Krissy Vanderwarker is–to be polite about it–a little bummed. She’s been waiting three years for her date with Mr. Marmalade and wasn’t expecting to have to share him. As artistic director of Dog & Pony Theatre Company, which prides itself on staging local premieres, Vanderwarker had been chasing the Noah Haidle play–about a precocious four-year-old and her problematic imaginary companion, Mr. Marmalade–ever since Orange County’s South Coast Repertory first performed it in 2004. “We have friends out there who keep an eye out, and they said, ‘You have to go after this script,’” Vanderwarker says. “We got our hands on a copy, read it, and promptly started asking for the rights.”
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According to Vanderwarker, Dramatists Play Service withheld rights until after the play opened in New York (at the off-Broadway Laura Pels Theater in November 2005), and then a little longer, probably hoping that an Equity house might want it. Itinerant three-year-old Dog & Pony finally got the rights last spring and immediately set to work on a proposal to mount the show at the city’s Storefront Theater. The city accepted the proposal in May, and Vanderwarker says Dog & Pony then announced the run in a press release and on their Web site. They also listed it in PerformInk’s annual new-season guide, which came out in September. It was then they discovered their production would not be the Chicago premiere. According to PerformInk, Mr. Marmalade also had a date with Chemically Imbalanced Comedy at the Cornservatory. CIC opened their show March 22 (reviewed this week in Section 2), while Dog & Pony’s will open April 5. Both productions run through the end of next month.
For McMahon, history was repeating itself. In early 2006, CIC got the rights to Christopher Durang’s Betty’s Summer Vacation for a September production, then discovered that Infamous Commonwealth Theatre would be producing it on exactly the same dates. In that case McMahon backed off, substituted another Durang play in her lineup, and turned the potential conflict into a four-theater Durang minifestival, cooperatively marketed. This time, she says, “I wasn’t willing to change my season again–nobody’s willing to change their season for me, and we had already started our marketing. I asked if Dog & Pony wanted to do a cross-promotion–you go see one Marmalade, come to another for $5 off or something–but they weren’t interested.” That was the end of it.
The museum’s truncated hours–now just Friday through Sunday in the afternoon–can’t help. Still, McGuire claims, if you include exhibits that hang in the field house lobby, they’ve been getting about 10,000 visitors a year. With an annual budget of about $50,000, most of it provided by private donors, the place has been running on volunteer and contract labor. The hope is to reopen in a downtown location; McGuire says negotiations for space are under way. In the meantime, to raise funds, they’re selling the work in one of their current exhibits, Claus Miller’s “Signs for Peace,” which incorporates the fingerprints of Nobel prizewinners. (E-mail peacemuseum@usa.com for info.)
