Found this today...
Intiman Theater Cancels Season
By KATE TAYLOR
The board of the financially embattled Intiman Theater in Seattle voted on Saturday to cancel the rest of the 2011 season and lay off the theater’s staff, said Susan Trapnell, a consultant that the board hired late last month to lead a financial turnaround.
Ms. Trapnell said that she had advised the board to take the step because it was not clear the theater could meet its obligations for the rest of the season.
“I just thought we need to stop and regroup and figure out what it’s going to take to do next year and raise the money to do that, rather than kill ourselves to be back at zero in January,” Ms. Trapnell said.
Some employees will be given two weeks’ notice, and some will be laid off immediately, with severance. The theater’s current production, of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” will close on Sunday as scheduled.
In mid-February, Intiman announced an emergency fund-raising campaign and said that it needed to raise $500,000 by the end of March and another $500,000 by September to stay open. On March 31, it said that, even though it had only raised $450,000 so far, it would continue the season.
But only after that, apparently, did Ms. Trapnell have a chance to look closely at the theater’s revenue projections, which she decided were unrealistic. She said she made the recommendation to cancel the season now because actors were about to start arriving to begin rehearsals for Intiman’s next production, and she was not sure the theater could pay them through the length of the run.
Ms. Trapnell has experience in a similar situation. She led another Seattle company, A Contemporary Theater, out of a similar crisis in 2003. In that case, too, the board decided to close the theater temporarily, and she said that made her task easier. The theater ultimately reopened.
“I think the only hope is, you stop and you focus — otherwise, you just never get your head up far enough to think, and it just gets worse and worse,” she said. “You start using a lot of well-intentioned money, and then you can’t get it when you really have your head clear because you’ve broken promises too many times.”
