New Century Theatre has fans on the edge of their seats again, for a new reason. After a quarter century of performances at Smith College, the company founded in 1991 by Sam Rush and Jack Neary is pulling up stakes and moving.
But it doesn’t yet know where.
An offer on its website promises a 20 percent discount on tickets for the 2017 season. All the company needs now is a stage. And rehearsal space. And a shop to construct scenery. And a green room.
Indeed, finding a new home that improves on what the company has long used at the Mendenhall Center for Performing Arts at 122 Green St. will be difficult. A lot of theatergoers and more than a dozen businesses that have provided sponsorship support, including the Daily Hampshire Gazette, are waiting for answers.
All that’s known so far is that New Century’s first show of the 2017 season, “Life in the (413),” will be performed at the Academy of Music in late spring. If that were to be the final show, it would be a major blow to the Valley’s creative scene. New Century’s shows have been among the best staged in any regional theater.
Rush, in a Sept. 30 Facebook post announcing the change, said his company and the college “agreed to part ways” and explained that New Century has been boxed in by limited times for rehearsal and set construction at Mendenhall. He termed it an “amicable divorce,” but the emphasis may be on the inevitable hardship of that second word.
The college was tight-lipped and legalistic when asked for details on the split: “In light of undisputed policy and contract violations, Smith College opted to discontinue its relationship with New Century Theatre, an independent organization that has contracted with the college for summer theater performance space, acting classes and related events.”
A Smith spokesman declined to detail those supposed contract violations, but added, in an email message to the Gazette, that decades of having hosted the company “does not/did not imply any administrative oversight of the program.” That kind of language leaves theater supporters wondering why the college appears determined to hold Rush’s arts enterprise at arm’s length.
Backers would be better off investing energy in helping New Century land on its feet. Rush called the challenge that lies ahead now “a leap of faith” that it had to take to enable it to grow as a professional company. The summertime use of space at Smith left New Century unable to expand into other seasons. Acting classes now in progress are held at the Northampton Senior Center. It is a dream without a home.
The company was able to expand a bit in its quarters at Smith, including adding children’s theater productions. That growth may have exacerbated its strained relations with the college.
As of now, this leap of faith has the company in mid-air, without a net.
The timing doesn’t give Rush and the theater’s board of directors much time. They’ll have to prepare for the artistic rigors of the 2017 season while tending to the bricks-and-mortar issue of where productions will be staged. If locating a new home was going to be simple, it would have happened already.
Rush told the Gazette he wants the company to remain in Northampton, but practically speaking, that may not be possible.
In a second social media post Oct. 3, Rush thanked supporters for expressing optimism — and for their devotion to the cause.
“You are such a part of the warp and weft of our summer,” one theater patron replied on Facebook. Another offered encouragement with this short post: “Blazing new territory … again!”
If that sounds dramatic, it is. In a sense, Rush and his allies face the challenge of founding a new company, again.