`I felt I had to either leave now,” says Steve Pickering, explaining his recent decision to quit both his post as the artistic director of Evanston’s Next Theatre Company and, eventually, the Chicago area, “or I had to stay at Next for at least the next four years.”
Pickering chose the former option. And thus Evanston’s only resident professional theater company (aside from Light Opera Works) now finds itself at an intriguing crossroads, even as it prepares to begin performances this weekend of “Cardenio, or, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy.” Kate Buckley, the director of the current production of the 17th Century drama, will be gradually taking over the artistic helm of the theater during the next couple of months.
Next has suffered through its share of problems during its 17-year history, almost all of which has been spent in residency at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center (a warm environment but one that lacks much of the equipment needed for large-scale professional theater). Most problematic has been an ongoing financial deficit that has been as high as $80,000 but has now dwindled to about $20,000 (which is about 10 percent of Next’s $200,000 annual budget). Although it still has an affiliation with the Actors Equity Union, Next remains on the bottom tier of Chicago-area contracts, mainly because it just cannot afford to take financial risks.
“My biggest regret,” says Pickering, “is that I am not leaving the theater in the black.”
But there’s also a positive side to the future of Next. Although nothing is yet certain, the troupe appears to have a lock on being the principal tenant in the new performing arts complex scheduled as part of the proposed large-scale redevelopment in downtown Evanston that will include a hotel and a large movie theater. If the current thinking stays the same, Next will share a two-theater live performance complex with Light Opera Works (which produces big musicals and operettas) and, possibly, another theater company.
“The feeling is that the new theater spaces would need to be busy 52 weeks of the year in order to be viable,” says Next’s managing director, Peter Rybolt. “So there will probably need to be three principal tenants.” Obvious candidates for that role would be such troupes as Apple Tree, Lookingglass and Roadworks (or possibly the Evanston-based Piven Theatre Workshop), but that’s just speculation at this point. Even if all goes well, Next is unlikely to begin producing in the new space until the fall of 2000.
So what will be the impact of Pickering’s departure in the meantime? There will undoubtedly be less edgy horror and science fiction on future Next seasonal bills (in collaboration with Charles Sherman, Pickering enjoyed dramatizing the works of Clive Barker) and possibly a greater emphasis on classic work — Buckley is best known in Chicago for her work at the Shakespeare Repertory Theatre and the traditionally focused Writers Theatre Chicago in Glencoe.
“We may even start doing romantic comedies at Next,” says Buckley, only half-joking. “But I am also interested in new playwrights and maintaining this theater’s reputation for fostering home-grown talent.”
Buckley’s directorial attention this week is on an early Jacobean play that is very rarely produced (there has been considerable scholarly debate as to its authorship, but the work recently has been attributed to both John Fletcher and William Shakespeare). The play exhibits most of the usual lurid Jacobean obsessions — lust, revenge, murder, suicide and sexual misconduct.
Pickering, who has specialized in nasty types during much of his acting career in Chicago, will star in the play. Although he is also directing one more show at Next later this year, he’s clearly ready to find new challenges away from the Chicago area.
“Anyone running this theater has to be prepared to take us into the new building three or four years from now,” Pickering says. “Knowing my emotional and artistic life, I did think that would be of benefit to me. Besides, it was time someone else had the chance to run things.”
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After Ray Bradbury wrote a dramatic version of his anti-utopian 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451” for the actor Charles Laughton in 1956, he tossed the script into the trash without it ever being produced. Forty years later, the much-admired 77-year-old author has no problem explaining why.
“I threw that script away,” Bradbury said over the telephone from California last week, “because it was no good at all.”
But Bradbury is dogged and, he says, “theater is in my blood.” So he wrote another stage version of “Fahrenheit 451,” a tale set in the future in which a mechanized society insists that all books be burned. And then 11 years ago, he wrote even a third version — this time a musical, with songs by David Mettee and lyrics by Georgia Holoff — which began life at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Connecticut.
Starting this weekend, the Bailiwick Repertory Theater will present the local premiere of this operatic incarnation, in a production directed by David Zak. Bradbury says he is coming to Chicago for the opening on Sunday.
Is “Fahrenheit 451” still relevant after 40 years? “It’s even more relevant,” Bradbury almost shouts on the phone. “We’re becoming a pinball, game-playing, computerized society. We don’t teach reading any more. If we don’t change things, we’re well on our way to being just like the people in `Fahrenheit 451.’ “
Hollywood is apparently still interested in one of American popular literature’s most redoubtable writers. Bradbury says that Mel Gibson will soon begin producing a second film version of “Fahrenheit 451” (the first, directed by Francois Truffaut, was made in 1966). And Tom Cruise is under consideration for the lead role.
