Retractions generally aren’t fun for journalists. But the announcement last week that Mercury Theater Chicago isn’t dead after all makes me happy—even if it means that my obituary for them as one of the losses in Chicago theater for 2020 now has to be taken back in its entirety. The fact that the company is also bringing in Christopher Chase Carter as artistic director just adds to the spirit of renewal for the venue.
Partly it’s the result of the opening up of the Shuttered Venues Operators Grant (SVOG) program through the Small Business Administration. Says Stearns, “That really is helping us because if we’re able to get some of that revenue that we lost last year, that’s going to help us obviously ramp up as well. We also did some refinancing and other things too to become much more stable financially than I think we thought we could be.” He adds that the company lost about $300,000 due to the shutdown, though he also stresses that they were never in the red. As Dizon puts it, “We were able to pay all the actors and all the other things [including severance payments to staff] and by the time we totaled it up, it was like, ‘That’s a lot of cash out the door.’” But with SVOG offering the possibility of grants up to 45 percent of gross earned revenue, that’s bought a little breathing space.
Carter says Stearns and Dizon reached out to him a few months ago for ideas about what to do if they reopened.
Adds Carter, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have that energy when people come to town to say, ‘Hey, up close and personal with these artists if you’re a big fan?’ We don’t have a place like that and I’m excited to try to explore this and try to give us something like that, you know?”
“Maybe we do a signing with a baseball player in the Venus one day,” muses Carter. “Or we do things that let audiences know, ‘You are welcome, and we are here to support you in this community and this neighborhood. We’re your neighborhood theater.’”
