And what joy there has been.  Saying goodbye will not be easy.  But it’s time to do just that.

With equal parts joy and sadness, we are announcing that our current production of James Saunder’sA SCENT OF FLOWERS will be the final story you hear from our stage.  On August 25th, the curtain will fall on the final act of A SCENT OF FLOWERS, and on the final moment of BackStage Theatre Company.

The sadness comes from acknowledging the realities of a treasured organization whose lifespan has come to an end.  We will deeply miss the opportunity to engage with you, our extended family of friends, patrons, supporters and fans and to surprise and challenge you with our stories. Our engagement with you was central to the stories we told, and we will sorely miss the opportunity to talk with you about them in the years to come.

But there is joy in the announcement, too.  Twelve years is a happy life in the scope of any small arts organization.  We can say with real conviction that we spent those twelve years telling stories that were never easy, rarely familiar, and were always challenging and meaningful to our artists and our audiences.

Consider this sampling of BackStage stories … THE MISANTHROPE, TERRA NOVA, ARSENIC & OLD LACE, DENISE DRUCZWESKI’S INFERNO, THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, BLOODY BESS, MEDEA, WAITING FOR LEFTY, HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE, THE MEMORY OF WATER, ON AN AVERAGE DAY, ME THE DEVIL & OTHER FRIENDS, AUNT DAN & LEMON, ORANGE FLOWER WATER, THE PLAY ABOUT THE BABY, THREE DAYS OF RAIN, MEMORY, A NUMBER, and now A SCENT OF FLOWERS.  This is a list of stories to be deeply proud of.  And through telling them all, we met you.  And you stuck with us until the very end, and for that we will be forever grateful.

There is also joy in the fact that A SCENT OF FLOWERS seems to be the perfect story to celebrate these twelve enlivening years.  The story of Zoe and her family is

deeply in line with our mission, our core values and our aesthetic.   It is an unknown play that we rediscovered, and brought to the midwest for the very first time.  It features a great many of our ensemble artists, many treasured guest artists and an eye-opening lead performance by an emerging young actress. It is one of our most expansive productions to date, yet it remains disarmingly intimate.  Within that 2 hours and 45 minutes are all the ideas, the artists, the stories and the values that we’ve been nurturing and developing over the past twelve seasons.  A SCENT OF FLOWERS is full of life and mystery, language and family … it is a risky show full of uncompromising theatricality and disconcerting intimacy, and as a final production for BackStage Theatre Company, it is a deeply felt and enlivening statement of who we are and who we tried to be.

A SCENT OF FLOWERS is the final production for BackStage Theatre Company, and it is currently running Thursdays – Sundays until August 25 at the Building Stage.  Come celebrate with us.

We want to say goodbye.

-Matthew Reeder, Artistic Director

On this particular day, my son had a hulking coffee table book of Hubble space images sprawled across the floor of the non-fiction section. As he looked at a two-fold spread of a picture of deep space, I casually glanced at the emaciated shelves of the “drama” section. I’d looked at those neglected shelves many times before, not that there was much to look at. There were perhaps two rows of old loosely stacked drama books, and they rarely featured anything other than a few copies of Neil Simon, Tennessee Williams and perhaps a few dog-eared copies of “Death of a Salesman.” So as my kid flipped the page of his book to a new photo of some nebula or other, I gave the playscripts a quick once-over.

Nothing much had changed. But squeezed in at the very end of the section, I noticed an ancient looking acting edition of a play I’d never heard of. I pulled it out and glanced casually at its cracked and fading cover: Next Time I’ll Sing To You, by James Saunders. Never heard of the play or the playwright. Flipping the thin book over, I read the synopsis that briefly outlined the story between the covers. It was apparently about a man who chose to leave his life and family behind for the life of a hermit. And apparently, it was based on the life of an actual person. It sounded mildly intriguing. I opened it, and glanced at the publishing date. 1962. My snobby contemporary sensibilities took over and began whispering don’t bother into my ear. But I had been working on selecting a BackStage season at that time, and I had recently run out of reading material. So I shrugged my shoulders and checked it out on impulse.

The script stayed in my bag for over a week. One night, after the kids were in bed, and my wife and I began to settle in for the night, I managed to remember the script in the bottom of my bag. I retrieved it, assembled myself under the covers and opened the script with a yawn of mild curiosity. As the dust of age fell on my bedcovers, I yawned and began to browse the first few scene . . . and was totally unprepared for what I found.

