The New and the Neglected
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A new home was also her goal eight years ago, when her own company, Touchstone Theatre, merged with Organic. Touchstone, which she founded in 1985, had been renting an expensive space at 2851 N. Halsted, and she was hoping to move operations into the building Organic owned at 3319 N. Clark. But as soon as the merger was complete she began to learn of problems with the Organic facility–including major roof
That money was used over the next several years to pay off the $80,000 in debt the two companies had brought to the partnership and to pay operating and production expenses, including rent and maintenance costs of more than $100,000 a year on the Halsted space and upper-tier union wages, Marlowe says. “It was killing us. People had the impression that we were fine. Foundations didn’t give us money. We didn’t have any kind of institutional support.” By 1999 the Touchstone and Organic boards had mostly disappeared. Out of money and basically working alone, Marlowe moved Organic to the theater at the McGaw YMCA child-care center in Evanston, where
Follow-ups: Kim Clark, who’d been booted from Second City last time we spoke, has landed at Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, where he’ll head up the writing program….Cleetus Friedman, whose one-man-and-a-DJ satire got the hook at Lake Forest High School, will perform Crackers at midnight tonight (May 31) at Frankie J’s MethaDome Theatre; the show will be filmed for NBC’s Hip-Hop Nation….The Illinois house last week passed a resolution calling for cable company RCN to pay up on its $645,000 obligation to CAN TV, overdue since January….The Guild Complex has named a new executive director, longtime volunteer Ellen Wadey, who has worked as development director for the Marwen Foundation and communications and marketing director for Old Saint Patrick’s Church….Columbia College public relations head Carol Bryant retires in June after 11 years there and a total of 42 in the business….With the departure of publicist Marlo LaCorte, the Silverman/LaCorte Group is now the Silverman Group.
