Famous Door Shows Its Board the Way Out
Taking its uncertain future firmly into its own hands, the award-winning Famous Door Theatre Company has made the unusual decision to fire its entire ten-member board of directors. Usually a theater company’s board makes the final decisions about how the company is managed and who is hired or terminated, not the other way around. Famous Door’s extraordinary action apparently reflects the significant growing pains and financial pressure that the six-year-old company faces. “Famous Door is going through a period of transition,” notes Dan Rivkin, company cofounder and artistic director.
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The company hopes to replace the board with a new lineup that can make influential contacts and channel significant new money into the increasingly visible and critically acclaimed organization. “What we are looking for now,” explains Rivkin, “is a fund-raising board, people who can help us in the business community.” Before asking the present board members to resign, Famous Door made overtures to some potential new members, though no one associated with the company expects that it will be easy to find replacements. “The right people are hard to get,” says managing director J. Spencer Greene. Rivkin says two of the board members–Lydia Stux and board president Gary Green–probably will enlist for the new board. Sources close to the developments say Green is a close personal friend of key company members, so it isn’t surprising he would carry on even though he was also offered the chance to resign. Both Green and Stux were out of town and unavailable for comment.
At the Hull House theater, Famous Door mounted two big hits in a row, The Conquest of the South Pole and Shrapnel in the Heart. They were followed by the much less successful mounting of Tiny Dimes, a black comedy about big business in the 1980s whose script problems were compounded by Dexter Bullard’s ridiculously over-the-edge direction. Tiny Dimes closed last weekend after a two-month run. The popular late-night show Hellcab, now in its seventh month, will continue to run through the summer.