What I found was a deeply surprising, intensely inventive and lyrical piece of experimental theatre whose first few pages completely disarmed me. I closed the book once or twice, reading and re-reading the author’s name, looking for at least a hint of recognition. But none came. I couldn’t understand it. I should know who James Saunders is, I thought. This play was no one-off. This play felt vital and visionary and three decades ahead of its time. Halfway through this sucker-punch of a play, I turned wide-eyed to my wife and said “I’ve never read anything like this.”

Whoever this James Saunders was, he was working on par with some of the great theatre experimenters; Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, Genet, Pinter … but somehow, Saunders was different. As in the plays of the aforementioned authors, there was deep narrative and conceptual innovation in this play, but unlike the same authors, there was hot blood pumping from a heart that seems to be notably absent from the great works of so many of these playwrights. Despite their dramatic and literary significance, the bleak worldview of these “Absurdist” playwrights has been a lifelong turnoff for me, both as an artist and a human being. But Saunders was doing something different. If Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and (to a lesser degree) Pinter seemed to build their plays around the idea of the futility (“absurdity”) of life, Saunders had written a play about the devastating beauty and wonderful sadness at the center of living. Saunders play was sad, yes, but it was also funny and very much alive. In Saunders’ play, being human was equal parts ecstatic love and contemplative melancholy. This passage, spoken by the Hermit, says it all:

“There lies behind everything, and you can believe this or not as you wish, a certain quality which we may call grief. It’s always there, just under the surface, just behind the façade, sometimes very nearly exposed, so that you can dimly see the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental pond on a still day, the dark, gross, inhuman outline of a carp gliding slowly past; when you realize suddenly that the carp were always there below the surface, even while the water sparkled in the sunshine, and while you patronized the quaint ducks and the supercilious swans, the carp were down there, unseen. It bides its time, this quality. And if you do catch a glimpse of it, you may pretend not to notice or you may turn suddenly away and romp with your children on the grass, laughing for no reason. The name of this quality is grief.”

* * *

Despite my enthusiasm for Sing To You, it didn’t take me long to realize that the story of this particular play was not exactly right for a BackStage Theatre Company season. But in my enthusiasm I was convinced I had made a re-discovery of some long-forgotten playwright, so I ordered as many of Saunders’ scripts as I could from the libraries around the area, to see if he had written something that was even remotely as exciting as Sing To You, one that we could sandwich into our company mission of “the exploration of family.” Not exactly piled on library shelves, a few of Saunders’ titles trickled in, all possessing the same transporting mix of invention, lyricism and humanity. Finally, A Scent of Flowers arrived. I read it once, and knew I had found exactly what I was looking for. A Scent of Flowers was both similar and notably different than Next Time I’ll Sing To You. While the story of Sing To You was written in widescreen (its scenic centerpiece was a huge, dilapidated theatre), Scent of Flowers was stunningly intimate. Traversing a funeral parlor, a church and a grave site, the family at the center of A Scent of Flowers is presented in disarming close-up. As Zoe and her family experience the premature death of a beloved family member, the entire journey of their lives, both internal and external, conscious and subconscious are examined in exquisite, lyrical detail. The play was both stunning in it’s scope and invention, yet searing in its intimacy. In short, I had found a perfect play for BackStage Theatre Company.

Here it is, over two years later and we are finally producing it. Yet, my puzzlement over the shade that is drawn around James Saunders continues to mystify me. Despite the fact that Next Time I’ll Sing To You helped launch the theatrical career of Michael Caine, despite the fact that the opening night of A Scent of Flowers earned a reported fifteen encore curtain calls, won the Evening Standard Award for promising new playwright, marked the West End debut of a very young Ian McKellan in his first ever award-winning acting role, despite the fact that Tom Stoppard claims that sitting in the audience for Next Time I’ll Sing To You was the singular transformative moment that made him want to write plays, despite the fact that if you look back far enough in time, you will read James Saunders name mentioned in obsolete articles about the Absurdist theatre movement . . . despite all of this, I have not come across a single person, theatre artist or otherwise, who knows who the hell James Saunders is. During the pursuit of two theatre degrees, I don’t recall ever seeing his name in a textbook, on a professor’s shelf or in a university library, and I never heard his name mentioned in a class. Researching the production history on A Scent of Flowers, there is little to no information that tells us that this playwright has had any meaningful introduction to American audiences. It is a mystery to me.

