Running Home

By Jamie Swinnerton
Tompkins Weekly

 

After 11 seasons without a home base, performing wherever there was space to be found, the local children’s community theater company Running To Places is finally settling down. Since the company started it has performed across the county in school auditoriums, as well as at professional places like the Kitchen Theatre. Each time moving in the set, packed up tight in a van, and setting it up just days before the performance, just to dismantle and pack it back up almost as soon as the last curtain hit the stage.

The days of vagabonding are over. Now, Running to Places (RTP) is running home to take over what used to be several of the old movie theaters in the Shops at Ithaca Mall, currently being used to store the mall’s holiday decorations.

“I always imagined that we would be homeless forever,” said RTP’s artistic director Joey Steinhagen at the June 9 unveiling event. “It’s been getting to the point where every time we have to move to a new place it takes a toll.”

The company’s goal, Steinhagen said, is to constantly focus, and re-focus, on the kids of RTP. Finding a permanent home eliminates a lot of the time and work it takes just to put on each show. That’s time and energy that can now be reinvested in all of the kids that participate and have found a home in the free, local theater company.

The space in the mall, which was once a movie theater before the current Regal Cinema theater moved in, has been on RTP’s radar for about two years. Back when RTP was going to put on The Little Mermaid with about 50 middle school-aged children, Steinhagen kept looking for a space to host the show, up until about three weeks before opening night. Just in time, the former Sears location was identified as a performance space and a stage was built, but it wasn’t permanent.

“While we were there we sort of did proof-of-concept that the mall, in general, is a great place,” said Steinhagen. “We became aware of the fact that this space is here. We couldn’t do anything about it at the time.”

But ever since that first encounter RTP has been in talks with the mall about eventually making it the company’s permanent home.

The mall location comes with a number of benefits including lots of parking and plenty of shops and food vendors for parents to visit while their kids are practicing. By taking over what used to be four movie theaters worth of space, RTP has a foundation to build its dream theater without having to start from scratch. The area is already equipped with bathrooms, “they need some love, but they exist’” Steinhagen told the crowd at the unveiling event. Just one less thing RTP doesn’t have to pay to install. What used to be the projection booth running the span of all the theaters will be turned into the orchestra booth. On either side of the stage will be much-coveted wing space, dressing rooms, office space, and a big empty room that can be used for whatever the company needs, sometimes it could be rehearsal space and sometimes it could be a green room. Those that attended the unveiling were shuffled to the back of the mall’s food court to find the event. But, once built, the theater will have its own entrance from the outside of the building.

 

The only thing sitting in this new space is potential. The potential for bigger shows that run longer, the potential for community collaboration, the potential for education in the aspects of theater not always seen on the stage.

“I think about the kids who are interested not in performing but in, for example, lighting, Steinhagen said. “We have no means to teach them lighting design because we don’t have lights, let alone a place to do it. And when we are in a theater it’s for five one-week periods over the course of a year and there’s the pressure of just getting the show done, so there’s not a lot of time for teaching and learning, experimenting.”
Currently, RTP is in the fundraising stage. But it isn’t starting from the very beginning with the new space announcement. Already, according to the GiveGab page, the company has raised $94,498 of it’s $150,000 goal, as of this writing. Much of this was collected through donations from the company’s network of generous supporters, some through local grants that will also be made over several years. The goal is to raise the $150,000 by the end of the summer, start the renovations on September 1, and be ready to host the first show of the season in December. Past RTP seasons have all started in January, mostly because theaters and auditoriums are booked in December.

At the June 9 event to announce the space, Steinhagen not only introduced the new RTP home to the media, but also to the many local kids who have found and fallen in love with the company. While announcing the shows for next season, the future auditorium full of next seasons actors could not stop cheering. The next season will run from December 2018 to August 2019 and the lineup will include: Newsies, Annie, Alice in Wonderland Jr. (a show specifically for middle-school aged children), The Wiz, and Mamma Mia.

While the capital campaign aims to raise $150,000, anything over that will allow the company to pursue upgrades and ideas that were scheduled for years down the line when the money was saved for them. Because RTP is a local kid’s theater company, as Steinhagen pointed out, it can save money in places where other, professional theatres cannot. Newfield High School will soon be renovating its auditorium. Can RTP buy those auditorium seats at a discount price? Yes, yes it can. Could the Kitchen Theatre? Probably not. But saving this money means the company can put what it saves to good use in other areas.

“We want to keep the money where it belongs, which is doing whatever it takes to keep it free,” Steinhagen told the gathered crowd.
Several of the pledges that the company has already received are multi-year pledges which will help the company stay stable and sustainable knowing it will have the money to pay the rent in future years. Now, the company is turning to the community that created and supported Running To Places to help create what comes next.