Theater group partners with Artists’ Exchange

A HOME: Kevin Broccoli, Epic Theatre Company founder, runs the one-man operation, which just became the Artists’ Exchange’s first-ever resident company. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERSSON
A HOME: Kevin Broccoli, Epic Theatre Company founder, runs the one-man operation, which just became the Artists’ Exchange’s first-ever resident company. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERSSON

The Epic Theatre Company has found a home at Cranston’s nonprofit Artists’ Exchange, stepping in this month as the exchange’s first-ever resident theater company.
The Artists’ Exchange, which had opened its Black Box Theatre at 50 Rolfe Square and nearby Theatre 82 to Epic founder and producer Kevin Broccoli in the past, came up with the idea of the residency this summer. Gateways to Change Inc., of Warwick, is the exchange’s parent organization.
Hosting of the venture seemed to make sense, said Elaine McKenna-Yeaw, the director of the Artists’ Exchange and Theatre 82. The exchange has the space, and Broccoli is a proven commodity.
“The Artists’ Exchange is our business venture and it’s a community arts center with a dual mission of providing arts to the community and also integrating adults with disabilities into everything we do,” she said. “His shows do very well, and whenever he’s done a show for us, we’ve done very well.”
The informal arrangement will continue “as long as it works,” she said.
The exchange operates with a budget of less than $500,000, she said. The Black Box Theatre seats 35, while Theatre 82 seats 110.
With the new arrangement, Broccoli’s theater company, a one-man operation which uses available volunteer actors, directors, marketers and a production manager, has “access to and use of all our space,” said McKenna-Yeaw. “We do a 50-50 split for shows. And he helps promote shows with the box office. ”
The exchange won’t charge Epic fees or rent, she added.
Broccoli jokingly described his theater company as “me and four folding chairs. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek because we never had any money or anything.”
A full-time librarian at the Johnston Public Library by day, he started the theater company at Rhode Island College in 2005, producing shows but purposely staying out of the limelight. He will act or write for other theater companies, but not his own.
This past fall, the theater company began putting on programming more regularly, with almost a show a month between November and August. Some of the past shows, including John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” in February and Sarah Ruhl’s “Passion Play” in 2012 were presented at the Zabinski Music Studio in Pawtucket at the Hope Artists’ Village. Epic’s and the exchange’s first joint venture is a Sept. 13-28 run of “A Behanding,” a four-character play about a con artist’s botched scheme by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. Shows have been planned through the end of the year, she said. If Broccoli is not always using the space, the exchange will book something else, she added.
The exchange will promote itself on its website, with weekly email blasts, and newspaper and magazine ads, as well as the distribution of fliers to local schools, she said.
In addition, with the help of singer/songwriter Christine Lavin, who has performed at Theatre 82, the exchange is booking both local and national acts, including Vespers, a Kentucky folk rock and Christian band, and Don White, a singer/songwriter and comedian from Massachusetts, McKenna-Yeaw said.
The next step for the small theater company might logically be to apply for nonprofit status, but Broccoli has decided to stick with a more basic business model: splitting earnings with his host as he better defines his company’s intrinsic, marketable identity.
“In the past couple years, a lot of theaters have opened up and fast-tracked the [nonprofit] mode. So the benefits for that have dwindled. But one of the things I always said we’re striving to do is sustainable theater, where one show can pay for the next show, so that the show is supporting itself.”
Broccoli has a few areas where he plans to focus, including offering plays about women’s issues, LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered) issues and politics.
“I want to make sure we have a real identity as a company, as a business,” he said. •

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