Town Hall FAQ

HELLO FRIENDS 

Obviously a lot has been going on at the Crowd in the last few days, and we wanted to provide a reference document to answer some of the common questions we’ve been getting and try to provide some answers.

WHAT HAPPENED?
We learned this weekend that the city believes our space does not comply with building codes. We do not want to take risks with our friends, patrons, producers, and performers, so we decided to cancel all shows in the space. It was not an easy decision for us to make, and echo the sentiment shared by much of the community - heartbreak. 

WHATS NEXT?
The most truthful answer at this time is still unfortunately: we don’t know. We know with certainty we will not be able to continue operation at our Broadway location.  The board met Monday night and talked. Our impulse is to continue in the direction we had already been exploring, moving to a new space with more resources available to support our community. For some time now, it’s felt like we might want to do more than what our Broadway space could allow and we would like to take the next step toward our forever home.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR US
Frankly, we were blindsided by these events, and we’ve been just as shocked as many of you have been. We put so much of ourselves into the space, and are upset that we won’t be able to give our old home a proper send off.  The outpouring of love, support, and appreciation has left us floored. Thank you to everyone that let this place become special to them. It’s been an incredible journey so far.

WILL THERE BE A GOODBYE THING?
We’re planning on hosting a Bring Your Own Toast (BYOT) night at Logan Square Improv on Sunday, March 15th at 8PM.

IS THERE A TIMELINE?
No, not yet. The move is something that we had decided on earlier in 2019, but our most optimistic timeline was October 2020. We can’t say yet whether these events have kickstarted or delayed our timeline. On one hand, one of our biggest bottlenecks with the move has been maintaining the general operation of theater in addition to pursuing developmental plans. On the other hand, we aren’t sure if this move was something we were capable of doing. Either way, a lot is up in the air and we are currently working on finding an equilibrium by addressing all of our immediate concerns. We've always valued transparency and community so please know that as soon as we have more information we'll get it out to you.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR OUR STAFF
Well, without an operational business we don’t necessarily have ‘staff’ anymore, so our payroll will be suspended for the time being, and everyone involved has been notified. The silver lining, is that this was no ones primary livelihood, so we should all land on our feet. Our board will be meeting more regularly for the next few weeks while we continue to figure things out.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PRODUCERS
A handful of other venues have offered to help our shows find a new home in the meantime, if you’re a producer reading this and need help finding a space please get in touch with us. Producers will get any deposit we have held refunded. We believe we’ve reached out to all of our producers, but its been a crazy weekend and we’ve been in crisis-mode for a long time.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE CO-OP
The Co-op has the benefit of being the Crowd’s most portable piece of programming, and over the seasons we’ve had shows occur all over the city. As such, we plan on running another season soon, and once we’ve solidified our game plan for our future we’ll communicate details about the Co-op. Due to its flexibility and sustainability, the Co-op will be the primary piece of programming we are able to produce while looking into new spaces, so it’s not going anywhere (for long). Get on our the Co-op mailing list here! 

WHAT THIS MEAN FOR OUR PATRONS
For the time being, we’ll be continuing our Patreon, although expect some changes to happen in the near future, and know that any fundsunds contributed to the Patreon will be put toward the move and relocation. In the event we aren’t able to materialize our plan, we’ll be donating all of our assets to like-minded organizations and charities.

HOW YOU CAN HELP
We wish we had really concrete ways people could help us, but for the time being we’re still trying to get our feet back on solid ground. We will be putting together a capital campaign in the near future, and your support will be invaluable, and frankly necessary if this is going to happen.  Short term things we’ve talked about doing that you could help with:

• Turning our Instagram and Facebook into meme accounts. So DM us memes.

• Adding more people to our board of directors or forming a larger associate board to hlp inform the direction of the Crowd and land us in a new home. If you’re interested, let us know.

• Putting together a yearbook with head shots, photos, and anecdotes. If you’ve got experience with something like this, we’d love to have a hand.

Until then, just keep the spirit alive. Get on our mailing list. This isn’t the end of the road, just a bump in it.

The Research is In!

By: Andrew Tavin

The research is in! Attending “That’s So Tavin” leads to a 37% increase in good mojo. While the positive correlation between “good mojo” and attending “That’s So Tavin” has long been documented, a definitive link has long eluded researchers. Until now. 

Scientists at Harvard’s internationally renowned Mojo Lab recently published the results of the largest peer-reviewed mojo study. Researchers assigned one group to watch “That’s So Tavin,” the acclaimed one man variety show featuring stand up, multiple game shows, a walking tour of New Orleans, a financial advice seminar, and more. Meanwhile, the control group was placed in an empty theater at the same temperature for an equivalent period of time. 