How did he fall by the wayside? We may never know. But what I do is this: we are bringing James Saunders to Chicago, and the story of Zoe’s journey through her own life is already in pre-production. We have assembled a crack team of designers who are already hard at work designing the strange world of this play, and we have a terrific cast of actors who are already privately getting to know these characters who have been silent for so long, actors who will begin to bring them to life in rehearsals that begin in less than four weeks.

Getting to this point has been a strange brew of happenstance, detective work and audacity. Working on an old play that no one knows about by a playwright that no one has heard about is not the safest of theatrical endeavors. I know this. But discovering (or rediscovering) a play and being dazzled by the potential and wonder of it, and transforming that dazzle into an ephemeral gift that we will hand to you when you walk into the Building Stage in July . . . in that joyful process of discovery, dazzle and giftgiving lie the purest example of why we do what we do.

That is what making theatre is all about.

Matthew Reeder

Artistic Director

Enter the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) Storefront Theater.  The DCA and it’s state-of-the-art yet flexible and intimate Storefront Theater seek to fill that very gap.  The mission of the DCA Storefront states that the “DCA Theater offers downtown audiences a unique opportunity to experience Chicago’s vibrant off-Loop theater scene by providing affordable ticket prices and an innovative look at the many diverse companies that call Chicago home.”

By providing this unique space, the Department of Cultural Affairs advocates the notion that the vibrant theatre scene in Chicago is so much more than the glitz of the beautiful new Loop theatres.  Of course, we at BackStage Theatre Company could not agree more!

So, it is with great excitement that I announce that BackStage Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere of Steven Levenson’s The Language of Trees, has been selected to be a part of the Fall 2012 season at the DCA Storefont Theatre!  We are thrilled to kick-off our 2012-2013 season in collaboration with the DCA.

From the DCA press release:

“We are excited to collaborate with these notable companies on what promises to be a diverse and exciting Fall 2012 Season,” said Nate Brandt, Director of Theater and Dance Programming, COTC. “DCA Theater brings audiences the best of Chicago’s local talent into the Loop at an affordable ticket price, while providing our theater companies the invaluable opportunity to produce in a state-of-the-art venue in downtown Chicago with no rental fees.”

So in November 2012, look for us in the Loop!  We can’t wait!

But until then, there is still a lot more to our present season!  Our next incarnation of The Listening Series is coming March 26th!  And our ambitious Midwest premiere of James Saunder’s poetic drama A Scent of Flowers opens in July at the Building Stage!  Hope to see you all there!

–Matthew

The same can be said about good criticism.  Theatre criticism (and art criticism in general) is often at the heart of some pretty contestable arguments, sometimes for strong intellectual reasons and sometimes because the artists clearly had their feelings hurt.  But in the long view, I think the most effective criticism is the kind that doesn’t tell its reader how to experience a play or a performance or work of art, but one that makes the reader think about what they saw (or will see) and finds a way to relate that experience to the everyday lives of the reader.   Good theatre criticism might pre-load the reader with a question that gives that reader a certain tool or insight that makes participation in the event they attend a bit more active.  Good criticism relates the importance of high standards in the art we claim as our own, and gives us the tools to understand why art is essential in our lives.

Like good theatre, good criticism asks good questions.

This weekend, we opened Caryl Churchill’s A NUMBER at the Building Stage.  As part of its given circumstances, Churchill’s play centers on the story of a father who has cloned his first born son.  In his review for the Chicago Tribune (a largely favorable review, I’ll admit) Chris Jones commented on something that has been ringing in my ears ever since.

” . . . one is struck anew by how much more comfortable we’ve become over the past decade with the intrusion of technology in human reproduction. I’d argue that we’re also now less worried — perhaps foolishly — that labs will suddenly start churning out folks for other folks to buy at Wal-Mart.  Thus “A Number” does not so much feel like a cutting-edge drama as almost a period piece. Which does not mean it is without interest or potency.”

Here is a moment of criticism that makes me think, that makes me start to ask questions not only about the world of our play, but about the greater world we live in.  We never approached the play as an examination of bioethics or as a morality tale about cloning.  It is and always has been a study of the dynamics of parental decisions and responsibility under extraordinary given circumstances (human cloning.)  But Jones raises a good question about an important aspect of the play that we may have taken for granted.

So let’s use the questions raised by good drama and good criticism and talk about this.  Is Jones right?  Are we really becoming less fearful of the idea of biologically engineered human beings?  Are we starting to let go of the notion that human cloning is “playing God?”

And if so, what does that say about us and the future of our most intimate relationships?

