The real drama in the Jeff Awards this year isn`t in who will win and who will lose, but whether there will be a ceremony anyone will attend.
For now, it appears there will be, thanks to a surprise concession by the Jeff committee, which, after stirring up theatrical passions, managed to calm them temporarily this week.
The issue? A banquet, of all things. More specifically, the $50 fee the Jeff Committee wanted everyone-nominees included-to fork over before the Nov. 4th ceremony and dinner.
Last Wednesday, in a swift vote to calm a swelling protest, the executive committee for the Jeffs, which annually honor excellence in Chicago`s theater, voted to streamline its awards hoopla, eliminate the somewhat cherished tradition of a dinner and admit the nominees for free.
”The response from the theater community was overwhelming,” Jeff spokesman Thomas Marshall said. ”The economy is such that our plans just aren`t feasible.”
Despite the emergency reversal, which in itself makes for an embarrassing mess, the committee is left with egg on its collective face and confronts an uphill struggle to retrieve credibility lost amidst this most recent controversy and a gradual erosion that has set in in recent years.
Before the mid-week change of heart, this year`s presentations at the Blackstone Theatre had threatened to be especially rancorous, legitimately inspiring a variant of that classic social putdown: What if they gave an awards night and nobody came?
Faced with hard times, escalating costs, no corporate sponsorship, and a whopping $17,000 deficit from last year`s fete, the Jeff Committee voted to request that all nominees, not just spouses, friends and supporting colleagues, pay their own way at the ceremony and dinner.
The $50 fee was to have been an all-or-nothing ticket, so that if a nominee, his theatrical organization or a kindly angel didn`t cough up the entire amount, he wouldn`t have been allowed into the Blackstone to find out if he had won or lost.
”It`s like saying, `Here`s your award, and here`s your bill,` ” Goodman Theatre producing director Roche Schulfer said before the vote to rescind the decision.
”It reminds me a little of those vacation come-ons where they offer you a free trip if you agree to listen to their condominium pitch,” said producer Robert Perkins, ordinarily one of the Jeff`s staunchest boosters.
”It`s just plain tacky,” said Kary Walker of Marriott`s Lincolnshire Theatre.
Other important guns in the theater community agreed. The Goodman Theatre, one of the few organizations able to absorb such a cost, and with the clout not to, informed the Jeff committee it won`t be picking up the tab for its nominees. Steppenwolf Theatre managing director Stephen Eich says the issue raises thorny questions about the importance of the overall event.
”You have to wonder,” Eich says, ”when it comes down to whether to go to the awards or to fund something else you think is important. We`re in the process of trying to find funds for our upstairs Second Stage series, which we consider an integral part of our life.”
Faced with that kind of resistance, the Jeff`s executive committee voted mid-week to cancel the dinner at the Blackstone Hotel, reduce ticket prices to $30 for the awards presentation, offer them for only $20 to any member of Actors` Equity and let the nominees in for free.
The dinner, onstage entertainment and live music, which all contribute to the event`s lavish cost, stem from the late `70s, when the Jeffs were in a kind of heyday. Funded by corporate sponsors and celebrated by live broadcasts over local television, the event was a genuine occasion.
But that was when the theater movement here was hot news. Corporations, besides being tighter with their gifts, aren`t as interested in glitzy events. Television isn`t much discussed anymore. That leaves only the committee, which survives by membership dues, and the theater community to pick up the tab.
Jeff committee member Criss Henderson, who wears a theater hat as managing director of Shakespeare Rep: ”We`re a major theater city. We wanted a classy event.”
The timing of the controversy probably couldn`t be worse for the Jeff Committee, already under fire over its system for picking winners and other issues related to its basic operation. These larger, deeper issues already taint the awards, and will remain, long after the banquet brouhaha is forgotten.
Some theater managers find the Jeff`s Byzantine mathematical system something of a barrier to fairness, if not logic. Awards are delegated not by simple majorities but in a complex system of comparative percentages based on the number of Jeff members who attend a show and then vote for it.
The mathematical formula didn`t work for Brian Dennehy (in ”The Iceman Cometh” at Goodman) and Carole Gutierrez (in ”Sylvia`s Real Good Advice” at Pegasus Players and the Organic), two acclaimed performances that the Jeff Awards overlooked.
As if to draw attention to the odd complexity of its system, the Jeff Committee this year embarrassingly had to add a name to the list after announcing its nominations. Dev Kennedy, who starred in ”The Golem” at the National Jewish Theater in Skokie, thus became a sixth nominee for actor in a principal role in a drama a week after the other five nominees were announced. That belated move was explained as a statistical error, prompting some to wonder if even the committee understands its own system and others to seriously question the credibility of the whole enterprise. The committee membership, for instance, contains only a random sprinkling of industry professionals, leading to charges of a stacked deck. David Zak of Bailiwick Repertory resigned two years ago when that issue heated up for a while, and last year some quietly questioned whether Henderson`s membership might not have had some effect on Shakespeare Rep`s underdog victory for top production honor.
In another controversy, last season one of the city`s top producing organizations, Remains Theatre, withdrew from competition, arguing that the awards should be non-competitive and go to multiple winners, as with the Jeff citations distributed to non-Equity theaters.
That means that, whatever happens at this year`s awards, whether honorees fork up and go or not, there`s already the cloud that their honors don`t take into account Remains` ”American Buffalo,” one of last season`s more spectacular shows.
Adding to the current rancor is the fact that all 40 members of the Jeff Committee get not one but two free tickets to attend any nominated show. Eighty tickets for a pre-sold hit can be a handicap-as it was for Remains`
”Speed-the-Plow” a few seasons back-and some theater managers are particularly irked that the Jeff`s sudden concern about everyone paying his or her own way doesn`t apply to the committee itself.
”I`ve gotten calls from some Jeff members hinting for free tickets for shows that aren`t even nominated,” says Perkins. ”I`ve even gotten calls from friends of Jeff members, who hint they might be merely bringing a Jeff member with them and are therefore entitled to be let in for free.”
David McGaughy, the Jeff`s balanced and conciliatory chair, notes that most members of the Jeffs are generous supporters of local theaters.
”I loved winning in the past and I`d never turned one down, but increasingly I find I have something else to do on Jeff night,” says the Goodman`s Robert Falls, a directing nominee for ”Iceman.” ”There`s something wrong when Dennehy isn`t nominated.”
”I believe in the awards, and they`re good for the industry,” says Perkins. ”This noncompetitive idea is foolish. But I have to admit the Jeff Committee has a tendency to shoot itself in the foot.”
