The Chicago theater community got a pair of year-end jolts with December announcements about the demise of Oracle Productions and the near demise of the Hypocrites.
But the two leaders who’d taken the company in this idealistic direction since 2010 were at a turning point. Oracle, with a 2015 operating budget of around $123,000, would be losing the services of executive director Brad Jayhan-Little and executive producer Ben Fuchsen.
So their mid-December announcement—that, “due to an unforeseen and dramatic drop in box office sales and fundraising goals,” they would cancel the last two shows of this 20th anniversary season, lay off their six-person staff, and cease producing after a truncated run of Wit (now opening in January and closing February 19), while Graney figures out a new mission and model—was a shocker.
“There were a lot of things that we’ve been fighting for two and half years, and it came to a head this fall, as ticket sales tanked for us. The board smartly looked at the books and was like, ‘we have to stop. We can’t continue. We have an unsustainable model, and if we go further we’re going to get into debt that we’ll never be able to get out of.’”