Next up, it’s our very own Tony Bozzuto.  Tony was last seen as Pip/Theo in last season’s acclaimed Three Days of Rain, as well as our Jeff nominated production of Memory.  Asked about how A Number speaks to him as an artist, he had this to say:

“Of course, I love Churchill as a writer, but I admire this one in particular.  I have had a complex relationship with my own father, so any story that explores that dynamic is of instant interest to me.  What’s great about A Number, is I get to attack that dynamic from three different perspectives.  Also, as crazy as Churchill’s story sounds, the core of it is something very real and tragic.  When it all comes down to it, she asks some very deep questions…What defines who we are? and Can we make up for past mistakes?” 

This is Tony’s second season as a full ensemble member, but our audiences have been seeing him on our stages for quite some time.  Before last season’s Three Days of Rain and Memory, Tony was seen in Orange Flower Water, and in received a Jeff Nomination for his acclaimed portrayal of Robert in On An Average Day. His forst production for BSTC was in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive.  For about seven years, Tony has been honored to work his way around the Chicago theatre scene with such talented companies as Lifeline Theatre, Next Theatre, Metropolis PAC among others.  Whether on stage, television or film, Tony credits much of his skills and successes to his studies at the incomparable Hilberry Theatre in Detroit, MI, where he received his MFA.

First up, our guest artist Patrick Blashill, who plays Salter.  Asked about how this play speaks to him as an artist, Patrick had this to say:

“This piece has so many layers to it, the challenge of the role is what initially intrigued me.  As a father, to be able to explore the darker side of parenting was both difficult and fun…being able to really experience the emotion of the play and then be able to go home and hug my children gave me strength and perspective that allowed me to really let loose.  The play is brilliant.  It is hard to read at first but once I found the rhythm, individual sections and beats took on new meaning and changed the meaning.  I’m still learning,  which says a lot about Caryl Churchill and her particular genius.  Working with Karen, Tony, and Jen has been a real treat…they all bring so much to the production and have helped me more than they’ll know.”

We are thrilled to have Patrick with us for our season opener.  Patrick has been an ensemble member with Lifeline Theatre since 1996 and has been performing at various Chicago theatre’s for the past 20 years. His favorite roles include the Father in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Old Bailey in Neverwhere, and Edgar Drake in The Piano Tuner (After Dark award for outstanding performance). Other favorite roles include Ferdinand the bull in The Story of Ferdinand, the Mighty Gorilla in The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (later remounted for Chicago Theatre on the Air with guest star Brent Spiner), Victor in Lizard Music, Hugh Thane in The Talisman Ring, Tom in Pistols for Two (Jeff citation nomination for Best Ensemble), and Bunter in Strong Poison (Jeff citation nomination for Best Ensemble). He is especially proud to have acted in all three books of Lifeline’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that spanned The Fellowship of the Ring (Bilbo Baggins-1997), The Two Towers (Frodo-2000), and The Return of the King (Frodo-2002). Patrick has worked with numerous other Chicago theatres (including an opportunity to play Mr. Knightley in Reverie Theatre’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma) including Victory Gardens, Organic Lab, Theatre on the Lake, Stage Left, and Shakespeare’s Motley Crew. Patrick is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Come see what Patrick’s artistry brings to A Number, opening this weekend at The Building Stage!

As the holidays approach, our 12th season officially gets underway!  Our first production, A Number, opens on January 7th at the Building Stage.  In anticipation of the opening of the BackStage Season, Development Director Celene Mielcarek sat down for a conversation with Artistic Director Matthew Reeder about what is in store for BackStage in the New Year and beyond.

As Artistic Director, what are you most looking forward to in BackStage’s 2011-2012 Season?

There’s an awful lot to be excited about this season.  We’ve two wonderful, challenging plays that we are incredibly excited about.  ”A Scent of Flowers,” is a wonderfully poetic drama that was written in 1965, but feels like it could have been written last week.  James Saunders, the playwright, is virtually unknown in the States, but Tom Stoppard claims that it was watching Saunder’s “Next Time I’ll Sing For You” that made him want to write plays.  We’ve done a lot of digging, and we can’t find a production history for “Scent of Flowers,” but we think that our production is one of the first professional productions of this remarkable play in the States.  And it fits our mission like a glove.  It feels like a real find.  It’s an ambitious piece.  I’ve been quietly sitting on this play for a few seasons, and I think we’re ready.

