Milwaukee Chamber Theatre

What is the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre?

For 30 years, it was an extension the personality of artistic director Montgomery Davis, who co-founded the company with actress Ruth Schudson in 1975. MCT was vaguely Anglophile (a Shaw Festival was a signature event).  And it was somehow connected to the Skylight Opera Theatre.

Davis stepped down in 2004 and died in 2007. The Shaw Festival ended in 2002, after a 19-year run. But the company still co-habits with the Skylight at the Broadway Theatre Center.

“In terms of identity, we mostly have to deal with not being the Skylight,” said Kirsten Mulvey, who is completing her first year as managing director. “People are still telling me how wonderful our Rent was.”

The Skylight, not MCT, staged Rent in the spring. The Skylight owns the Broadway Theatre Center; MCT is a tenant there, with an office on the fifth floor. MCT contracts with the Skylight to produce on the Cabot Theatre main stage and in the tiny Studio Theatre. The two companies go way back. MCT, even in its itinerant days, often produced at the Skylight’s old Jefferson Street theater and was a charter tenant when the BTC opened in 1993 (MCT has a 50-year lease on its office there at a favorable rate, but pays a hefty $19,000 per month when it uses the Cabot Theatre).

“We’re also confused with Next Act,” said C. Michael Wright, who suceeded Davis as artistic director in 2005. “We’re about the same size.”

Like Next Act, Chamber Theatre trades on the intimate theatrical experience. Wright has further sought to define MCT as the company that nurtures local talent and prizes the literary aspects of theater. Wright has gone out of his way to co-produce shows with educational institutions. In 2009, he did William Inge’s Picnic with UWM’s theater department. In the coming season, MCT and Marquette University’s theater program will put on James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter.

“Collaborating allows us to do bigger productions than we would normally do,” Wright said.

MCT pays some of the student actors and gives faculty designers a chance to show their stuff on the local professional stage.

“We want these people to stay in Milwaukee,” Mulvey said. “We want them to know that there is work here.”

Wright has taken a keen interest in the literary part of MCT’s identity.

“Great writing is important to us,” Wright said. “We also want to nurture playwrights and literary adaptations.”

He staged a three-actor condensation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in 2008. MCT is entering the fourth year of Wright’s five-year project of staging a Pulitzer Prize-winning play each season. Last season, it was Picnic (1953). This season, it’s Frank Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses (1965). The 2010-11 season opens Friday (Aug. 12) with Jeeves Intervenes, Margaret Raether’s adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and stories about a canny valet and the empty-headed man of leisure he attends. It’s very arch, very British, very MCT.

Also on the upcoming season: Main-Travelled Roads, Paul Libman and Dave Hudson’s musical treatment of Hamlin Garland’s stories about Wisconsin, directed by Molly Rhode and with musical direction by Alissa Rhode; and Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, part thriller and part family drama.

Wright’s programming is of course fundamental to establishing the company’s identity and its niche in the market, a task he must accomplish while keeping the company solvent in perilous times. So far, so good.

“We had a huge debt when I came on in 2005,” Wright said. “The doors were about to close. All that’s paid off. We did it in three years by scaling back productions and staff. Last year was tough — even though the recession hit, we couldn’t scale back further.”

MCT did reasonably well in 2009-2010. It drew 11,538, down a little from 12,264 the prior year. The company has no debt, but it had to exhaust most of its cash reserve to cover a year-end deficit. The margin for error is thin — MCT also has no endowment — but Mulvey is optimistic.

“We think we’ll have a good ticket year,” she said. “We had 1,053 subscribers last year, and we’re already past that.”

The budget is $914,000. MCT has four full-time and two part-time employees. It typically earns about 40% of its budget at the box office, and grants and donations cover the rest.

“Foundations were down last year,” Mulvey said, “but we have very loyal board members and supporters.”

Next Tuesday, Tom talks to the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.