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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2008 > July > 17
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Long Center budget update
Reports that the new $77 million Long Center for the Performing Arts is facing budget shortfalls are wrong, Long Center executive director Cliff Redd said.
“We’ve said all along that revenues from ticket sales and facility rentals will not cover all the costs of running the Long Center each year,” Redd said. “Like every other non-profit, we have to raise money every year.”
The Long Center’s current annual budget is $8.8 million. Redd said preliminary projections indicated earned income from endowments, ticket sales and rental fees would cover all but $1.5 million.
However about $500,000 in additional parking and security costs have upped the figure to $2 million, Redd said. Insufficient public parking at the city-owned parking garage adjacent Palmer Events Center garage has meant that additional traffic control and security personnel are needed for each event. “We weren’t expecting to have to shoulder those additional expenses,” Redd said. “But we’ve already started fundraising for it.”
Published reports also said that Long Center had asked the city for money. However Redd said the Long Center, like dozens of other Austin arts organizations, has simply applied for funding through the city’s cultural funding program for the first time. The cultural arts funding contracts are announced in September. Last year, the city awarded a total of $5.5 million to Austin arts groups. Among the largest cultural contracts were $150,000 to Ballet Austin and $146,000 to Paramount Theatre. The Long Center has applied for $200,000.
In April, a massive traffic and parking snarl left opera-goers tangled with people headed to a reggae festival on Auditorium Shores adjacent to the center. The 1,200-space city-owned Palmer Events Center garage — which serves the Palmer and Long centers. With additional parking spaces in nearby city-owned garages at Town Lake Center and One Texas Center, both on Barton Springs Road, there are a total of 2,254 spaces available.
The Dell Hall, the Long Center’s main venue, has 2,400 seats. The Long Center’s Rollins Studio Theatre can accommodate up to 240 people. Estimated peak capacity for the Palmer Events Center is 6,000, according to the city.
Built to replace the city-owned 1959 Palmer Auditorium, the Long Center was built by a private non-profit organization started by backers of the Austin Lyric Opera, Austin Symphony Orchestra and Ballet Austin in order to give those organizations a permanent performance venue. The $77 million raised for the new center came entirely from private donations.
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Review: “The Clean House”
What’s not to find charming about Sarah Ruhl’s “The Clean House,” the delicate and soulful comedy now getting a whip-smart production at Zach Theatre?
Ruhl manages to translate to the stage the kind of magical realism usually found only on the page. In the world she crafts, absurdity becomes the norm, metaphor and imagination morph into reality and forgiveness is not only possible, but the actual path to peace and happiness.
And, oh, yes — it is possible to die laughing from the best joke in the world.
Lane (Lauren Lane) and Virginia (Barbara Chisholm) are two uptight middle-age sisters — both childless, both driven and compulsive, both ultimately unhappy. Lane is a successful doctor whose life is carefully circumscribed by her demanding career and her equally successful doctor husband. Virginia is a housewife who, out of boredom, compulsively cleans.
Entering into this sterile world — wonderfully realized by set designer Michael Raiford with minimal ultra-white and clear acrylic furnishings — is Mathilde (Smaranda Ciceu), a Brazilian woman in her twenties who has been employed by Lane as a housekeeper. Only the problem is, Mathilde gets depressed when she cleans. Daughter of “the two funniest people in Brazil,” it’s up to her to now by the funniest person in Brazil and so Mathilde longs to come up with the best joke in the world.
But when Virginia makes a deal with Mathilde to secretly clean Lane’s house so long as Mathilde pretends to do it, worlds begin to collide. And when Lane’s husband Charles (Tom Green) proclaims that he has found his true soulmate in an older yet life-loving woman named Ana (Alicia Kaplan), everyone’s carefully-constructed world unravels. Ruhl’s gift as a playwright is her subtle shifting between classic comedic realism and wonderfully imaginative flights of fancy. Brilliant and clever punch lines surprise. But then so do surreal dream-like scenes. A trip to Alaska to retrieve a cancer-curing tree? Sure, why not.
Lane and Chisholm are perfectly in synch as a comedic duo, each actress bringing loads of complexity and nuance to their terribly unhappy characters. As Mathilde, Ciceu charms with a combination of innocence and supreme wisdom.
Director Dave Steakley keeps a delicate hand on it all, leaving Ruhl’s sparkling script to sparkle on its own merits.
After all, it would be a shame to upset the balance of such an oddly balanced and charming world view.
“The Clean House” continues 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Whisenhunt Stage, Zach Theatre, 1510 Toomey Road. $28-$37 ($15 on Wednesdays). 476-0541, www.zachscott.com.
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