Sharon Evans, cofounder and artistic director of Live Bait Theater, was talking to friends after a performance of her play The Tall Ships when the fire department made a surprise visit.
The city denies this, insisting that building inspections are almost entirely complaint driven. Yet in the past two years, established small theaters have received an alarming number of surprise inspections, and many of them–Stage Left, Factory Theater, Annoyance Theatre, Neo-Futurarium, Shattered Globe Theatre–must either pay for expensive renovations or go out of business. None of these spaces is a firetrap, but each failed to comply with the building code in some respect: Stage Left didn’t have an emergency lighting system, Shattered Globe needed a second in-house bathroom, and Annoyance’s front and rear fire doors weren’t large enough.
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True to the city’s story, a large number of inspections result from complaints. Martin believes that a disorderly drunk he ejected from Stage Left two years ago lodged a complaint to get back at the theater. And the theaters seem to be each other’s worst enemies. “The city told us that a lot of the complaints come from other theaters,” says Halperin. “The inspectors might be in one space and say the exit lights are not good, and the theaters say, ‘What do you mean? This other theater doesn’t have proper exit lights,’ and so on. It’s like in school, where if you do something, you say, ‘Well, these other kids do that too.’ That only gets the whole class in trouble with the teacher.” Pudil confirms that Shattered Globe was ratted out by another company: “When we went downtown after our inspection revealed an electrical violation, the woman at City Hall admitted the complaint about our space had been submitted by another theater. She said, ‘It’s a shame. I think it’s really low that the city nails a theater for something and they start squealing on everyone else.’”
