BY LUCIA MAURO
Few theatre companies, after losing their performance home of five years, would celebrate their newfound itinerancy–let alone view it as a step toward national recognition. Unless, of course, their next season happened to be held at Steppenwolf, Goodman and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA).
That’s what happened to About Face Theatre. Early this year, when the company learned that its base at the Lakeview Jane Addams Hull House would close in the summer, co-founder/artistic director Eric Rosen embarked on an unprecedented networking campaign. His efforts, which have been a steady feature of the company since its inception in 1995, culminated in the high profile 2002-03 rental season, which also includes collaborations with national playwrights.
"We didn’t want to just go to, say, Steppenwolf and put on a play," says Rosen from About Face’s offices in Uptown. "We were interested in a co-production. And we’ve co-produced before. It’s in our culture. We focused on what we could contribute to Steppenwolf and what they could contribute to us."
More specifically, About Face Theatre, which centers on a broad spectrum of gay issues, brought in a younger and more diverse demographic to Steppenwolf (which co-produced Richard Kramer’s Theater District, about a teenage boy who moves in with his gay father, in the fall). The Steppenwolf connection pushes About Face closer to its goal of becoming a major national theatre. Another larger benefit to About Face is that the administrative staff can learn how a theatre like Steppenwolf handles its marketing, publicity and fundraising by interacting with them.
In February, the company presents a pre-off-Broadway work-in-progress of I Am My Own Wife at the MCA. Written by Doug Wright (Quills) and directed by Moises Kaufman (The Laramie Project), it’s based on the true story of an openly transgender East German woman who survived the Nazi and Soviet eras. In the summer, About Face Youth Theatre’s latest original work for its fifth anniversary will be presented at Goodman’s Owen Bruner Theatre.
Other plans include a "Festival of New Plays" in various locations across the city, and a collaboration with writer Jim Grimsley on Fascination, a new play about a serial killer. Grimsley’s Dream Boy essentially put About Face on the map in its early years, and the artists have kept in touch with the writer.
About Face Theatre was co-founded in 1995 by artistic director Eric Rosen and associate artistic director Kyle Hall (who now lives in New York) to create performances that examine contemporary and historic issues in the gay, lesbian and bisexual communities. Those themes continue to expand to include transgender and sexually questioning individuals. In fact, Rosen points out that the artists are constantly re-examining their language to reflect a broader population.
"We’re focusing on states of being in-between," says Rosen, "people who do not fit into a category. We have an increasing preoccupation with the idea of what is the truth–what hasn’t yet been said about our increasingly complex times?"
About Face, which moved into the Hull House in 1997, initially started with a $5,000 annual budget. Today, that budget has risen to $650,000. It also has 12 paid employees and several interns.
The theatre has three programming arms: its diverse mainstage season; its new works program, "a safe birthing place for new work," which goes beyond readings to involve the all-encompassing development of a show under the direction of resident artist Grimsley through the National Theatre Artist Residency Program of Theatre Communications Group; and its nationally recognized education programs, including the About Face Youth Theatre and educational outreach tour that reaches over 12,000 Illinois students and teachers each year.
About Face is in the midst of a national search for a managing director, whom Rosen says "must be a fairly high-level leader with excellent fundraising skills and as passionate about building the institution as we are about building the art."
Megan Carney, artistic director of the Youth Theatre, has witnessed extraordinary growth in their educational programs. She has worked closely with the Goodman, who is looking to expand its programming in this area, in sharing the benefits of the Youth Theatre model. And that’s how the upcoming anniversary collaboration happened.
"What we do is all about developing relationships," says Carney. "You invite people to the table and involve them. When we knew we were going to be homeless, we had to reexamine the idea of home–to be at home in the theatre or at home in the work. We decided to make it a season of collaborations, especially with the Youth Theatre hitting five years."
The Youth Theatre, which centers on experimental youth-created and performed works by over 150 students, has experienced a tremendous amount of growth. Condensed versions of these shows have toured schools and provided a forum for hard discussion of these issues (including school bullying and the increasing awareness of transgender youth). Many young people, who also work in the About Face offices, have been able to explore their full potential in a non-judgmental environment.
According to Carney, its outreach program does not offer merely a performance and a Q&A. Instead a facilitator guides high school students through scripted questions so that they can zero in on specific issues.
"I prefer rich, fertile dialogue," she says, "not putting students in a situation where there’s a vague call for questions. Using that old model, they’re either very polite and ask nothing or play it safe and ask the usual questions about how a theatre production is put together. We ask students to think about something very specific in the play."
In terms of the gender/sexuality focus of About Face, how does the theatre maintain its specificity while speaking to larger human issues?
"I think what we do," responds Carney, "is look at the same story in a different framework. We’re universal without being mainstream, and there’s not an attempt to mainstream."
New work also remains at the core of About Face’s mission.
"Our manifesto of play development," says Rosen, "is that authorship is a collective responsibility of a director, playwright, designers and actors. We collaborate from the beginning and obsessively demand re-writes. What I learned from Mary Zimmerman [at Northwestern University] is that the play reveals itself in front of you only when the tools are there."
He continues, "A successful theatre company is not about having a hit show. You build a body of work [in a variety of styles] over a long time that has integrity and feels morally right. We want to change the world through art."