WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Look out, Bloomington! A new theater production company has just hit the scene, and this one is stirring up waves in the service industry. How? By putting the troupe first.
Off-Night Productions is a newly formed theater company that has the goal of making local theater more accessible to Bloomington residents. Off-Night is the culmination of years of discussions around how to make the local theater industry less of a burden to perform in. Aubrey Seader, co-producer and actor in ‘Proof’, said Off-Night’s goal is allow actors to get roles and lucrative shifts at their day jobs.
“After I graduated with my undergraduate, I primarily worked in food service, so my best nights of the week to make money were Thursday through Sunday afternoon. So if. . . I was cast in a great role, I always had to make this decision, ‘Was I going to take the role, or was I going to make money for all of those weeks that I was going to be performing and rehearsing,’” Seader said.
The concept of Off-Night Productions was formulated by Seader’s mother, who is also a co-producer on the production. Other than making the process of putting on a play easier for participants’ bank accounts, Off-Night’s goal is to give women and women-presenting people a chance to be part of the decision making process in Bloomington’s local theatre production companies.
The process of getting a play from conception to execution can take months, and often there are logistical hurdles to clear before anything can be done, namely obtaining the rights. Obtaining the rights to a theater production are vastly different from the movie studio model of obtaining rights through a legal process and paying royalties.
“We bought the rights to the play ‘Proof’ from the Dramatist’s Play Service, and they are probably the largest purveyor of rights. . . When I picked ‘Proof’, I looked it up. . . and you can read through what the agreement is that the playwright and their trust have set. . . David Auburn is still around and able to monitor his trust and the rights of his play. . . For some plays, they have very specific things they want you to do and want you to use. . . Famously, there is a play called Waiting for Gadot, where you cannot not have a specific tree in the play. . For David Auburn’s ‘Proof’, we purchased rights per night. So there was a price for purchasing the rights to a play, and then you pay a fee per number of performances,” Seader said.
Another element that sets Off-Night Productions apart is their unique ability to reuse and store old sets for later productions. Traditional theater productions use staples or glue to make sets easier to move around in a quick timespan. The cost to build sets light is losing a lot of material in the process. Another big obstacle other production companies run into when attempting to store their sets is simply a lack of storage options. Cassie Hakken, the Director of ‘Proof’ enlightened WFHB on how Off-Night adapts to this challenge.
“I’m so glad that it’s one of the core values of Off-Night Productions. . . Theater across the board can be a very wasteful industry. .. I know locally a lot of the challenge for pretty much all companies in town is just a lack of storage space. A lot of time a company might want to save a set or save a ton of platforms, but they just can’t because they don’t know when the next time they’ll use it will be, and it’s so expensive to pay for a whole storage unit. So usually they’ll try to save stuff that’s the most frequently used like furniture and things like that. . . But it’s great that Off-Night has storage capabilities and that Melinda [Seader] is so savvy with conserving all of the materials we use,” said Hakken.
With a production starting in February of 2023, consisting of getting rights approved, building sets, and numerous technical aspects, Off-Night’s production of ‘Proof’ has had a long road getting to where it’s at now. From navigating actors schedules, to acquiring repurposed materials from other sets, Off-Night is a labor of love for theater and a fresh take on the world of live theater performance.
Off-Night Productions performance of David Auburn’s ‘Proof’ will be hosted by the Waldron Firebay Theatre through July 16-18 at 7 p.m.