Also, I am very excited about “A Number.”  I think that Caryl Churchill is one of the most unique dramatic voices of our time and in “A Number,” she has penned a really haunting story that examines the complex bonds of fathers and sons within the confines of a naturalistic sci-fi chamber drama.  I know, it sounds bizarre!  But the strangest thing about the play is how un-strange it actually is.  The play is (like most of the stories we tell) deeply intimate and full of questions.  And it is being directed by my good friend and mentor Karen Kessler, who is a company member at Red Orchid.  Karen is the former Artistic Director of Famous Door Theatre company, where I served as an MFA intern many years ago.  She helped me launch my career here in Chicago, and I can’t wait to have her around this season.  It feel like a circle has completed itself somehow.  And she’s a really exciting director.

What was BackStage’s greatest impact last season?

Last season was pretty significant for us on a number of levels.  With Memory, we took a challenging, relatively untested play about a contentious subject and turned it into one of our most notable productions.  Mostly importantly, however, that experience gave us a several new opportunities to engage our growing family of patrons in a vital dialogue about the kinds of stories we choose to tell, and how those stories affect our lives.  Our Sunday talkback series gave us a weekly opportunity to connect to our patrons in a very direct, approachable way.  In the process, we have begun to get to know the people who have come to know our stories.  A lot of artists spend a majority of their creative lives shouting into the void.  It is a remarkable thing when that void begins to light up with familiar faces.

BackStage is in a period of exciting change right now! What are some of the changes you are most excited about?

We have been in the process of rejuvenating our staff for quite some time now.  Just three years ago, we had a staff of just four.  There are now ten of us.  Over this past summer we have added a new Development Director, a new Associate Artistic Director and we a new Managing Director.  In the past few seasons, we have seen wonderful growth on the board level.  Three seasons ago, there were two people on the board.  Now we have a full and very active, enthusiastic board of seven who have brought more to this organization than I could possibly describe in the few minutes that I have here.

Organizational development may not be the sexiest thing to talk about, but the people really are the lifeblood of an organization.  Adding this many talented, driven people to the BSTC roster bodes pretty well for the future of the organization.  These folks will only continue to make us get better at what we do.  That’s pretty exciting to me.

What makes BackStage different from other storefront Chicago theatres?

Even though we are a small organization, we are already decidedly mission-driven.  Every decision we make, whether about programming or otherwise, is filtered through the lens of our organizational mission and our core values.  This is a clarifying process, but it doesn’t always make it easier.  The dedication to our mission gives us less room for easy decisions, and makes programming a season much more focused and particular.  It adds creative tension to the selection of a season but it has, I think, always ended up paying off in a pretty meaningful way.  Our mission is a pretty unique one, and we are learning how to navigate through the questions it asks of us.

Also, we are a direct product of the Chicago theatre scene, and very specifically the homegrown Storefront movement.  Much of what we do has been dictated by the realities of the “alternative spaces” we have produced in over the years.  These spaces vary in functionality and quality, but one common characteristic among them is their proximity to the audience.  For a long time, theatre companies like ours were looked upon as the little companies who were still waiting to grow up.  The local mythology of Steppenwolf has spawned a million like-minded start-up theatre companies who have long believed that the incredible combination of factors that lead to Steppenwolf’s unprecedented success can happen to them if they just stick it out long enough.  For a few decades now, Storefront theatres have been pointing at that famous Steppenwolf marquis and asking “how do we get there?”

At BackStage, we are asking ourselves a different set of questions.  Over the past few seasons, we have become increasingly enlivened by the possibilities that exist in the constraints of our intimate spaces.  In these small spaces, fueled by the questions that our mission compels us to ask, we have realized that we are already offering our audiences something vital and unique.  Staged in close proximity to the audience, our stories become something our audiences experience, rather than watch.  Combine that disarming closeness with our dedication to producing shows that require some imaginative and intellectual work on the part of our audiences, and a picture begins to emerge that really has nothing to do with becoming the next “big” thing.  Our central question then becomes less about how we might land our 500 seat theatre, and more about how to deepen our close engagement with our audiences as we grow.  These are somewhat uncharted waters, but they are very very exciting to us.

Your support powers our growth. Last week, we concluded the inaugural presentation of our newest artistic initiative, the Listening Series. You made this series possible, and for that, we are thankful.

Listening to ensemble members Rebekah Ward-Hays, Michael Pacas, and Eric Paskey twist Harold Pinter’s tale was just the beginning. We are thrilled to bring our new Associate Artistic Director, Jen Poulin, on-board the team. This is far from the first time Jen has worked with BackStage, but her new role opens doors that weren’t possible before. You’ll be seeing BackStage take on new projects with invigorated energy in the coming season.

