By Kevin Zimmerman
Theater producer Sean Williams has a theory as to how the two biggest outer boroughs developed into distinct artistic centers outside Manhattan — it’s the subway system.
Artists, unable to afford the escalating costs of the Lower East Side, hopped the L train and made their way into Brooklyn, Williams said.
The same logic explains how Queens developed into the home of the city’s acting set.
“The 7 train goes right into the theater district,” Williams said. “There are a lot of actors who live in Astoria, Long Island City and Sunnyside.”
When Williams’ Queens-based theater company, Gideon Productions, started out 14 years ago, most of the borough’s actors were still taking the subway into Times Square for work. A few of the more adventurous ones might have headed to Brooklyn, but they definitely didn’t stay local.
“The independent theater scene was not reaching into Queens at all,” Williams said.
Today, Queens’ Off-Off Broadway options have increased tenfold, with companies like Gideon, Flux, Vampire Cowboys, Boomerang, Variations and Titan consistently producing the caliber of shows that audiences once needed to ride the 7 train to experience.
Although Titan Theatre Co. started out performing Shakespeare in The Cave and The Creek comedy club on Jackson Boulevard, the Queens Theatre recently tapped the group to be its new resident company.
“They have a fantastic Off-Off Broadway energy,” Taryn Sacramone, Queens Theatre managing director, said. “They have a wonderful, scrappy spirit. It’s a great thing to have here in the building.”
If Titan’s artistic director, Lenny Banovez, had concerns about leaving LIC for Flushing Meadows Corona Park, he does not acknowledge them.
“When we moved further into Queens, everyone said we were nuts,” Banovez said. “We thought the opposite.”
The offer made sense to Banovez, who wanted to reach a broader Queens audience. The recent run of its first Queens Theatre show, “King Lear,” seemed to accomplish just that.
“We saw a 20 percent increase in ticket sales and 35 percent of the audience was first-timers,” Banovez said. “We had people coming from Flushing and Long Island. We never had people from Long Island at one of our shows. Queens deserves this. It deserves an artistic community.”
What Queens needs, Sacramone said, is a diverse community of artists to serve this most diverse of boroughs.
Sacramone, who is finishing up her first year running the space, sees Titan as one component of her plans for the theater’s future. Queens Theatre, built as part of the 1964 World’s Fair New York State Pavilion, is capable of staging three types of programing at the same time. The large main stage theater will continue to attract touring productions of drama, dance and music of all ilks. Its smaller studio space downstairs, where Titan will set up shop, can accommodate the type of show running in any Off-Broadway theater in Manhattan. And the intimate cabaret spot is ideal for single-performer pieces or staged readings, Sacramone said.
For Sacramone, her building offers the answer to one of the biggest questions that many theater companies, especially ones just starting out, ponder — where can we perform?
“There are a lot of exciting, emerging artists in Queens, but one of the biggest struggles new theater companies face is they need a space to perform,” she said. “I have that. I have these fantastic spaces that can be used by artists in the different stages of their careers.”
With the skyrocketing costs of doing business in Manhattan — — Queens is poised to continue its growth as the place for theater, and not just in Long Island City and Astoria.
For Williams, the burgeoning Queens scene can be attributed to the city’s real estate market.
“When a producer wants to put on a show in a theater in Manhattan, they’ll pay $5,000 a week to the owner,” Williams said. “So now, say you have a three-week run and one week of rehearsals, you’re talking $16,000.”
At that level, Williams would have to sell 75 tickets each night of the run just to break even.
“We can make our own spaces,” Williams said. “You are going to see more theaters pop up along the 7 and N trains. And you’re going to have theater companies to fill them.”
In the shadow of the 7 train’s Court Square station in Long Island City, sits the Chain Theatre, home of Variations Theatre Group.
Co-founder Kirk Gostkowski, who helped open the space two years ago, said Variations toyed with the idea of becoming a Manhattan-based group. But as smaller black-box theaters shuttered, worth more as spots for new condos than original performances, Gostkowski found himself crossing the East River in search of a home.
“Variations existed since 2010 just bouncing around to different theaters, but that is no way to exist and build a base,” Gostkowski said.
He compares the growth of the independent theater scene to the earlier rise of indie cinema.
As the movie business consolidated into a handful of major studios, the smaller films that told stories geared toward a specific audience rarely received the green light, Gostkowski said.
The same thing has happened on Broadway, and to a lesser extent, Off-Broadway.
“In Manhattan you can’t take a risk,” Gostkowski said. “I still believe the real indie theater is all happening in the boroughs. And you are always going to have new things popping up with new artists, who will need a home.”
Gostkowski believes the Chain can serve as that base. His Variations will continue as the theater’s lead company, but when its schedule is dark, others will fill the stage.
“Our real goal is to have six or seven companies thriving,” he said. “Variations will have the pick of the calendar, but we will parse out (the theater) to companies we trust.”
Queens, with more than 2 million residents, definitely has the audience to support an expanding independent theater scene, Banovez said.
And as companies settle in and grow, they will be able to attract playgoers from outside the borough, he said.
“Our five-year goal is for us to be a destination for people in Queens and outside of Queens,” Banovez said. “Make the trail and people will follow.”
