Dennis Bigelow, boards of directors and the death experience of Portland Repertory Theatre

Dennis Bigelow directed The Miser in Portland in 1988./Set+photo: Carey Wong

By Barry Johnson

Yesterday in discussing the Intiman Theatre situation, I mentioned the closing of Portland Repertory Theatre in 1998, the last time a professional Portland theater company closed its doors for good.

Portland Rep was the second largest theater company in the city when it closed, one of two fully professional, Equity houses, after Portland Center Stage. It had a long, strange history, beginning as the Mark Allen Players with a penchant for Neil Simon comedies and gradually evolving, after Allen left,  into a sharp, urban company that produced excellent versions of recent New York hits.

When it closed, its artistic director was the late Dennis Bigelow, whose life in the theater is a cautionary tale: Mommas don't let your babies grow up to be theater people. Bigelow came to Portland Rep to pick up the financial pieces after its previous artistic director Geoffrey Sherman ran up big deficits in an attempt to force the board to match its rhetoric about wanting a national class company with a much more significant fundraising effort than it mustered. Sherman escaped left for Meadow Brook Theatre in Michigan, and Bigelow's careful stewardship began.

UPDATE: I received the following email from Geoffrey Sherman disputing this brief account of his tenure.

Alas, I did *not* run deficits at Portland Rep to challenge the board or anyone else. I was made producing artistic director and was able to get my head around the accounting methods used up to that time, I discovered that the theatre had been capitalizing props, sets, costumes, furniture etc., thus, I am sure inadvertently, overstating the positive side of the balance sheet by many thousands of dollars. I checked with several managing directors at other theatres to discover that none of them used this form of accounting.


This discovery meant that Portland Rep. was suddenly running a sizeable deficit, without any help from me! These *facts* were shared with the board of directors at that time.


It should also be noted that I was totally committed to the company, even building our experimental theatre with my own hands (and that of a willing staff) to try to encourage the board to move the entire operation to our warehouse in the NW to capitalize on what I thought would be major development of the area.


I therefore find the notion of ‘escaping’ to my next job insulting. Since you published your erroneous remarks without attempting to contact me, I would be grateful for an immediate retraction, before I am forced to seek legal redress.

I apologize for any insult perceived by Geoffrey Sherman, and I can see how he saw one in the word "escape," which I have "neutralized" above. I remember Sherman himself telling me that he wanted the board to step up to the financial responsibilities that being a national class theater entailed. Only the books from the time would help us understand what exactly happened with the company's deficit during Sherman's tenure, which the staff and board said was around $500,000 when Bigelow took over.  I have no reason to believe that Sherman ever had anything but the best interests of the theater at heart. 

Bigelow was on his way toward a successful turnaround (in my opinion), when the board decided to pull the plug on the company in the middle of a show.  They said it was a prudent financial decision; most of us looking at the situation from the outside thought they'd just lost their nerve, because the problems the company was having had to do with cash flow not its underlying health, which though precarious, wasn't dire.

Bigelow asked to meet with me after the board decided to close the theater.

Looking for scapegoats at Intiman

Last Intiman show? Chuck Cooper in "All My Sons"

By Barry Johnson

I did some hunting and pecking for news on Intiman Theatre this morning and found something useful by Jose Amador at the Seattest website.

Amador took his text from the comments section of a post on the Seattle Stranger's blog, specifically one by the former artistic director of Seattle Empty Space theater company, Allison Narver. That comment is provocative at the very least. It starts: "I am so fucking sick of Arts Boards that don't know what the hell they're doing."

She was talking about the decision by the board of Seattle Giant Magnet children's theater festival to make this year's festival its last, but then she tore into Intiman's board, too. "Shame on The Intiman Board as well. Blaming Brian C. [Colburn, Intiman's former managing director] for the theater's misfortunes shows what a chicken-shit, lame, ignorant bunch they are." And then:  "I'm sick of seeing worthy arts organizations (ConWorks, The Empty Space, Giant Magnet to name a few) close because of weak, scared, arrogant and/or inexperienced Boards."

