Out With the Show
In mid-August Duchon offered the group the vacant Matz Funeral Home at 2058 W. Belmont. It seemed like a nice fit. “This place is like no funeral home you’ve ever seen,” Scambiatterra says. “It has vaulted ceilings with sky scenes painted on. It’s beautiful. I thought, this is the perfect place for this play.”
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Duchon offered to pay for another space if the group would move, but Scambiatterra told him nothing he suggested suited their needs. “One of the spaces was above a pizza parlor,” she says, “and we’d have to build a black-box performance space–that’s not what we wanted to do.” Duchon thinks he was being more than fair: “They were paying $1,000 a month to use about 6,000 square feet, but it costs us $14,000 a month to have that building sit there. I was doing them a huge favor to begin with.”
“Things got hot,” Duchon concedes. The cops were called, and the theater’s lawyers advised them to press charges. “Now the show was disintegrating,” Scambiatterra says. “We had a very short time in which to produce it.”
Duchon says he’s glad it’s almost over. “They’re out December first. We’re moving in on the second to tear the building down.”
