The Plan to Resurrect Body Politic
Body Politic Theatre, the city’s oldest off-Loop theater company and the victim of financial disaster in recent years, may yet come back to life. On the verge of a merger that would have wiped out the independent identity the company has clung to since 1966, the theater’s board of directors has instead opted to try to resurrect the company with new artistic director Terry McCabe, a talented theater vet who’s presently resident director at Wisdom Bridge Theatre and a member of Court Theatre’s artists council. For the moment McCabe will keep those ties. Body Politic has been without an artistic director since the well-meaning but mostly ineffectual Albert Pertalion resigned last November, citing the need to move on to a job with a more certain future.
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Body Politic’s decision to give McCabe a try came at the urging of the newly named artistic director himself. He first approached the theater’s board approximately six months ago after repeated news of the company’s imminent demise, he says, “depressed” him. McCabe’s Body Politic ties stretch back almost 15 years: during 1981 and part of 1982, in his first paying job after graduating from college, he worked as assistant to the late, respected James O’Reilly, then Body Politic’s artistic director.
McCabe laid out his strategy for revitalizing the company in a 12-page typewritten memo he delivered to the theater’s board of directors last month. In it he stressed that, realistically speaking, the company can expect no income from foundation grants or other philanthropic sources for at least the next two years. His plan is predicated on increasing the flow of earned income over the next 18 months while plotting a conservative course toward a three-play subscription season for the fall of 1995. His first project would be to carve a 50- to 75-seat studio theater out of what is currently the Body Politic’s rehearsal room to rent out this fall. A modest space would cost about $6,200 to construct, according to McCabe’s estimates, and would generate between $500 and $600 a week in funds on top of income from continued rental of the theater’s 192-seat main stage.
