One of Brooklyn's Finest Theaters Faces The Abyss

I wrote last fall about an Ugly Rhino production at the Brooklyn Lyceum, a onetime public bathhouse on Fourth Avenue, in Park Slope.​ The last performances of that play—a Halloween spectacular complete with booze, dancing and 1970's sleaze—were cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Now, the theater itself faces something far more daunting: bankruptcy.

For the last few weeks, theater owner Eric Richmond has been proclaiming doom. After more than two decades of ownership, he has run into serious debt, and could be foreclosed upon as early as this month. I live around the corner from the theater, and thought of seeing it go dark makes my heart hurt. God knows how Richmond must feel.

In a February memo to supporters, he wrote that the Lyceum, "has always been a work in progress."

The fees from rentals and admission barely covered the cost of basic maintenance and the electricity to run the building.  All the infrastructure work—including the creation of new theater spaces—came out of sweat equity or cash raised from the mortgage. (That of course is part of the legal dispute.)

My goal was to make this tremendous hulk of a space available to striving artists. Many people have appreciated the Lyceum’s roughhewn beauty. Some wanted a more polished space, but that is kind of a Catch-22: maybe that desired space would not be affordable.  We were/are a big wreck of a building that gets better each year.

That wreck could be facing the wrecking ball. Well, not literally—you can't just go around tearing down landmarked buildings. But the space's future as a theater is in doubt. Richmond warns of a culture lover's worst case scenario: that the grandest theater south of Flatbush could be converted to condos or, worse, a Duane Reade.

Tonight came an update, and it is no more rosy. Richmond writes:​

The Lyceum is not closing. The Lyceum, however, is fighting for its very existence. What got us here is subject to much speculation.

Our  current financial problems result largely (but not exclusively) from  legal battles with our former architect, Jean G. Miele, regarding a development deal that encompassed the Lyceum, the lot next door and the development rights shared by both properties. We believe we're victims of price gouging: up to $800,000 in questionable expenses that frustrated our ability to complete the deal and led to our predicament.

Richmond writes with passion, but not clarity. His message has the intensity of someone whose legal troubles have made him an amateur lawyer against his will. I'm not really sure what's going on at the Lyceum, but it doesn't sound good. I hope Richmond is exaggerating, but my gut tells me he's not. I'm going to start looking into it tomorrow. I'll let you know if I learn anything interesting. 

For Coney Island's Mayor, A Long, Ugly Winter

Since November, I've been working on a long feature for Narratively about Dick Zigun, self-proclaimed "mayor of Coney Island," and his arts group, Coney Island USA. Best known as the man who invented the Mermaid Parade, Zigun is a charismatic, bombastic and occasionally divisive figure whose life's work was mangled by Hurricane Sandy. I was turned on to the story by Ginny Louloudes, of ART/NY, and spent the next few months hanging around the Boardwalk, interviewing artists, and devouring the unbelievably readable Coney Island: Lost And Found.

Want the lede? I'll give it to you for free. The rest of it, well, you can get that for free too.

Dick Zigun was ready for a two-foot flood. In three decades at Coney Island, every hurricane he had seen blew through like a tourist passing the boardwalk on its way up the coast—and he was not afraid of Sandy. Rather than evacuate, he spent the night at home on West Fifteenth Street, a few blocks from the water, his pick-up parked outside in case of emergency. By the time he realized emergency was here, it was too late to run.

“When the flood came, it came fast,” says Zigun. “When I saw water pouring in under the door, over the sandbags, the water was already knee-high in the street.”

Fearing the flood might knock him over, he waded across the road to take shelter in a friend’s second-story apartment. From the second floor, they watched the water—three feet high and rising. Four. Five.

Dick Zigun, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Coney Island”

When the tide ebbed after midnight, Zigun, a grizzled fifty-nine year-old, went home to grab something he’d forgotten in his hurry: his cat. He found Buddy floating on his mattress, safe and dry, but “a little freaked out.”

“He saved my expensive goose down comforter,” Zigun says. “He had gathered it up around him, so it wasn’t soaking wet, and he was warm. I grabbed the cat, grabbed my prescription medicine, grabbed my iPhone charger—you know, the essentials of life.”

