Is Roadworks Roadkill?
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It was a surprising turn. Since its founding in 1992 by a group of Northwestern University theater majors headed by Abby Epstein and Debbie Bisno, Roadworks had regularly attracted top-quality talent and earned great press. The New York Times called it “the prototype Chicago ensemble–talented, fortunate, and ambitious” in 1998, and it was regarded by locals as the next big thing in off-Loop theater. Roadworks was the first Chicago theater to produce work by the likes of Mike Leigh and Kenneth Lonergan, and while the company took plenty of risks it still collected more than 40 Joseph Jefferson nominations and awards. In 2002, after ten years of nomadic existence, the company took up residence at the Chopin, planning to produce four shows each season there. Last fall it mounted David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, and the group’s holiday show was a revival of a reliable hit, David Sedaris’s SantaLand Diaries.
Board president Marko Iglendza didn’t return calls, but Curley says Roadworks currently has no “substantially major” donors. (Unlike some of Steppenwolf’s and Lookingglass’s founding members, Roadworks’ founders haven’t achieved the celebrity status that can bring in large audiences and donations.) The company lost a couple foundation grants recently, and those that are coming in are coming late. In addition, Roadworks’ supporters are mostly too young to be big givers: with 75 percent of its audience between the ages of 18 and 40, there isn’t a lot of exposure to the demographic group most likely to write fat checks at the end of the year.
It wasn’t one of Eileen Harakal’s better days. Last week the umbrella organization Museums in the Park reported that attendance had been down by a half million in 2003 at its nine member institutions, and the biggest drop–22 percent–had come at the Art Institute, where Harakal’s vice president for audience development and public affairs. It wasn’t true, Harakal says, “but the next thing we knew the Tribune was calling.”