This attack resonated with Amador: "Narver once again bluntly echoes some of what skeptics have been saying since the news of Intiman's fiscal woes came to light. What makes the statement stick is the fact that the Board has not been, and likely will not ever be, forthcoming about exactly what happened at Intiman." He also accused Intiman's board of scapegoating Colburn and neglecting its own duties, and vowed to take up Narver's call for deeper discussions of "non-profit governance and the relevance of arts organizations."

The Philadelphia Orchestra and the changing financial model for symphonies

By Barry Johnson

As I browsed the half-dozen or so classical music sites I frequent, I half-way expected to find lots of blog posts about the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy situation. I didn't. Maybe it's too early. Maybe the bloggers think it's a "local" problem.  And the issues involved are complicated -- most of us glaze over at phrases such as "pension fund obligations" -- and the data is scarce, as we pointed out yesterday.

Classical music provocateur Greg Sandow didn't do an extensive analysis of the Philadelphia crisis on his blog, but he did place it in a larger context, the one he's been describing for the past few years. Sandow believes in the Le Poisson Rouge approach to preserving classical music, meaning that musicians and the institutions they play for need to figure out ways to enter the worlds of the people they aren't reaching now.

Le Poisson Rouge is a New York City club that mixes modern classical music, jazz, indie rock, performance art and almost anything else as long as it has an avant edge. It has proven to be very popular and helped to develop a new generation of art music composers (think Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, David Lang). Sandow thinks the future of classical music is in the hands of clubs of this sort, because how else will we breach the wall between Gen Y and classical music?

Gus Van Sant and William S. Burroughs explain Doing Easy

By Barry Johnson

Via Open Culture, I watched this Gus Van Sant short film from 1982. It "illustrates" a short story/essay by William S. Burroughs, The Discipline of D.E.  The D.E. stands for "Doing Easy," which is following an efficient, smooth path through the universe. This sounds cosmological, but the movie teaches us how to get through our day without bumping into things or spilling, so, yes, the cosmos in a drop of water.



“How fast can you take your time, kid?”

Intiman Theatre, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the issue of transparency

The venerable Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy.

By Barry Johnson

The news over the weekend was grim, confusing and bi-coastal. The mighty Philadelphia Orchestra filed for  bankruptcy, though it has an endowment of $116 million. And Intiman Theatre in Seattle closed its doors for the rest of its season, though it successfully reached it Phase One $500,000 emergency fund-raising goal a couple of weeks ago.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has threatened this course for a while, but Intiman's decision came as a surprise. Still, what was missing from both organizations, both the mighty and the small, was the degree of transparency about their operations that would give potential donors confidence to contribute to them yet again.

At the end of the day, didn't they owe the public better numbers and better explanations than they gave us?

Weekend reviews: Men dancing at White Bird, drama in the quartet at Portland Center Stage

Matthew Boston and Chris Coleman in Michael Hollinger's Opus/Photo:Owen Carey

By Barry Johnson

Just about every putative Portland "Spring," your correspondent falls prey to one germ or another. Nothing serious, mind you, just enough to be a nuisance in the various ways that colds/mild flues can be. I even pretend nothing is wrong some evenings and head out into the drizzle to see something. This week, for example, I saw Yossi Berg and Oded Graf's zesty dance concert at the Alberta Rose Theatre, the historic home opener of the Portland Timbers and opening night of Portland Center Stage's Opus, which included the company's artistic director Chris Coleman in the cast.

I didn't want to miss any of them, but on the other hand, writing about them the next day was impossible. My head would start to hurt and sentences vanished before I could get them typed. Then I'd have to cough for a bit.  Or something.

Back to business.  Writing about a concert or play a few days later isn't the best plan, at least not for me, but that's what I'm going to do. The benefit to you is that everything will be a little shorter! And because this isn't a sports blog, I won't be writing about the Timbers game, though I have a rocking analysis of the game, if you want to hear it when we meet...