This Saturday, New Leaf is going to see Hunting and Gathering at Theatre Seven  - and we’d love it if you came with us!  This is the Chicago premiere of a play by Brooke Berman.  Last week, I directed a staged reading of another play of hers – Smashing – for Theatre Seven’s new Shikaakwa reading series.  I had a blast (with a stellar cast that Brian and I put together), and can’t wait to see another piece of Brooke’s work.

On Saturday, May 29th, you can see this show with us for just $14 if you buy your tickets in advance with the code NEWLEAF.  The show is at the Greenhouse with a 7:30 curtain.  And I bet there will be more beers after the show.  I hope you’ll come help us support our friends (and – of course – hang out with us).

See you soon!

Pictures say it all. It snuck up on us, but we hadn’t just been building a number of great ensembles over the years at New Leaf – we built one big one.

Thanks to Austin Oie (The Man Who Was Thursday) for capturing the event for us.

[View with PicLens]

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Fresh, real food is missing from many neighborhoods in Chicago. What can we do to change that?

Last fall and into the winter, we started to think about our company and ourselves as members of the larger community. In this thinking, it became clear that we were interested in broadening and deepening our civic engagement, how we as a company interact with the world outside the walls of the LPCC. We want to continue our focus on renewal, and of course keep our work tied to the work on our stage. So a partnership with the burgeoning Neighborhood Nutrition Centers, helmed by our friend Les Kniskern, seemed like the perfect fit for our upcoming production of Curse of the Starving Class.  I’ll let Les tell you more about his work with NNCenters in a sec – I’m just thrilled to have him along with us for this first crack at creating a true community-driven partnership.

Where do we go from here? Well, we’re going to figure that out together. We’re planning to have information in our lobby during the run of Curse (which begins April 15th!) that will tell our friends and patrons more about NNC and the good work they’re doing in Chicago – and give them a chance to contribute to the cause; we’re also planning an awareness-raising discussion in early May with Les and other local leaders. We’re also looking at having a 360 Stories night responding to the show and looking at themes of hunger and the many resonances that word – that idea – has for each of us.

And then the work continues. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’d like to see a theatre company involved in the world. Who’s doing it well? Where is there the greatest need? How should these questions inform season selection? How do the issues around us get reflected on our stages – how should they be reflected?

We’re just getting started – I’m excited to see where we grow from here.
—————————————————————–
The Beginnings of Neighborhood Nutrition Centers

Neighborhood Nutrition Centers was recently asked for its ‘moment of obligation,’ a point where you identify the things that truly matter and commit to carrying them out. For me, this came from a young teenager:

“One volunteer opportunity came with a child hunger study sponsored by The Chicago Food Depository and the Heartland Alliance. A sixteen-year-old came into the room dejected, shy, quiet, lethargic, and almost ‘beaten down.’ As we discussed what he had eaten in the past twenty four hours I realized it was basically macaroni and cheese. I thought to myself, ‘kid, you’re a teenager, you should be shoveling the food in.’ He simply wasn’t getting enough nutritious fuel to give him energy. It was in this moment I realized the need to help provide community food access.”

What is community food access? There are many areas right here in Chicago, particularly in low-income areas that have little or no access to grocery stores with fresh foods. Real stores have divested from these areas, leaving behind fast foods and convenience stores with food that is high in fat, high in calories, consisting of salt, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

Real food is needed to combat obesity problems, diabetic issues, heart conditions and early deaths among low-income communities. But without stores to provide the food, communities are left with little choice, and no access.

Neighborhood Nutrition Centers strive to provide access to food in these areas by connecting with local farmers – as well as providing the resources to re-learn how to cook real food. This means, housing a community kitchen with programs that share fresh food knowledge. NNCenters will identify and engage the community’s “grandma cook,” to teach about using fresh foods, preserve foods for winter use, and preserve cultural food traditions by reinvigorating interest in good food practices.

I love the social commitment of New Leaf Theatre, and am honored to join in collaboration to build Neighborhood Nutrition Centers for Chicago.

Les Kniskern
Director
www.NNCenters.org

click below to donate through Facebook Causes.

Contributions are made to the NNC fiscal agent, Center for Economic Policy Analysis

Please designate your contribution is for: NNCenters

photo by Wonderlane used with Creative Commons permissions

Our five companies – Caffeine, Dog & Pony, New Leaf, Steep, and Theatre Seven of Chicago – are so collectively thrilled to be considered for this year’s Broadway in Chicago Emerging Theatre Award.  It truly is an honor to be nominated, and we’re sending out this message because we are just so pleased – all of us – to be in the company of so many committed, visionary, talented artists within our broad community and within these five companies specifically.  We know each other, respect one another’s work, see each other’s shows – and it’s really a thrill to be in this together.

