"Last Shift" sold out its entire run at The Regal Theatre. The rest of the Foundry Stage Company's all-local season has drawn some of the strongest ticket sales in its history. None of that, artistic director Marisol Fennimore said Monday, was enough to offset a denied grant that has left the nonprofit theater company facing a projected $175,000 shortfall.
The Foundry Stage Company said it learned last week that it had been denied a three-year, $90,000-per-year operating grant from the Kestrel Valley Arts Trust, a regional funder the company had counted on as a stabilizing piece of its budget heading into this season. Artistic director Marisol Fennimore said the denial, combined with rising production costs tied to the company’s all-local season, has left the nonprofit facing a projected $175,000 gap for the coming fiscal year.
“I want to be clear that this isn’t about the season failing,” Fennimore said. “‘Last Shift’ sold out. Our subscriber renewals are up. This is about a company that took a real financial risk on locally written work and then lost a grant we’d built our budget projections around before we even knew the answer.”
Success on stage, strain behind it
The company’s board chair, Renata Ostroff, said the all-local season, while a clear artistic and box-office success, has proven more expensive to produce than the touring productions it replaced. New commissions like Curtis Whitlow’s “Last Shift” require paying a living playwright, building original sets from scratch rather than renting touring packages, and covering rehearsal weeks that a licensed touring script would not require.
“Every one of those costs is worth it artistically,” Ostroff said. “But they are real costs, and we built this season’s budget assuming we’d have the Kestrel Valley Arts Trust grant to help absorb them. Losing that grant doesn’t undo the season’s success. It just means the success came at a higher price than we planned for.”
We told our board this season was a financial risk before we ever opened the first show. We just didn’t expect the risk to compound with a grant denial we’d been treating as close to certain.
Marisol Fennimore, artistic director, Foundry Stage Company
Why the grant fell through
A spokesperson for the Kestrel Valley Arts Trust said the foundation received a record number of applications this cycle and could not fund every qualified request, declining to comment further on the specifics of Foundry Stage’s application. Fennimore said the company was told informally that reviewers had favorable things to say about the artistic merit of the application but that the funding pool simply did not stretch far enough this cycle.
“It’s a strange thing to be told your application was good and you still didn’t get the money,” Fennimore said. “I believe them that the pool was more competitive this year. It doesn’t change the fact that we built real financial assumptions around a grant we now don’t have.”
The company has launched an emergency fundraising appeal aimed at closing roughly half the projected gap through individual donations before the end of the season, with Ostroff saying the board will consider scaling back next season’s ambitions if the appeal falls short. Fennimore said she is reluctant to abandon the all-local programming model that has driven this season’s creative success, even under financial pressure.
Fennimore said the company has also approached the Bellwater Museum of Art, its partner on the “Last Shift” talkback series, about whether any joint programming funding might be available to help offset costs tied to that specific collaboration. Museum curator Priscilla Adeyemi said the museum is exploring a modest co-sponsorship for future talkback events but cautioned that its own budget, still absorbing the cost of the new Ironworks Wing, has limited room to expand.
“We want that partnership to continue regardless of what happens with Foundry Stage’s grant situation,” Adeyemi said. “But I’d be misleading people if I said the museum has deep pockets sitting around waiting to plug a theater company’s budget gap. We’re going to help where we can, and it won’t be enough on its own to solve this.”
- Foundry Stage Company projects a $175,000 shortfall after losing a multi-year Kestrel Valley Arts Trust operating grant.
- The company has launched an emergency fundraising appeal targeting roughly half of the projected gap.
- Board chair Renata Ostroff said the company may scale back next season’s ambitions if the appeal falls short.
“I don’t want the lesson from this to be that local work doesn’t pay for itself,” Fennimore said. “I want the lesson to be that a small nonprofit theater took a real swing at telling this city’s own stories, and now needs this city to help make sure that swing wasn’t a one-season experiment.”
Ostroff said the board will reassess the company’s finances after the fundraising appeal closes, with a decision on next season’s programming expected within the next several months. “We’re not canceling anything today,” she said. “But I’d be lying if I said every option, including a smaller season next year, is off the table.”