Arts & Entertainment

Off B’way Playhouse Crowdsources Funds

By Juliana Guarracino

Spectrum staff

Money has gotten so tight at Off Broadway’s Theatre 80, which doubles as an East Village performance space and a community meeting house, that it has launched a Go Fund Me campaign to raise $70,000.

“When you kill the entertainment industry here, when you turn New York into a cultural wasteland, the value of living here is going to plummet,” Theatre 80’s owner, Lorcan Otway, told this reporter  as he vented his frustration about taxes and other rising costs of doing business in New York City.

The theater is at 80 St. Marks Place in a building that was constructed in the 1830s and, during Prohibition, was a speakeasy. “My father and I built Theatre 80 with our own hands, digging out the auditorium and pouring the concrete,” Otway later wrote in an email.

Shakespeare’s plays have been staged there. Theatre 80 has hosted a variety of fundraisers, including ones benefiting victims of tsunamis in Japan.

As of today, the theater’s Go Fund Me campaign has raised $3,066. The prospect of Theatre 80 closing concerns some of its loyal patrons. Clayton Patterson commented on the Go Fund Me page that the owners of Theatre 80 “are examples of people who make up the real backbone of LES [Lower East Side] culture. Theatre 80 must be saved. They have given so much back the community.”

Also on the Go Fund Me page, patron Geri Falek wrote, “I was lucky enough to grow up in a world that housed this treasure [Theatre 80]. Thanks to the Otway family and staff for years of hard work bring joy to audiences and the neighborhood …”

Patrons are not the only ones who appreciate the theater. In 2010, the Greenwich Village Society of History Preservation gave Theatre 80 its Village Award for its independent spirit, creativity and rich history. “Theatre 80 embodies so much of what we love about Greenwich Village and the East Village … ” Andrew Berman, the preservation society’s executive director, wrote in an email. “We are deeply saddened by the possibility of the theater closing, and have worked closely with the owners over the years to try to support them and keep this treasured institution’s doors open.”

Despite efforts to save historic businesses, the struggle to stay relevant and financially stable has brought many near closure. “The artistic is funded, but the operational is not,” said Marcia Pendleton, founder of Walk Tall Girl Productions, a theater development and marketing firm. “How are you going to maintain the structure that supports the work?”

With institutions like Theatre 80 facing such financial struggles, there is a threat of certain sections of New York becoming a “cultural wasteland” Otway said.

A city without theater “is like walking in a midwestern shopping mall,” Otway said. Keeping theater alive is how “the elders [are] passing the cultural torch to the next generation.”