Quitting While They’re Ahead?
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Cohen and producing director Geoffrey Barr founded Naked Eye in 1998 and were joined early on by other theater-world youngsters like lighting designer Jaymi Lee Smith and dramaturge Sarah Gubbins. “A few of us were working together at the Goodman,” says Cohen, who was an intern at the time. “Our first production was in the studio there.” They produced a couple of plays a year, plus new-play festivals and workshops in a variety of venues, including Theatre Building Chicago, A Red Orchid Theatre, and Steppenwolf, where last season they had back-to-back successes with The Idiot Box and Nickle and Dimed. Barr, business manager at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater by day, says that with a yearly budget of $150,000, Naked Eye is in the black, and echoes Cohen in insisting that they have no intention of closing it. It’s “definitely not another financial casualty of the economic environment,” he says.
“As we’ve gone on with our careers, it’s been more difficult to run a company,” Barr says. “It seemed like we either needed to fully commit, get a paid staff and hire a professional fund-raiser, or we needed to redefine what we’re doing.” For a month or so this year it looked like Naked Eye would make the leap. The board approved a salary for Cohen, and he became its first full-time employee. Then he got the job offer from Hartford. After that, Barr says, they asked themselves, “How does this company look with a new artistic director?” On the heels of last year’s productions, he says, “it looked like trying to climb a mountain. But neither I nor our board nor any of the other company members are ready to say this is it. We want to be able to come together again and say, look–here’s this project, let’s make it happen.”
Popped!