Within six months, subjects who had attended “That’s So Tavin,” were all asked out by their respective crushes, found a combined total of $324,795 on the street, and had good mojo” ratings 37% higher when compared to the control group. Additionally, every member of the control group died in various cartoon accidents as wacky as they were tragic. Falling anvils, running into a cliffside that they had earlier painted to resemble a desert highway, and additional events of that nature. 

“It is clear that attending ‘That’s So Tavin’ at the Crowd Theater on Saturday, March 14th at 8:00 PM is highly advisable,” urged Mojo Lab founder Dr. Sarah Moore. “It should also be noted that attendees have the chance to win fabulous prizes by competing in the various game shows offered during the performance and that the venue is BYOB.”

Moore’s team is currently planning further research to find out if multiple viewings of “That’s So Tavin” lead to increased mojo benefits, or if the effect is more limited.

House Teams // The Residency

In the last two years I rediscovered my love of reading. I started with The Name of the Wind, then made my way through The Storm Light Archive, and now have found myself two years later wrapping up The Wheel of Time, a fourteen book fantasy epic comprised of some 12,000 pages (also, amazon is adapting it for TV and the cast is HOT.) Most people that come into my Conversation Zone™ over the last year have heard me ramble about the series. Conversations, ultimately ending in the question: what is the series about? Which, frankly, is a very difficult thing to encapsulate. Shockingly, there’s actually a reason the series is fourteen books, it could probably have been cut down to maybe 11 or 12 books. But, most of the series is important for understanding and contextualizing the entirety of the series, the characters actions, their motivations, and so on. Circling back around to the question at hand -  what is the series about? The series follows the Dragon Reborn on their preordained journey, which is writ on the Age Lace and woven into the Pattern of Ages by the turning of the Wheel of Time, to Tarmon Gaidon - or the Last Battle, in which the Dragon Reborn must face off with the Dark One himself. The Dragon reborn must seal the Dark One away or else he will have his way and see the complete annihilation of the Pattern, and with it all of existence. 

Which is basically nonsense. 

The story itself is the journey, which you can’t really capture in a logline, even a very long one comprised of mostly Seuss-ian gibberish.  The point I’m getting to here is the journey. The Crowd has come a long way in the last year and it’s time to start to digest some of that journey. We’ve had successes and we’ve made mistakes, but each of these is an invaluable part of the journey leading us to where we are today. A necessity one might say. The short of it - the logline, if you will - is this: we’re ending the House Team Program. 

Let’s look at the journey and reasons for why we’re doing this, and then of course, examine the destination. In board and manager meetings we’ve talked at length about the program, the pros and cons. We’ve compared it what what we initially set out to do with it, and what it has seemed to have done. I am ever the optimist and politically identify as a Utopian Futurist, but sometimes my idealism and optimism blind me to the proof in the pudding of so many other similar programs. Our intentions with creating the House Team Program were the following:

• Challenge the conventions of other House Team Programs

  • Create space for concepts outside of standard improv teams.

  • Pay our coaches so performers don’t have to. 

• Give artists more license and ownership over the space.

• Provide a space for more tenured folks to fit into the fabric of the Crowd.

We’ll put a pin in those for now, but I wanted to remind myself, and you too, Dearest Reader, of why we created this program to begin with. Now I want to look at why we aren’t going to be continuing the program:

• We don’t have the resources to properly administer the program.

  • We had to stop funding our coaches.

  • The administrative toll was far higher than anticipated.

• We don’t feel it’s in line with the Crowd’s brand. 

I’ll dissect each of these points further down below.

Resource Management

We’ve encountered a few stumbling blocks over the last year, the first of which, and most importantly - licensing. We had been working with a number of great, far too generous, and thoughtful professionals, architects and lawyers to finalize our Performing Arts Venue license. After three years of rigmarole, paperwork and trips to city hall, the gavel has panged and the jury is out. Our beloved 3935 N. Broadway location will not be able to be licensed without considerable renovations, including a rework of the HVAC, construction of a foyer at the top of the stairs as well as installation of a door, construction of an additional bathroom, and those were just the first three items listed before I stopped reading because we were already priced out. All this to say, if we’d like to stick to our original ambitions of creating something permanent and lasting, a space that can be self sufficient, it won’t be where we are now. We don’t necessary have to move, but we can’t stay here.  

Why do I tell you this, when we haven’t even figured it out what we’re going to do? Especially considering I was advised not to talk about the move until we finalize a location. 

Context. Journey.

