Business savvy drives Boise Contemporary Theater

Adventurous theater goers over the past 20 years have come to know Boise Contemporary Theater as the place to go to be challenged and surprised.

The company itself is a surprise in the theater world, a small company that owns its own theater and is landlord for the offices and rehearsal space for the much larger Idaho Shakespeare Festival. And BCT essentially plays the role of regional theater company, one not usually performed by a city’s contemporary theater.

“We are an anchor organization, not a fringe organization,” said founder and artistic director Matthew Cameron Clark.

BCT is also a company on the move. Maybe literally, as Clark wants to expand into the adjoining building. And definitely as an organization, as Clark and his board are working on a five-year plan to build on the company’s success in its 20^th anniversary season.

“We’re really talking about improving and expanding the experience for the audience and the artists,” Clark said.

Clark, a Boise native, founded Boise Contemporary Theater in 1996. It was pretty much a vagabond operation for its first four years, bouncing from basements to storefronts. That’s the way Clark’s life had been in the Seattle theater world in the 1990s before he returned to Boise. He toyed with starting a theater company in Seattle but the region was saturated with small and mid-size theaters.

BCT became a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 1999, and Clark bought a warehouse building at Fulton and Ninth that became the company’s permanent home in 2000. BCT is the relatively rare theater company to own its performance space and office space. It also rents  out office space to Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Balance Dance Co., Music Together of Treasure Valley, and to other groups for events.

Only 27 percent of theaters with budgets under $1 million own their performance and office space. The same is true for only 38 percent of all professional nonprofit theaters that participated in the Theatre Communications Group’s Theatre Facts 2013 financial survey, said Ilana B. Rose, the organization’s associate director of research.

BCT has a $770,000 annual budget. Playing landlord gives BCT a 60 percent ratio of earned income against contributions. Most performing arts groups across the disciplines, no matter how large or small, can count on no more than 30 to 40 percent earned income, primarily from ticket sales.

“It helps the numbers work,” Clark said. “I can see with confidence, that the stability of our model is the principal reason we survived the recession.”

Clark acquired 231 old balcony seats from the Egyptian Theater to create an off-Broadway-sized space (100-499 seats). The auditorium chandeliers are from the Pinney Theater, built in 1908 and demolished in 1969 and on permanent loan from the Idaho State Historical Society.

Clark has eyes on doubling BCT’s footprint.  His 15,000-square-foot building fronting Fulton is a Siamese twin adjoining a 10,000-square-foot building in back. Inside, the two buildings seem like a single building. Indeed, the staircase is in one building and the restrooms are in the other. Owners of both buildings have a permanent agreement for shared use of these facilities.

“One of the things we are considering is a purchase of the north end of the building. It’s for sale,” Clark said. “We’re a month or two away from making a decision to make that a concrete goal.”

Clark wants to expand the theater lobby into the adjoining space, possibly adding some café and cabaret space.

Clark and his board of directors are in the middle of five-year strategic planning. He’d like to expand the season from four plays to six plays and expand the play choice from works with no more than five actors to plays with up to nine players.

“We’ll be doing more work on a larger scale,” he said.

With more plays, Clark also wants to expand the audience.

“We don’t spend a lot of money on the marketing of this company,” Clark said. “The majority of the people in Treasure Valley don’t have an idea we are here.”

In the early years, BCT performed mostly existing plays. More recently, Clark has focused more on world premieres (BCT’s “The Velocity of Autumn” had a four-and-a-half week run on Broadway in April 2014 starring Estelle Parsons) and second stagings of new plays.

“A lot of playwrights say a second production is even harder to get,” Clark said.

Clark has also established a BCT Playwright Fellowship and will announce the first recipient in April. This $10,000 fellowship commissions a play and pays for transportation to bring the playwright to Boise early in the development of the show so the playwright can write for specific actors.