One of the proudest hallmarks of Chicago’s dynamic theatre community is that it’s just that – a community.  We’re a huge family of artists who strive towards the same goals of thought-provoking, inventive, exciting theatre that asks our audiences some of life’s most mystifying and important questions.  Each company in this town takes a different path to and around and through, and yet we still get to these questions’ (and our audiences’) core in effective, engaging, and innovative ways.  This is what makes Chicago the best town in which to make and see theatre.

So, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for this community we’ve made together, and we wanted to come to you as a group and let you know more about all five of us.  To us, this is an opportunity to celebrate our collective accomplishments thus far, and look forward to an exciting future.

If you haven’t already joined each of us for a show, we hope you will soon.  Here’s what’s we’ve got going on:

Caffeine – Wild Nights with Emily (through April 11)
Dog & Pony – The Twins Would Like to Say (through April 25)
New Leaf – Curse of the Starving Class (April 15 – May 22)
Steep – Harper Reagan (through April 25)
Theatre Seven of Chicago – Mimesophobia (through April 4)

If you’re a representative of a League member theatre company, you can also learn more about our companies and perform your democratic duty here.

If you’re with a theatre company that’s not a member of the League, you can cruise over here to learn more about joining the party.

And if you just want to learn more about what’s up in Chicago theatre, you should head here.

Sincerely,
Caffeine – Dog & Pony – New Leaf – Steep – Theatre Seven of Chicago

Most of the New Leaf and Curse of the Starving Class team met up recently at one of our favorite haunts for a fantastic first read through  together.  We gathered ourselves around some good food and a few drinks and listened to these incredible actors breathe life into the dangerously beautiful words of Sam Shepard.  Rehearsals start on March 2nd and we can’t wait to roll up our sleeves and dig.

Special thanks to the awesome folks at Rocco’s Cafe & Pizzeria ( http://www.roccoschicago.com/)

“Nick Keenan’s the kind of guy you can’t wait to see a few years down the road. You know he is going to be doing something stellar because he is already one of the most exciting artists in town. The young designer’s resume has blown up to include many of Chicago’s major theaters, and he is is a thinker to boot. Follow his musings on web technology, theater infrastructure and community building on his blog theaterforthefuture.com.”

Check out the whole list here.

After closing the books on The Man Who Was Thursday, we find ourselves with more pleasant surprises – our ticket sales and two comparatively modest but vital grants have paid the entire production budget for our spring production of Curse of the Starving Class, and go a long way towards funding the first production of the 2010-2011 season. If you have followed the national conversation on theater funding in the last few years, you’ll know that funding a theater primarily with ticket sales is highly unusual. What is going on?

The fact is, as we look ahead to our tenth year in production, New Leaf has become uniquely efficient in developing low-cost production infrastructure (we own most of our equipment, keeping our rental budgets low), exploring non-traditional venue relationships (the unique Lincoln Park Cultural Center – our home – continues to shape our company and cut us a sweet deal that allows a higher level of risk-taking), and leveraging little-used resources with partner theaters and organizations (collectively, we also work at the Goodman, Chicago Shakespeare, Marriott Lincolnshire, and many others, and we do our darndest to maintain relationships built on trust with all of ‘em). We’re good at finding reused resources rather than buying them new and tossing them in the garbage. We have friends who help us, and we help them in return.

In addition, we like solving problems with conceptually simple but powerful resource-friendly solutions. Those of you who saw The Man Who Was Thursday will remember the lamppost that helped Austin Oie and Joel Ewing guide the audience delightfully through our space, or the small collection of rocks from January’s Touch that set designer Michelle Lilly O’Brien actually pulled from and then returned to a stream bed. Those stones were transformed seamlessly with light, staging, and storytelling from simple objects into a powerful floating platform in an infinite void, or the heart-stopping ghost of an unseen character. These kinds of solutions are challenging and energizing to find, because they work elegantly, are artistically exciting, and as a result are financially achievable. Yes, that’s right, we said it: elegant solutions are always cheaper to produce than multiple, often literal, solutions. That kind of craftsmanship is worth discovering.

