Olney's Season To Invest In

An Ambitious '09 Roster Spearheads Efforts to Pay Off a $5 Million Loan

Olney Theatre Center's Jim Petosa is feeling his oats as artistic director since his announcement in May that he intends to stay on in the post he's held since 1994. His 2009 roster (see box), which he calls "as full and as diverse an experience as we can conjure in a season," includes two world premieres, highly unusual for Olney.

But the team of Petosa and new Managing Director Amy Marshall has a big task ahead -- to pay off a $5 million loan taken out three years ago to help fund the $12 million construction of a new main stage and other improvements.

Since the main stage opened in 2005, subscriptions have steadily gone up, according to Petosa. "The investment in the new theater has certainly paid off in terms of people finding Olney a much more commodious theater," he says.

But that hasn't been enough to offset construction costs. The $5 million loan to pay costs not covered by state, county or private donations, Petosa says, was financed by using as collateral Olney's 14-acre property and four performance spaces, valued at $16 million.

"Essentially, we borrowed against our assets," Marshall says of the loan. They hope to pay the loan off within 10 years. "I'm here to raise contributed income and to help pay back the money," Marshall says of the responsibilities she took on whe she arrived last October.

She is hopeful that a few deep-pocketed donors -- or just one big one -- may decide to retire Olney's debt in a dramatic gesture, which could result in the still-undubbed main stage being named after the most generous check-writer. "It would be a lovely opportunity for a corporation or foundation or individual donor to come in and name the space," Marshall says.

To her, Petosa's continued presence as artistic director is a big incentive to invest in the theater because his "unique programming" brings in audiences.

Marshall remembers a recent evening scrambling with marketing chief Kate Taylor Davis to squeeze more folding chairs into the intimate Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab for "Stuff Happens," David Hare's funny/bleak docudrama about the run-up to the Iraq war.

The play "speaks to the depth of Jim's programming," Marshall says, "because part of the anger that you experience watching 'Stuff Happens' is that two months before, you watched '1776' and what those people gave to make this country great."

Skidmore's Africa Act

Many people find travel broadening, but stage director Jeremy Skidmore isn't satisfied unless the culture he's visiting knocks him on his keister (we gently paraphrase). He has traveled a lot in Asia, which did it for him, whereas Europe did not.

"I realized that I basically was becoming addicted to the chaos of cultures that are completely different than the United States," Skidmore says. Without having had that kind of "shock to the system" in a while, Skidmore decided his trip abroad this year should be into a "fairly intense culture." Which is why the 31-year-old former artistic director of Theater Alliance, recent curator of the Source Festival and director of the just-ended "Stuff Happens" at Olney Theatre Center will fly to Tanzania in early December. He'll spend three weeks at a desk in the Kilimanjaro region of the East African country, polishing grant applications for charities, some focused on women and children affected by HIV/AIDS.

Skidmore was hooked up through a friend who works for Cross-Cultural Solutions in New York, a nonprofit that arranges for professional types to volunteer with charitable organizations and local people around the world. He sent out a mass e-mail in the spring asking people to sponsor him by contributing toward the $3,000 for living expenses in Tanzania. He raised the money and also found cheap airfare, thanks to Rorschach Theatre's Randy Baker, whose day job is in the travel biz.

"I've started to understand much more completely how inspiration to do the things I need to do as a director needs to come from sources completely outside of theater," Skidmore says.

Before he leaves, Skidmore will direct Martin McDonagh's bloody farce "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" at Signature Theatre.