OFF-OFF-BROADWAY: FREEDOM ISN’T FREE
ONE DAY DURING REHEARSAL, director Adrienne Campbell-Holt found herself painting the walls of a set. It was for a world premiere play being mounted by her theatre company, Colt Coeur. It was a 10-person piece called Zürich, with one set, a hotel room, that featured a painted wall and door on one end and a floor-to-ceiling glass wall on the other.
As a director working Off-Off-Broadway, Campbell-Holt is used to multitasking. In addition to directing plays for Colt Coeur, she’s also the artistic director, where she manages operations, writes grants, and “drives the truck, loads the truck—you know, all the things,” she says with a wry smile. Sometimes that means painting the set.
Campbell-Holt is also used to doing more with less. The set she painted looked like it cost at least six figures. When she tells me it only cost $2,400, my jaw drops. “It was slick, right?” she says happily. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, this is Off-Off-Broadway.
How to define Off-Off-Broadway? It’s an amorphous thing. The popular assumption is that is refers to any production in a New York City venue with fewer than 100 seats. But operating under that rubric are a dizzyingly wide range of companies, with annual operating budgets ranging from $50,000 to more than $1 million.
Randi Berry runs the Indie Theatre Fund, which provides grants to Off-Off-Broadway producers. Berry considers Off-Off-Broadway primarily an aesthetic. “It’s not just seats or budget,” she explains. “It’s innovative theatre happening in small, intimate spaces. The work is more diverse, the work is more risk-taking. That’s where the research and development for the whole American theatre takes place, in indie theatre. It’s more collaborative—there’s also sometimes a different hierarchy in the structure and ensemble. Technically it’s 99 seats or less, but to me it’s all of those things.”
Indeed other monikers also frequently applied to Off-Off-Broadway theatre are “indie,” “downtown,” or “experimental,” meaning outside