There is of course one key flaw in New Leaf’s current operational model, and that’s the fact that we’re living on borrowed time. We give nearly every spare chunk of income to our guest artists, the folks who devote weeks to our productions, and yet we still offer some of the lowest fees in the industry. Indeed, New Leaf’s company members go entirely unpaid for as much as 20 – 40 hours of work per week. If you’ve worked in or near a Chicago creative industry, you can also see the effect that this vacuum of financial support for the individual artist in Chicago has on the entire culture. As artistic fees are sacrificed to production budgets, venue rental fees, and licensing costs, a kind of 10-year brain drain pattern sets in. As an artist develops in their career, many “outgrow” Chicago – they move on to a career in New York or LA or less saturated regional markets to obtain more sustainable or more lucrative work. In Chicago, we experience the loss of our core talent, the loss of institutional knowledge, and over decades, we erode our cultural memory. And it doesn’t have to be that way: most expat artists we know have had to make all-too-familiar choices between their love of Chicago’s creative melting pot and their need for financial security. Even William Peterson, whose career developed in Chicago’s Victory Gardens theatre, recently left an incredibly lucrative turn on CSI for an opportunity to rejoin VG and Steppenwolf theatre as a featured artist. There is love for this community and what we do here, but somehow we’re not connecting creative professionals with the financial systems and infrastructure that could easily support them and keep them here in Chicago.

But for the city at large, weathering the economic upheaval despite a daily onslaught of volatile market and governmental changes, the central question that must be asked now is: Why is supporting a community of artists a priority? To be honest, we’ve asked ourselves the same thing. Why do theaters clamor for funding while local institutions that alleviate hunger or poverty or the effects of war or abuse go underfunded? We’ve asked what theaters have done to provide more than just indirect benefit to the community or entertainment to the very wealthy.

Our critical thinking goes deeper that that. We’ve asked how effective a theatrical call to social action could ever be – isn’t that just telling the audience what to do in a way that undercuts their enthusiasm and passion and ultimately erodes the success of the call to action? The fact is, we as a theater company don’t have complete answers to these systemic problems. But we also know that as a collective – our network of artists, audience, and supporters – we actually do have the potential to find answers for these and related issues, explore them in depth, and align energy behind them. If nothing else, theatre is a powerful and comparatively low-cost reminder that we must constantly reevaluate our perspectives, priorities and assumptions or face disaster. But it is also fun. It is radical. It is liberating. It is cathartic. It is surprising. It shakes our minds and souls loose.

A way forward became clear as we looked beyond our work to our lives: our theater must move away from a patronage model of funding and towards a partnership model. I don’t think any of our patrons would argue that art and the artists that make it couldn’t use more support in our society, both financial and social – we have all seen the ancillary benefits that are generated when you connect an artist with their passion – beauty, clarity, revelation, emotional release, simplicity, dialogue. But we also believe that society, corporate culture, and community organizations could directly and immediately benefit from a creative integration of the artistic process and the byproducts of artistic thinking into their work and daily experience. Most of America’s exposure to art is the finished “product” – a couple hours of watching a play, taking in a recital, or browsing paintings at a museum. If what we offer is an experience, our product is not the result, it is the entire experience from concept to creation to completion. And audiences routinely miss or are restricted from the meat of what that experience has to offer.

At New Leaf, we know how to integrate people into a rewarding artistic process that engages them on their own terms. We regularly offer that experience to our artists – while we haven’t always been able to compensate them, we have always invested in them. We have always taken pride in supporting the continued success and creative development of our artists on their terms, and we’re ready to extend that philosophy to our donors. We know how to provide creative encouragement, share professional relationships and connections, create opportunities beyond the walls of our theater, and even provide training opportunities to convert our theatrical and technical storytelling skills into skills applicable in any sector. The amazing thing that we’re finding is that by making that human investment and providing the right opportunities for artists to connect with the right story or audience, it sets off an actual, observable chain reaction of community alignment, inspiration, and development. The next logical step is finding a seat for the audience and funders of the theater to go along for that part of the ride.

So while this might be an odd pill to swallow, we believe it to be true: the artistic process – whether it is storytelling, design, writing, composing or collaboration – can be applied to any human connection or craft beyond the theater. I’ve seen this first hand in folks as seemingly removed from the world of theatrical storytelling as mortgage brokers, real estate agents, food banks and social advocacy organizations through my work with Marshall Creative. This isn’t about running folks through a team-building improv treadmill; it’s about thinking through problems and human nature creatively, drawing new connections between our passions, and creating a new story – a new framework for understanding – through bold action, communication, and design. Other organizations can benefit from the rich generation of experience and the investment in detail that theater offers, and our communities will be stronger for it. And, in the process, we may also hit upon a way of holding off that creative riptide and reconnecting artist with community and its need for creative thinkers. New Leaf can’t solve systemic issues like that alone, but through successful connection of existing assets like space, artisans, and community organizations, New Leaf is already reimagining what is possible on that critical hyper-local scale within close-knit neighborhoods and tribes. We’re redefining the reach that a neighborhood organization that exists to tell stories can have. And we invite you to add your voice to our process, and benefit from our thoughts, action, and creative force in your vision.

