First the Office, Then the Paper?
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The office closing will trim PerformInk’s staff by one: office manager Jon Sevigny will hit the street. Everyone else is working from home anyway, says Kaufman, whose schedule changed with the birth of twin daughters two years ago. “It’s gone from me being in the office twice a week and working from home the rest of the time to me being in the office once a week, to me being in the office once every two weeks. My ad manager says it’s easier to work at home; all the writers are freelancers working out of their homes. It dawned on me that I could get a PO box down the street.”
Kaufman has owned PerformInk since ’92, when she took it over from Act One bookstore owner Rick Levine, and is quick to say that it isn’t going away. But, she says, an online paper could have a potentially lucrative national presence, covering theater–and listing auditions–in other parts of the country. PerformInk has been charging viewers for access to its online audition notices for four years; at a dollar a pop, Kaufman says that business is now marginally profitable. (The company also publishes The Book: An Actor’s Guide to Chicago). Kaufman says the PerformInk Web site will be enhanced by the end of summer, with a free e-mail press-release distribution system for theaters and two new online-only columns. She’ll consult advertisers and readers before pulling the plug on the paper edition and says if resistance is too great, she might reconsider. In the meantime the office furniture will be sold June 24 and 25.
“When we stitched these together [last summer], they looked perfect to us,” he says, adding that the pieces fit into place as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle. “Everybody was like, ‘Holy cow, it’s done, it’s beautiful.’” But last winter, “once we started welding and polishing, we noticed that away from the weld zone there were different ripples and indentations. So now you’re taking something [the weld seam] that could be two inches wide and you’re increasing it, because you have to sculpt it into a smooth surface.”
Jacqueline Russell and Todd Leland announced this week that they will launch the Chicago Children’s Theatre with an inaugural production of A Year With Frog and Toad, directed by Henry Godinez, January 20 to March 5 at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre. Russell, CCT’s artistic director, left Lookingglass Theatre Company, where she was executive director, last year to work on this project; Leland, a managing director at Goldman Sachs and the CCT’s board chair, headed the Lookingglass board when it raised the money for its Water Tower facility. CCT plans its first full season of three shows in 2006-’07; Russell says the company has raised more than $500,000 in donations and that Target has signed on as the sponsor of a series of family matinees that will offer tickets (usually $17 to $38) at discounted prices.