I loved seeing all the shining faces of our closest friends and family at the Listening Series, and I’m excited that this is just the beginning. We have big goals as always, and we know that we can count on you to help us expand our reach. We are growing both our audience and our capacity to share our stories, and we’re so excited by the early returns on this season’s Annual Fund campaign that drives our continued progress. Thank you for all that you do with us and for us.

–David Zoltan

Assistant Development Director

That play, and the Tenth Anniversary Season it was produced in, marked a pretty major change of direction for BackStage Theatre Company.  While previous seasons focused on the notion of producing “Big Things in Small Spaces,” our 1oth Season saw us taking a step away from that aesthetic, focusing instead on stories that put our newly developed mission sqaurely in the limelight.  Instead of producing big things in small spaces, we began sinking our teeth into the intimacy of our small spaces, and asking our audiences to “step inside” the private experience of family.   And each production following Aunt Dan & Lemon has placed a heavy emphasis on the need for active listening.  From the vaudevillian surrealism of Albee’s Play About The Baby to the metatheatre of Lichtenstein’s Memory and the generational puzzle-box of Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain,  the act of listening becomes essential to the experience of attending one of our plays.  All of these close examinations of family require active, imaginative participation on the part of our audiences.  The desire to engage our audiences as discerning, probing and attentive participants remains a cornerstone of what we do.  In fact, in an overstimulated, plugged-in, multitasking visual age, we believe that this kind of theatre becomes a kind of necessary sanctuary.  We hope that the productions you see on our stages give you respite from the noise of our online, over-marketed lives, and provide room for imaginative travel and contemplation.

Which brings us to the Listening Series.  In an attempt to add something else to our regular producing season, we set out to create a new off-night series based around this idea of close listening.  Each Listening Series features a challenging short play that we believe requires this kind of participation.  And each Listening Series presentation will not take place on a stage, but rather in a comfortable room that reminds you of someone’s home.  Harkening back to the days of when families used to dim the lights and gather around the radio, the Listening Series allows you to sit with us, sip a glass of wine, close your eyes and let your ears and your imagination take over.  To enhance the experience, each Listening Series will feature either unique sound design or live music accompaniment.  After the story is over, you will be invited to talk with us about what you heard, what you didn’t hear, and where your imagination and your intellect led you.

It’s a loud, busy world.  We hope that our stories continue to provide you with an opportunity to slow down and lose yourself in quiet, meaningful contemplation.

But most of all, we hope to see you again.

Warmly,

Matthew Reeder

Artistic Director

BackStage Theatre Company

If you would have asked me ten years ago where I saw myself in 2011, writing a blog as a
theatre professional would have the last thing to come out of my mouth. At the end of college
I was truly lost; I was a kid who knew that he loved singing and acting in plays and musicals,
but I didn’t know how to turn that into a profession. I took a chance and auditioned for a
small theatre company, was hired on as a part-time employee/acting apprentice, and then
got to work learning, growing, and falling in love with the stage. Theatre transformed me. It
opened my eyes to the reality that every human being sees the world in a different way, and
that understanding of those differences comes through powerful storytelling. Theatre gave
me humility, patience, and courage. I believe that it is one of the most powerful forces on the
planet, and it is an honor to count myself as one of the few people in the world who get to
wake up and help create art every day.

I don’t believe there is a theatre company in Chicago with an administrative team that is
as hungry for growth as yours. It is time for us to evolve, and in the coming months we will
become an administrative work in progress, challenging the way we’ve done business in the
past while changing the way we connect with you. Our mission is to take bold steps forward as
a professional ensemble, to match the compelling and challenging stories we tell on our stages
with a supporting staff that presents those stories to an engaged and multiplying audience. We
want to give you the best, and in return we need your support!

Although I’m the new guy, I have learned quickly that the best way to get support in the arts
is to offer a great deal for a great show. So throughout the month of November, we are
extending our Early Bird Special for our Season 12 Subscription Package. With priority seating,
reservations, and standing discounts for friends and family, this package is a must-have! Click
here to grab yours today!

I’m looking forward to a lot more conversations with all of you, so don’t hesitate to contact me
at Brandon@backstagetheatrecompany.org if you need anything. Here’s to a great season!!

–Brandon Anderson

Managing Director, BackStage Theatre Company