For a moment, Zigun wasn’t thinking about Coney Island USA, the arts organization, sideshow and museum he founded in 1980. Since then, he has thought of nothing else. Long one of the most visible artists in South Brooklyn, the self-proclaimed “mayor of Coney Island” rules from Surf Avenue, where he has turned a ninety-five year-old restaurant building into the artistic heart of the amusement district. But since the storm, where once stood a bar, a theater and an ice cream parlor, nothing remains but “a big fucking mess.”

At 3,700 words, the resultant story is the longest journalism thing I've ever written, and I think it's turned out pretty well. (The second-longest was the time I spent two weeks pretending to know enough about the legal system to cover a very colorful court battle in Long Island. It sneaked onto the cover of the Observer because it happened to run the week the editor in chief got fired. Timing is everything!)

The pictures above don't have anything to do with the story, but I took them a couple of weeks ago, on my last day doing interviews at Coney. The one of the guy with the metal detector makes me so happy, you can't even imagine.

Have I mentioned lately how hungry I am for summer? I've been checking this website so often, it might as well be my homepage.

Horse Trade Prepares to Say Goodbye to The Red Room

Theater folks from the Bowery to Avenue B were saddened last week at the news that the Red Room, a black box theater on Fourth Street, will be closing after more than a decade serving the needs of theatrical madmen across New York City. Today, Astor Place Riot spoke to Heidi Grumelot, head of artistic development at Horse Trade Theater, which operates out of the Red Room and the neighboring Kraine and Under St. Marks theaters, about the space's past and her theater's future. 

Why is the Red Room going away?

We've been renegotiating our lease since the beginning of January, and our landlord has told us that he wants to repurpose the Red Room space into something besides a theater. We're retaining the Kraine and Under St. Marks, but starting April 1, he's going to be using the Red Room for his own purposes. In response, we're doing a crazy thing called Blaze of Glory to give it a proper send-off. I just sent out an email to all of our past and current residents who've done meaningful work in the Red Room, and within three days I've gotten together an incredible list of performances for March.

I know how important the development work you do in the Red Room is to you—how are you going to replace the space?

We're looking. We're just looking. We've gone to see a few spaces already. Nothing's developed yet. We're definitely serious about where we can continue to afford to do this work. If anybody has space—and I know how silly it sounds to ask that in New York—we're on the hunt right now.

Are you going to stay in the neighborhood?

We've talked about different opportunities uptown or in Brooklyn, but when you think about it, this is where we've always been.

Did your landlord give you any indication why he wants to repurpose the Red Room? Is it just that he wants something more profitable than a Black Box in there?

I think that's the plan. The rent that we're paying is staying the same, but we're down one space. He's trying to get another source of revenue in there.

To put it bluntly, that sucks. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're calling this Blaze of Glory because this room has so much history. Amazing and beautiful stuff has happened there. Suzan Lori Parks came and did this underground thing, Watch Me Work, which later moved to the Public. Lots of film screenings have happened with celebrities and other notable people. My understanding is that some of the people at UCB, like Asssscat, started at the Red Room. RadioTheatre, all these artists. 

It's such a warm space, it's so flexible, it's so intimate, and it's small enough that you can afford to experiment in ways that you really can't in a 99 seat theater. The thing that I've been thinking about since we found out about this is the impact of one little room and what that can do for a community, and just thinking about all the amazing things that have started there. You have to have a room to start stuff.

And there just aren't enough really small, affordable black box spaces, especially in the Village.

I know! The neighborhood is getting a little fancy.

Is this going to be a major financial hit for you?

It's definitely a bit of a hit, yeah. After the trouble we had with Under St. Marks a couple of years ago, it's been clear that you just have to have your own space. Horse Trade has always operated a little different from other theaters around town. We've been successful in sustaining ourselves only on rentals and box office, so losing the Red Room will have real financial impact. But we're launching a new nonprofit called HT Presents, and we have eyes on the future. We have a game plan to build something that isn't at the mercy of the ten year lease cycle of New York City real estate. 

What's the plan for the next few months?

The plan is the Kraine and Under St. Marks for now, and everybody should come hang out at the Red Room between now and April. Come and enjoy it while it's still here!

