Another Theater Company Bites the Dust
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Six years ago Synergy spent $12,000 building a comfortable and functional 96-seat proscenium theater in a space it rented at 1753 N. Damen. “We believed there was real revenue potential in opening our own space,” says Fritts. But the expected revenue never came. “In the past couple of years, the theater companies that could afford to sublet our facility were fewer and fewer because most of the small theater companies have less and less money to invest in productions,” he adds. Before Fritts decided to close the Synergy Center, the organization was asking $650 a week to rent the space. (A 148-seat space at the Theatre Building rents for $1,350 a week.)
Early on in Synergy’s life Fritts, who says he had no desire to see Synergy take on some “archaic institutional form like a mini Goodman Theatre,” apparently became disenchanted with the administrative aspects of building a theater company. “All that structure is dead weight when you should be putting your energy into the art,” he says. Synergy stopped writing grant proposals around 1991 when they realized begging for money “left no time for the art itself.”
been reelected chairman of the advisory board in November and was planning to serve out another term of