YOUR NEED

You have goals for yourself or your organization. There are challenges – roadblocks, a lack of resources, a lack of energy or a lack of focus, a lack of cooperation and common initiative. People get in each others’ way or they don’t share a common understanding or even language. And in our neighborhoods (even in Lincoln Park, where New Leaf makes our home), our history is being forgotten as the tension grows between the old and the new.

There is opportunity to build stronger connections among any group of people that learns from our shared past. We can tell stories that bring us together, even as the pace of our active lives tries to pull us further apart and isolate us.

This is where a partnership with an artistic organization that looks at the world through a different set of lenses can help. This is where the value of a local artist really lives – in the way that they carefully and creatively whittle away the piece of wood you don’t need, leaving only the part you do. They see the things that distract us from getting the broader message, and they reshape images and colors and sounds into greater clarity. In a world and society that prioritizes and measures financial profit, the artist prioritizes and measures the full experience of life, beauty, and understanding. They package intellectual messages into emotional experiences that allow us to internalize, to feel, to dream through our daily challenges in new ways. Artists team up with us to help process and shape our experience of the world.

OUR NEED

For nearly ten years, New Leaf has focused on honing our abilities to do the job of an artist really, really well. That process doesn’t ever end, but we’ve seen our successes become more consistent and the careers of our artists blossom in incredible ways in the last three years. The amazing thing is, in all that time of prioritizing the development of our body of work and the honing of our process, how close New Leaf really is to financial sustainability. In a recent company meeting, we put our heads together and drafted a financial picture of what an ideal New Leaf season budget would look like. We estimated the total, pie-in-the-sky amount of funding we would need as a company to provide solid, sustainable compensation for our artists and management in order to retain rich relationships with audience, partners, and artists. The total is a goal that surprised us in how reachable it is: $56,000. That’s it. That number still puts New Leaf as one of the smallest budgets in town, but it vastly increases New Leaf’s capacity for communication, transparency, and most importantly supporting the long-term development of a vital and permanent artistic community that is vitally connected with the entire community. We’ve already proven that New Leaf knows how to make a little go a very long way. With New Leaf’s commitment to conceptual efficiency that revitalizes found spaces, that small amount of money allows us to provide artists with compensation that matches that of theaters many times our size, and helps New Leaf become a part of an artist’s reason for staying in Chicago.

We discovered another thing about ourselves in that meeting: We don’t want to grow in size, we want to grow in scope. We love and indeed depend on the intimate diamond-in-the-rough nature of our stagings, and the unique environments we craft out of spaces like the Lincoln Park Cultural Center. That relationship with space, more than anything else, is our identity, and we don’t want to change it. Growth at too fast a rate would change our potential for sustainability. Where we would like to grow: we want to keep our artists around and help develop their careers and their work for another ten years, and we want to use those valuable artistic sensibilities and active audience participation in the artistic process to effect some real, tangible improvement and renewed connection in our community.

THE SOLUTION

Here’s where it gets good, folks. Clap your hands and rub them together. Since New Leaf is committed to working on that small, handcrafted scale, we’re therefore looking for a limited number of partners – 20, to be exact – who are passionate about our work and whose work we are also passionate about. At two levels of partnership, New Leaf will collaborate with our donors on projects initiatied by both New Leaf and donors. We want to get to know you, get to know what you trying to accomplish in your lives and in your communities, and to explore new and potentially unconventional ways of collaborating to craft tailored benefit experiences for each donor that use those shared goals as a starting point.

For $50 each month we will offer standard membership or subscriber fare, such as gifts and tickets to all our performances (which, after all, remain the core of what we do and what we create) but we will also offer unprecedented access to our artists and artistic processes, which have a range of capabilities that go far beyond the production of shows. We will shape opportunities for our members to learn or utilize the skills of our artists in their own work, and create lasting and valuable relationships from those opportunities.

At a higher level of a one-time gift of $5000, we will also offer the opportunity for a New Leaf-curated event for your organization (we plan a mean brunch), discounts for your friends to allow you to share (and, sure, show off) the theater that you helped create, and a gift tailored to your interests and passions.