Heartbreak On Fourth Street: The End of The Red Room

Word got around this week that the Red Room, a small "black box like space" owned by the Horse Trade Theater Company, will be closing in March. A press release is due out today or tomorrow, but in the meantime I have this statement from PR whiz kid Emily Owens, who reps Horse Trade:

Horse Trade's landlord at 85 East 4th Street has decided to repurpose The Red Room, and it will no longer be a performing arts space. I believe he plans to turn it into some type of B&B. Horse Trade will continue to operate out of The Kraine Theater and UNDER St. Marks, and they're currently searching for a venue to replace The Red Room. Everybody at Horse Trade is sad to lose a space they've operated out of for 15 years, but excited for the possibilities the future holds.

The Red Room was a tiny space—the kind that New York doesn't have enough of. With 32 stackable seats and a 14'x20' stage, it was about as small as a venue can get without being a living room. It was ideal for truly out-there theater, a hold-out for the Weird in an East Village that has gotten far too normal. Tiny black box spaces are the bedrock of theatrical art in New York City. They are intimate, convenient and, most importantly, affordable. There should be one on every corner. I'm sorry that, come March, there will be one less.

I'm speaking to Horse Trade's Heidi Grumelot next week. I'll let you know what she has to say about that "future" thing she's so looking forward to. Flying cars, perhaps?

How The Bushwick Starr Kept The Blood Play Flowing

In searching for the effect that Hurricane Sandy has had on local theaters, I've concentrated on those in the path of the storm—near the coast, or in the part of Manhattan that lost power last week. But the storm had other ways of messing with us. Today I spoke to Noel Allain, co-founder and artistic director of the Bushwick Starr, which was wrapping up a critically lauded run of The Debate Society's Blood Play when Sandy came to town. Cut the L train, and Bushwick becomes an island. Did the Starr's audience bridge the gap?

How have things been at the Starr?

Things are good. The L train is back up now. We had a show Monday and Wednesday the week of the storm, and obviously cancelled the show Monday. When everyone started to see how badly the city was being affected, and that the trains were not going to be back up any time soon, we canceled the show Wednesday, and were afraid that was it for the last week of the show. We were pretty disappointed, obviously, but on Thursday we had a conversation about it and looked at the list of ticketholders and said, Hey! Most of these people live in Brooklyn!

We wrote the list, and asked everyone—if we go ahead with the show, will you come? They said they'd be there, and we had a full house. People walked from Carroll Gardens. It was very heartening, especially after everything that had happened for the past few days, to see this support, this enthusiasm, for the show, for coming to the theater. At that point, I felt, oh—this is filling a need.

When we saw that, we decided to have the show the rest of the weekend, and they were all full. Even without the train, we had a great turnout.

Is most of your audience local to Bushwick? Or do people trek in?

They trek in. We're still working on building an audience in the immediate area. The crowd here is mostly visual art, music, parties. You say, oh, come see a play, and they look at you like, oh, why would I do that? It takes time to get people to show up.

What about your cast and crew? Did they have trouble making it in without the L?

They banded together; they found creative solutions. Some people live in Inwood. Our stage manager Liz is in Long Island, and drives in, so that whole week she stayed with the director of the show in Brooklyn. Everyone was under such duress, their lives were already turned upside down, that making the show happen was a welcome challenge. 

Until recently, I lived in Williamsburg and my girlfriend lived in Bushwick, and I got used to the L train going out for whole weekends at a time. Are you used to dealing with the L train vanishing?

We're used to living in fear. Shutting it down on the weekends—there's so much weekend business on the L train, it's like, are you fucking kidding me? Knock on wood right now, they've changed things up a little bit, probably because of that public outcry, and started doing work weeknights after 11. On a weeknight, people aren't gonna be staying out all night anyway. I hope they keep that up.

Those shuttle buses were part of why I left Williamsburg.

How can they think they can replace the whole L train with one little shuttle bus? Living where I am, the shuttles actually worked, because they would be empty when you got on. But once it got to the Graham stop, to the Lorimer stop, just forget about it. I just started walking. 

Did you get nervous seeing those pictures of the L tunnels completely flooded? 

I thought, oh God. How long is this gonna take? When it started running again, God, I felt like a king! Like, the world is open to me! The last couple weeks, you got, more than ever before, a sense of the delicate ecosystem that a city like New York runs on. It was scary. Hopefully, a little bit of a wake-up call to the people who organize this city.

People organize this city?

Somebody does, right? Somebody call those people!

