Consider the classic tree-in-a-forest conundrum, artistically speaking:
Say a Las Vegas community theater closes and (practically) no one is around to see it. Say a Las Vegas community theater closes because (practically) no one came around to see it. Does it make an impact?
You bet your raw-edged, challenging art-deprived ass it does.
"It's a hard sell in this town," says Francine Gordon, half of the renegade duo dubbing itself Test Market—Ernest Hemmings being the remaining half—that will shut down its home of 18 months, the tight-fit Arts Factory space known as the Social Experimentation and Absurd Theater, or SEAT, on July 31.
"The theater was not supporting itself," Gordon says, citing the monthly $2,000 rent that, despite what she describes as a fiercely supportive ally in their landlord, Arts Factory owner Wes Isbutt, began swinging ever lower over their cash-strapped heads like an alterna-culture Sword of Damocles.
(No apologies for melodramatic analogies here. This is theater. We emote.)
SEAT's production of David Mamet's Speed the Plow plows on this weekend, and Hemmings' own play, Eccentric, closes the room in July (saving them the fee to the rights of their originally scheduled Weekends Like Other People). Their REEL program of unconventional films, as well as occasional performance artists, also take a bullet. TM will still mount shows Downtown, joining the Cockroach troupers as roving guerilla-theater rebels, but with nowhere near its accustomed frequency and no place—be it ever so extraordinarily humble as the McDonald's dining room-sized SEAT—of its own.
"We were hitting (the rent) and beyond it from October 2004 with Psycho Beach Party, through January with Shopping and F--king," Gordon says, reeling off titles that distinguish SEAT's slate from, say, Nevada Conservatory Theatre's. "It was paying for itself, and that's all we really wanted. Even Die Motherf--ker Die, with its horrible reviews, we sold out a few of the last shows. But as we went into February and March and Adam Baum and the Jew Movie, even with the great reviews you guys gave it, we don't know where the audience went."
Still, this couldn't have been completely unanticipated. Sizable risk attaches to an independent streak and iconoclastic mind-set.
"We didn't want to go nonprofit because we didn't want a board, we didn't want to do all that paperwork when a lightbulb broke," Gordon says. "We didn't want a corporation giving us money and then saying, 'You can't put our name on Shopping and F--king.' "
Adds Hemmings: "We got a chance to do what we couldn't do otherwise. How often would you hear, 'We're auditioning for Shopping and F--king at the community center, it's gonna be a gas, you wanna sign up?' "
The most appalling snub of SEAT was of its recent run of Hemmings' astonishing performance in Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, Eric Bogosian's one-man, minor miracle of monologues on the state of modern humanity. For any theater fan to measure Hemmings' emotionally devastating work against the audience anemia is to get really ... pissed. As was this critic, surrounded by half a dozen mesmerized attendees while virtually an entire city foolishly kept its distance.
"That was the toughest thing I'd ever done in my entire life, very stressful each and every time. I blew out a blood vessel in my eye," Hemmings says. "For one show, two people show up, so we have to have a couple of our friends sit in the audience so I don't look like a nutcase when I do the audience interaction."
Scheduled for six Thursday-through-Sunday performances for three weekends, Pounding Nails lured approximately 40 theatergoers for its entire run. Several shows were cancelled, attracting zero patrons to the 40-to-50-seat SEAT (depending on the set configuration) for a 15-buck ducat (tickets for most productions were in the $10-$15 range).
"I was cold-calling people to come to Pounding Nails, but they didn't show up," Gordon says. "We went to a wedding at Las Vegas Little Theatre on a Saturday. People said, 'Oh, tomorrow's Sunday, we're not doing anything, we'll be there.' One person showed up. Because it was just Ernest (performing), that was like a slap in the face from the theater community, not just the community at large."
First Fridays were especially painful. "We'd work our butts off on a 20-minute show to sell for $5 and it would be empty," Gordon says. "Drunk people look at the beer, look at us, buy the beer and walk away, saying, 'I'm not interested in a paid show, where's the food?'"
SEAT's undoing has its own fingerprints on it, as well. Hemmings and Gordon arrived here from Cleveland specifically to launch SEAT and help spark that vibrant-yet-elusive Downtown arts district. But they often offered fare too far on the theatrical fringe—including some underdeveloped original works by Hemmings and others—to woo local residents who are spoon-fed more mainstream entertainment. And while they took obvious pride in "constructing four seasons' worth of shows in a two-year period," and barreling through the summers with productions as other theater companies went dark, they took critical heat for attempting too much too often, compromising quality to gain visibility. Gordon admits that cast/crew burnout was a destructive factor, as was more entrenched competition.
"I'm not supposed to be in Speed the Plow, we cast another actress—she dropped out to be in Once Upon a Mattress (at Spring Mountain Ranch in July)," she says. There were also grumblings among volunteers that Hemmings could be difficult to work with, an assertion he vigorously has denied. Marketing, beyond their godsexandbowling.com website, was another issue. "We initially tried to market to the Strip and that garnered maybe 10 people," Gordon says. "What we should have done is, God, buy an ad in Las Vegas Weekly, the flashy paper that is filled with news on the arts."
(Ah, go on. You'll make us blush.)
Still, there's a resurrection planned. TM's annual Samuel Beckett Festival is set for November in several Downtown venues, and Hemmings and Gordon hope to eventually open a new space, possibly with a partner, funneling that monthly two-grand savings into a more wisely applied marketing strategy. Meanwhile, Hemmings will direct Community College of Southern Nevada's September production of Anna in the Tropics.
"If we wanted to change the light at the end of the tunnel and do something for this art form, we didn't want to hinder the art form, and that's what was starting to happen," Hemmings says. "We don't want to have the one thing we came here to do to be ruined because we're chasing dollars."