You may read this and say: “Wow. If I had some money, I would do that. But I don’t.” See, that’s cool. The fact is, theater is still for everyone, and we’d be silly to think that these donors would come from our current blog readership. On the other hand, If we’ve learned nothing else in the past ten years, it’s that all the money in the world is not nearly as valuable as the connections and friendships and partnerships you forge.

So we need just a little bit of your help, to get in touch with the folks you know who you would like to share a New Leaf experience with. If you refer someone to New Leaf who becomes a member, we’ll be thankful that it was you who brought them in. And we’ll give you season tickets to our performances as long as your friend stays a member to show that appreciation. Just send us an email at newleaf@newleaftheatre.org with their contact info, and introduce us. We’ve got an invitation and some goodies to mail to them to get the process started.

It’s a new decade. We can do this, and more. Together.

You can download the full length play on our podcast.

Our next Treehouse is this Saturday at 1 pm at 2045 N. Lincoln Park West: Leocadia, directed by Jack Tamburri of the Plagiarists. As Leocadia is being licensed for this one-day performance, the only way to catch that reading will be in person… Unless you know a couple generous donors who can help us raise $150 to pay for podcasting rights for the performance (it’s tax deductible!).

So, we hope to see you there. In the meantime, here’s a few scenes from BRUTAL SELFISH RATTLESNAKE featuring Dan Stermer’s staging.

Listen to the full podcast below!

Jess & Bilal before our first-ever New Leaf talk-back on November 5th

Wow.

Just – wow.

It’s the Wednesday before our penultimate weekend of The Man Who Was Thursday and “wow” is about all the articulateness I can muster.  I’ve gotten TWO e-mails today from Marni, our intrepid box office manager, with updates about our rapidly dwindling ticket availability for this weekend.

UPDATE – I just got a third e-mail from Marni.  We’re sold out.  For the run. You can e-mail her at tickets@newleaftheatre.org to get put on the wait list for any evening.  Wow.

We’ve upped the number of folks we’ll seat per performance (twice? three times?).  We had our first-ever post-show discussion at Rocco’s last Thursday – which was outstandingly attended and a whole lot of fun.  Our ensemble of 10 delightful men  is continuing to discover and grow and crack each other up and keep one another out past their bedtimes.

I’m proud of my company, this play, this production – and I’m also excited that it’s giving us a momentum-based push in the direction of thinking about things in the long term.

Those of you who’ve already joined us for Thursday know that our space is a major player in the experience of this show.  And those of you who know our company know that we have been born and raised in that space, the Lincoln Park Cultural Center -  our home.  In fact, we wouldn’t exist without this space and the courage and care of its manager Cythia Jahraus.  She created the one-act play competition that brought our founders together, and then invited them to be the company in residence, back at the beginning of this decade we’ll be closing out in the next few months.

Working in a non-traditional space has forged who we are as a company.  It’s taught us discipline and brought out our creativity.  Working in the midst of a bustling community center shaped us as we refined our vision to look toward – together with our audiences -  remembering a piece of our shared humanity.  But as much as I love it – it’s little.  And sometimes it keeps us from showing our work to all the people who might like to see it.  (Believe me, of the myriad problems we could be having right now, I choose this one – but it’s still something that merits thinking about).

So even as I take this exciting (crazy exciting – we’re sold out for the rest of the run? what?!) time to celebrate where we’ve been and where we are, I’m also keeping all these facts about where we’ve been in mind as we look toward the future.  We recently had a great company meeting where we were able to more clearly articulate what it is we do.  We re-imagine.  That’s what we’ve been doing in our space since the beginning.  With each show we re-imagine our physical boundaries and our relationship to the audience and what we think is possible on a modest production budget.  I want us to continue to re-imagine as we continue to learn and grow.  I’m eager for the day when we’re still working in our home base at the LPCC, but also exploring other larger non-traditional performance spaces.  What would a New Leaf show look like in the grand high-ceilinged terminal of Union Station?  What about the public open spaces in Millennium Park?  Rather than taking our show to a space like the Chopin or the Greenhouse or another rental house, how can we keep re-imagining the definition of performance space?  How can our civic engagement bring people to us and take us to the people?

Where else?  What’s a space you’d like to see “New Leafed?”  What would you like to see us do there?

We’re also looking ahead to re-imagining our business practices.  We have two exciting new additions to our Board (I can’t wait to introduce them to you).  We’re talking about how to let the inspiration bubbling out from folks like this and this influence our next steps into fundraising and sustainable business practices (and I can’t wait to tell you about that).

So – wow.  Just.  Wow.  Here we are.  And here we go.