In Queens, Storms Stymie A Parkside Theater

Snow fell on Jamaica last night, and the Black Spectrum Theatre was dark, as it has been ever since Sandy first lapped at the beaches of Long Island. The theater did not flood and its power did not fail, but this local landmark sits on park land, and the one-two punch of hurricane and nor'easter means the parks of Jamaica remain closed. 

"It's snowing, you know. Winds are picking up," said Carl Clay last night. "This cuts right in the middle of our workweek."

Filmmaker, producer and writer, Clay founded the theater in 1970. Originally a traveling troop, the company settled down in 1986, to occupy a purpose-built 325-seat theater in Roy Wilkins Park, not far from the heart of Jamaica. Since its beginning, Black Spectrum has showcased the work of emerging and established black artists, reaching out into the underserved local schools to do so. This is the mission statement of dozens of community-based theaters across New York City, but few such like-minded groups have been successful enough to find a permanent home.

Since Sandy's first approach forced the city to close its parks, Black Spectrum's plum location has become an albatross. The pair of storms have forced more than a week of cancellations—abruptly ending the run of Bubba's Fish Market and upending the planned world premiere of Dumas, which was slated for a four day run that has now been pushed back to February.

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Black Spectrum's parkside home, the morning after the snowstorm.

"While we weren't flooded and no trees fell on our facility," Clay said, "we were hit in in another kind of way, which was just as damaging. With the loss of revenue for these productions that we've put money into and are now unable to recoup right now, it does mess with our cash flow, and our entire schedule."

Like many community-based theaters, a large chunk of Black Spectrum's revenue comes from doing programs in public schools. But ongoing disputes between mayor and teacher's union have held back funds for that kind of programming, forcing the theater to postpone the start of its in-school season to, at the earliest, January. With the loss of that funding, this half of the season was totally dependent on box office revenue that is now not coming in.

"This is literally the beginning of our season, so we're energized, ready to go," Clay said. "It's a little frustrating! We're not defeated or anything like that, but it is damaging."

He and his staff know that things could be much worse. What for some arts groups was a tragedy, to Black Spectrum is a frustration. Although their fall season has been turned upside down, the winds did no damage to the theater's brand new, $100,000 electronic marquee, which is designed to give them visibility beyond the park. The lost revenue from the school programs and the shuttered box office will not cripple the company. After decades in the business, Clay is too cunning to let a storm sink Black Spectrum.

"We're in our 43rd year of operation," he said, "so we know how to prepare. 

A Recipe For The Stranded: Bake, Bake, Worry, Bake

Outside the Magic Futurebox the day after Sandy—desolate but dry. 

Magic Futurebox sits in a warehouse in Sunset Park, half a block from Gowanus Bay and a short walk from some of the worst-flooded areas of Red Hook. During Monday night's hurricane, artistic director Suzan Eraslan sat in her apartment in Harlem, nervously scanning reports that a warehouse in their neighborhood had flooded and caught fire. To cope with the fear that it was their warehouse that had gone underwater, she continued to prepare for an upcoming production that was suddenly in doubt, altering costumes and baking furiously.

"I baked a lot of cookies," she said this weekend. "And yeah, I was nervous. I kept having this horrible feeling that everything was ruined by flooding or looting or that we'd forgotten to shut things down."

The cookies, whose recipe she eventually perfected, were intended to be given out during Bloody Lullabies for Brave Women, an "abortion fairytale" whose five-show run will benefit the New York Abortion Access Fund. Unable to travel from Harlem to Sunset Park, Eraslan and her co-artistic director Kevin Laibson had to wait until Wednesday to learn their theater's fate. 

"We worked as much as possible to keep from freaking out," said Laibson. "I was nervous about what the fallout would be for the show, but I was downright scared about whether we would still have a theater."

The damaged warehouse was not theirs. The Futurebox was safe. Originally intended to run just before the election, Bloody Lullabies has been postponed a week, and will now open on November 7th. Their tech week lost, Laibson and Eraslan will proceed with a "pretty bare-bones production."

"Our lighting designer is still stuck in New Jersey," said Laibson, "and our set designer is still without power and dealing with flood damage, so the director and I are here building the set and wiring some floodlights."

Because the show is a benefit, all the labor has been volunteered, and Laibson is wary of asking his crew to push themselves for unpaid work "until they can do so without incident." But because the storm has forced the shutdown of another of women's health clinics, he's hoping that Bloody Lullabies can draw enough of an audience to make a difference. 

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.