Bringing Up the House

St. Paul's Park Square Theatre looks to complete their fundraising campaign by doing what it does best -- putting on a great show

Park Square Theatre is reaching the end of a five-year, $4.2 million fundraising campaign they hope will allow them to build a new 200-seat stage.

Image credit: Courtesy Park Square Theatre

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Big Dreams, Big Show, Big Success

By: Lauren Peck

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series on theater venues in St. Paul that are writing new chapters for themselves. Future stories will look at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which is adding a new concert hall to its space, and The Penumbra Theatre, which was recently forced to cancel two of its spring shows due to financial reasons. See our complete guide to St. Paul’s spring theater activity here.

Park Square Theatre is entering its final act.

After remodeling its existing theatre space and expanding its programming, theatre leaders are moving into the final phase of their ambitions $4.2 million Next Stage Campaign – the construction of a new 200-seat thrust stage at its Historic Hamm Building in St Paul.

To get there, the theatre company is doing precisely what it’s been doing for the last 36 years: gathering a talented group of actresses to put on a great show. Nora and Della Ephron's play Love, Loss and What I Wore will be staged on Monday, Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m. featuring some of the area’s best known performers – Sally Wingert, Mo Perry, Virginia Burke and Aditi Kapil.

The event was organized by actress Linda Kelsey, co-chair of the theatre’s five-year fundraising initiative, the Next Stage Campaign. The benefit won't have a set ticket price, but will instead ask people to pay what they can.

Kelsey says she hopes the performance will help Park Square’s audiences feel "involved in a tangible way" with the fundraising campaign, instead of simply mailing a check. Kelsey is driven by her own connection to the venue, but acknowledges this is a different kind of experience for an actor.

"Actors, we do our thing, and we rarely intersect with people who make theater possible," Kelsey says. "On the committee, I get to do that, and it's very moving and humbling for me."

Park Square leaders have also been humbled by their fundraising initiative, which they say is about 80 percent complete.

Michael-jon Pease, the director of external relations at Park Square Theatre, says the recession made what was to be a three-year effort into a five-year campaign and that donors have been more reluctant to give in lean times.

"We've haven't heard 'no,' just 'not right now,'" Pease says. "We've also had more multi-year pledges spread out over more years because of economic uncertainty."

The difficulties are not for lack of popularity. Park Square has the third-largest subscriber base in its market and, according to Pease, has been seeing an ever-growing number of guests in recent years.

"What we're doing artistically has fueled the buzz," he says. "We've had more and more high-caliber artists in the past five years and such interesting projects for them; it's drawing audiences."

When that audience will get to see a new stage remains uncertain, but Pease says the hope is to open in either January 2013 or September 2013, depending on whether the theater decides they want to have a complete season in the new space.

In the future, both Pease and Kelsey hope that Park Square will not only continue to produce the great artistic work it's already known, but continue to stay relevant and attract new audiences.

"We want to be imbedded in the cultural life of the Twin Cities," Pease says. "We want people to think: 'Park Square, that's a place for me.'"

+ Park Square Theatre’s Love, Loss and What I Wore will be staged at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 13. For more information visit parksquaretheatre.org.