does maintain a staff of four in addition to Kaufman, plus a dozen regular freelance contributors. It’s become the paper of record for the Chicago theatre industry and is recognized as such both locally and nationally. It’s successfully launched an online edition, and a subsidiary publication, "The Book: An Actor’s Guide to Chicago." For her own writing in PerformInk, Kaufman has twice received the prestigious Peter Lisagor Award from the Chicago chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. PerformInk has not made Kaufman rich and powerful, but it manages to keep her in graphite clubs and titanium frames.
The Big Question, however, is: Has she accomplished what she set out to do? The answer is yes and no. "I wanted to change the face of theatre in Chicago. I wanted people who were theatre-goers to get excited about theatre, and I wanted to make it a clarion call for artists to focus their work. That was very idealistic, and I don’t know if it’s even a good thing to do. Like most theatre people, you start with a great ideal, a great show. Then you start to grow and you realize this is a business.
"My business skills were pretty good, but my management skills weren’t, so I started focusing on that. It took me 10 years, but I’ve finally learned how to manage people, how to hire people who will do their job and not look to me to do their job. We’ve always had some good people, but we’ve never had an entire staff of good people. We finally have a really good, mature staff."
Still pushing her now-cold pasta around, Kaufman likens PerformInk to the Myth of Sisyphus, with the staff joining her to push the great rock higher and higher up the hill. "I’ve got four people who are all focused on the move forward," she enthuses. "We know what we’re going to do. We want to make the paper relevant to theatre-goers, as well as theatre people. We want to make it relevant to people who’ve been in this business a long time, not just new-comers. That’s where we’re moving. I’ve always wanted to publish the New York Times Arts and Review Section, which is relevant to the artists who read it, and to the people who go see art."
What readers can expect in PerformInk’s future is a lot more Web content, including career-enhancement pages, message boards and interactive features not available in print. Kaufman definitely thinks the future is paperless. Currently, the PerformInk site is offering its first streaming video of Kaufman’s lengthy interview with Richard Christiansen, put up with the assistance of Marty Higgenbotham, developer of the Stage Channel Web site. "Right now there are lots of people who aren’t comfortable with the Web, who want to hold the paper. I hate newsprint, I’m allergic to newsprint. But I’m a writer," she says.
As for content, readers can expect at least two annual series of four or five articles each, similar to last year’s seven-part series on critics and criticism. Future topics may include how you work in theatre and have a family at the same time, and the pursuit of fame and how people handle it. Kaufman also expects to expand "The Book" within the next two years into a national edition offering condensed chapters for New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle and other major acting centers.
Kaufman says that marketing to a theatre-going readership will be addressed, too. "We are going to market. That is my failing. I’m a writer and a manager, I’m not a marketing person, I’m not a blow-your-horn person. We are going to market ourselves more so that people who love theatre will know who we are and pick us up, or go online."
As for Carrie L. Kauman 10 years from now, where does she expect to be? "You know, PerformInk was only supposed to be a stepping stone. And there are some years where it’s been a millstone, because I’m not really sure where I want to step to," she confides. "With the staff we have now, I like coming to work everyday. If I want to do something, I work really hard at it. I never think anything is ready because it’s never up to my standards. One wonderful lesson I’ve learned with PerformInk is that if you get it wrong, you can get it right two weeks later. With the Web, if you get it wrong you can fix it right now. PerformInk is a fun place to be. We laugh a lot, we have wonderful philosophical debates and we work our asses off. I could go somewhere else and make a lot more money, but there’s a quality to my life that I like."