The Garage Theatre team was psyched for 2020. It was a milestone year, the big TWO-OH, a time to celebrate two decades of doing everything from slapstick and melodrama to Shakespeare and the world premiere staging of a Tom Stoppard play — and always doing it their way.
Five performances into the first show of the season, the C-word brought the festivities to a sudden halt. And after a few months of uncertainty, one thing was sure: 2020 was a bust.
“We were like everyone in the world: we thought, ‘It might be a week, might be two weeks,’” recalls Garage Theatre co-founder Eric Hamme. “Then, ‘It might be a month, might be two months.’ And then it just kept going, and in the summer it became clear it just wasn’t coming back.”
Keen to hold on to the 1,200 sq. ft. space at 7th St./Long Beach Blvd. the Garage Theatre has occupied since 2005, they kept up with their rent. (Hamme has nothing but good things to report about their landlords.) But although they’ve done alright financially over the years for a black-box theatre company, they lacked the money in reserves to weather the sort of storm that COVID-19 turned out to be.
“[The financial reality] wasn’t great,” Hamme says. “Always at the beginning of the season we put a lot of our resources into getting the season up and running. We had a little bit of money in the bank, but we really depend on that first show to get us through the rest of the year. […] We got a rather sizeable donation from a family friend that kind of carried us through the summer and fall, so we knew we were okay for a little while while we were sort of feeling out what was happening and figuring everything out. But come the winter of 2020 we knew things were bleak for us, to say the least.”
Because the Garage Theatre is a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization — no employees, no payroll — none of the small percentage of COVID-related financial assistance they were technically eligible for came through. So they were left to their own devices.
“In 20 years, we’ve never been in debt. […] We’ve never taken a loan; we don’t even have a credit card. We’ve always just operated with what we have,” Hamme says. “So the idea of getting in the hole or into debt with anybody has never been something we’ve been comfortable with. So with that [above-mentioned] donation we received, we continued to pay the full rent every month. It wasn’t until November or December when that wasn’t a reality anymore. And we had a lot of discussions [along the lines of], ‘Well, is this the end of the road? Has it run its course?’ But we decided to give it one last effort and do a fundraiser.”
The Garage’s ”Yes We Can” fundraiser (as in: YES WE CAN survive this fucking pandemic) launched on December 18, 2020. With no illusions about the financial demographics of their audience, the Garage team did not have huge expectations.
“Let’s be honest: [although] our audience is incredible — I think we have the best audience in Long Beach, and they’re very supportive — we don’t have the wealthiest audience,” Hamme says. “Which is fine. But in general asking for money has always been an uncomfortable thing for us. […] So we thought $5,000 [was enough] to get us a few months into 2021. But then we decided, ‘Look, if we’re going to ask for anything, let’s go big.’ And the response was absolutely incredible.”
Incredible as in: despite a target of $10,000, donations to “Yes We Can” ended up totaling about $25,000, which enabled the Garage to pay their entire 2021 rent in one lump sum.
“It was really nice to have that security, [to realize] that we weren’t going to lose our space and were going to get through this and figure it out as we go,” Hamme says. “We didn’t have the financial pressure that a lot of companies and organizations and people felt last year.”
Although COVID continues to make things, er, interesting, the Garage plans to resume operations on March 11 with the world premiere of Private Lives of Imaginary Friends by local playwright Ryan McClary (whose Entropy General in 2011 remains one of the best things I’ve seen in Long Beach).
“Ryan wrote this play that really captured, in a very sweet and nice way, what a lot of us have gone through [during the pandemic],” Hamme says. “It’s about loneliness, about isolation, about getting back in touch with yourself and realizing who you are and where you belong in the world.”
Despite the difficulties of the last two years, Hamme feels the struggle has helped him get a clearer view of who the Garage Theatre is how they fit in the world.“I always had visions of us growing and being bigger than what we are,” he admits. “[…] When we got [Tom Stoppard’s] Darkside, to get the world premiere of a Stoppard play and have his agent come out from England to see it and give us his stamp of approval, I thought that might have put us on the map a little, so to speak. But the truth is, as great as it was and as much as I loved it, that didn’t happen. For example, we couldn’t get the L.A. Times out [to see it]. And when it was done, we just moved on to the next show like [it had been] any other show. And on a personal level — and I’m just speaking personally — in a way it kind of took the wind out of my sails a little bit. I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know what else we could do. […] I don’t know how to take this thing to the next level.’ So we kind of took a mini-break in 2019, and I was actually really excited about our 20th anniversary season. But then having the pandemic hit and our having to completely close down was kind of a blessing in disguise. I think it was needed for everyone to step away and take a break. And over the last year-and-a-half, not only did I start to miss it, but seeing the support we got from that fundraiser made me realize that [the Garage] means something and it is important. And it doesn’t really matter what the fuck it is. It doesn’t matter how big it is, how successful it is — what it is is important, and it means something to people. […] What the response showed me that I didn’t know is that the Garage is perfect the way it is. […] I no longer feel any pressure to make it something that it’s not. I accept it as it is — and love it as it is.”
For more information on what it is and details on what they’re calling “Year XX Two Ish,” visit thegaragetheatre.org.