This move is presenting with tremendous work load, but an equally tremendous opportunity. This move could be what sets the Crowd up for long term prosperity and self sustainability. Basically, it’s a big question mark. We’ve got a number of irons in the fire, are hoping to be able to begin making some announcements in 2020, but for now know that we’re working on it. 

Further, as outlined in our previous financial disclosure (read more here), our finances weren’t as resilient as we believed them to be. We can’t afford the budget we set out to alot for the program, which has caused us to tighten our belts in other areas, and was the first red flag that something was amiss. We were optimistic about our first foyer into grant writing this year, and taking full advantage of 501(c)3, but have had mixed luck. We have no problem saying it, we are a 3/10 business, and a 11/10 comedy venture. We’re trying to find some marriage between the two, creating a more professional realized business. We’re aware of our shortcomings and are working to shore them up. We even went and got a business mentor, his name is Asher and he’s hella balls-to-the-wall awesome. 

Finally, the program introduced a whole slew of issues we hadn’t planned on. I typically like to estimate how much work will be, and then double it. In experience, this has been a safe estimate. This time, my intuition failed me and I have done some re-calibrations since. The issues, without going into too much detail, stem from ownership. The Crowd has responsibility to each of these teams to serve as a facilitator, mediator, and director for these teams. I had hoped things would be easy, but they weren’t. We’ve had more human resources issues in the single year of administering our house team program as we did the previous three years combined. We hadn’t accounted for the strain that would put on our staff (read: myself). It was a tremendous drain that was kept us pursuing other programs in earnest. 

Brand Identity

While, our lack of resources is the biggest reason for our decision, we had a discussion about brand identity. Early on, when I was working on the launch of the program a friend of mine asked something to affect of, “But why? It doesn’t really seem to fit with what ya’ll do.”

My gut reaction: They were wrong, I was right. There words made me recoil. I’m not too proud to admit that I had some imaginary mental arguments with them - but at the end of the day, there was a lot of truth in what they said. It’s a little incongruous with the rest of what we do.

As many people know, I have no love for auditions, and they have no love for me. I have never been on a harold team. In a decade of auditioning I can count on one finger the number of times I have been cast. The process is never fun. It encourages systematic propriety (hierarchy). And propriety is something I have a great disdain for. We set out to create a space for all the weird-o’s, non-conformist, marginalized, and other wise left behind people. We set out to create a space for anyone with sincere interest, fine character, and genuine enthusiasm regardless of any other quality about them. The audition process is punishing and can easily turn people away; people will rebuttal with ‘rejection being part of the business,’ and i’f you can’t tolerate rejection, you aren’t going to make it.’

I guess, I’m left wondering - does it have to be? We have a proposition, which we’ll get to at our destination. But we have a little bit more Journey to go. 

Ultimately, it comes back to this essential question: How do we do the most good with what we have? What is the best recipe with the very finite quantity of time, money, and motivation we have? How can we best serve our community and mission? And, unfortunately, that perfect recipe doesn’t include a House Team Program administered by us at this point in our journey. 

Where are we going? How can we still stay true to those noble intentions that we set out, while staying with-in both our means and identity? How do we invest in those that invest in us? 

Here’s our solution. We’d like to introduce The Residency. 

Beginning in November, the Crowd will be offering Residency to indie teams, to play in our Resident Night on Fridays at 10PM. The Residency Program will be overseen by our new SHADOW TRIBUNAL which is comprised of a representative from each of our current Resident Teams - Carlos Cerutti from Cozy, Brandi Harris from Black Cat, Tyler Malec from Teenage Nicholas, Chris Hanley from Lo-Fi Beats (To Relax and Study To), and Meghan McGuire from FiasCO!

Submissions are open and available on our website.

The first official Resident Night will be Friday, November 1st at 10PM at the Crowd Theater.

Salud my dudes,

Dillon

post script
This is a decision I have fretted over for months. We launched this program as an experiment;I launched this program to dabble in curation. We had noble intentions, but were not able to meet our goals. I was not able to deliver what I promised to the letter, and for that I am sorry. I am not a welcher, and would hate to be thought of as one, but this program ran too personal a toll. I have unfortunately not found it in me to separate my own personal ego from the enterprise. Every departure from a team affects me personally, and I can’t help but think of it as a reflection of myself. This decision was made with the best intentions, and I will inevitably spend the next few weeks of distressed that I’ve upset a lot of my good friends. While the fault may not be entirely ours, the responsibility is. I am sure this will be met by a great variance of responses from outrage to understanding, but I implore you Dearest Reader, to read this with the latter - and know that we believe this the best decision for the everyone involved.

Continued reading:
Original House Team Announcement and Digest