The curtain will go back up for the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble at the College of DuPage after more than 2 1/2 years without a performance.
It took hours of debate, months of proposals and numerous pleas from the public, but the College of DuPage board of trustees last week approved a resolution 5-1 to return the ensemble to the McAninch Arts Center, known as the MAC, where it had been in residence for nearly three decades, and to help fund it for two years. After that, it will be re-evaluated to see if it’ll be likely to reach a projected goal of 60 percent earned revenue and 40 percent contributed revenue.
Students once again will have a chance to work side by side on productions with professional actors.
“There are some students here who haven’t fully gotten to experience BTE because it’s been on hiatus for so long, so it’s wonderful that they would be able to now,” said Angela Aiello, a theater student alumnus at the College of DuPage. “It’s amazing. You don’t really get that experience as a college student very often, unless you’re in the city, but we’re not in the city. So to have it at your school that you go to every day, it’s such an advantage. It’s so awesome.”
Formed in 1986, the ensemble had been on hiatus since the middle of 2013. In May 2014, it was booted from the college because of an $80,000 shortfall and the failure of a fundraising campaign to make up the gap. Even before that, shows were cut from 64 in the 2008-2009 season to 36 in 2013-2014, and in-kind donations were slashed.
Connie Canaday Howard, artistic director of the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble and a COD professor of theater, said after the vote that a “public outcry” spurred the return. More than 1,000 community members signed a petition asking trustees for the reinstatement.
Under the terms of the resolution, COD will give BTE about $131,500 the first year. An additional $97,500 is expected from ticket sales and $17,000 from donations and grants. For the second year, the college will fund the ensemble for $119,000, with an additional $102,000 coming from ticket sales and $25,000 from donations and grants.
The resolution was a compromise between ones written by Canaday Howard, BTE Associate Artistic Director Amelia Barrett and trustees. Trustee Charles Bernstein altered the trustees’ resolution, which called for more than half of seats to be filled with paid tickets as opposed to roughly one-third, saying that was a “bar that is impossible to overcome.”
Canaday Howard agreed with Bernstein, saying that mandating the BTE to sell more than 50 percent of seats would be too difficult, given the ensemble would be “coming off of not producing for two years and without fundraising happening.”
The resolution requires the BTE to file for 501c3 status, which includes forming a board of directors. It is incorporated, Canaday Howard said.
“It’s going to be a lot of work,” Canaday Howard said of the months ahead, but added that BTE’s reinstatement is “uplifting to the community, uplifting to the college. This is a good thing in terms of the public face of the college.”
COD is on probation from the Higher Learning Commission due to a tumultuous year in which former President Robert Breuder was fired after reports of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer and donor money on food and alcohol, and allegations of noncompetitive contracts awarded to board members of the college’s fundraising foundation and inflated enrollment numbers.
Newly elected board Chair Deanne Mazzochi was the lone vote against the resolution, saying the Higher Learning Commission is intensely scrutinizing spending. She said the BTE is an independent theater company in residence and not an academic program, and that the fundraising guideline in the trustees’ initial proposal was not unreasonable.
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“If every person who bothered to send us an e-mail would send you $20,” she told BTE supporters, “your fundraising goals that we set would be met.”
Bernstein urged the theater to find a way to meet its earned revenue goals by the end of two years.
“If these goals are not met,” he said, “I would lead the charge to end the BTE at that time. But I think it needs to be given an opportunity to see what it can do for this college and this community.”
Barrett and Canaday Howard said a start date for productions will be determined after they assess all that needs to be done first.
“We were working toward getting this thing passed, and now we have to take a deep breath and go, “Oh, OK, so now the other part of the work begins,’ ” Barrett said. “But of course the great thing is to capitalize on people talking about us. Let’s celebrate that we’re coming back and let people feel enlivened to return to our theater and be part of our family.”
“BTE was always about giving stories life,” she said. “We have a great story to tell now.”
Erin Chan Ding is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.