Theaterweek	Studio Arena's Next Act by Anthony Chase

There was no gasp of surprise when Studio Arena board president Daniel Dintino announced that the theater would be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As details of their financial woes became increasingly public, it seemed unlikely that a hero would be arriving on the horizon any time soon.

To clarify, Chapter 11 Bankruptcy is not the kind of bankruptcy where a business liquidates all of its assets, gives its creditors whatever it can and goes out of business. Chapter 11 is often called the “reorganization” bankruptcy. This is the one that airlines go in and out of as they restructure to stay in business. An arrangement is worked out with the court between the ailing business and its creditors—typically a payment schedule, often allowing repayment over a period of years. By filing Chapter 11, Studio Arena has indicated that they most decidedly are determined to stay in business. In short, Studio Arena is saying that we have not seen the final curtain.

At Monday’s press conference, both Dintino and Studio Arena CEO Kathleen Gaffney were as forthcoming as possible about the details of the proposed Studio Arena reorganization. The theater will continue to produce a reduced number of plays, probably three. In addition, Studio Arena will enter collaborations with Shea’s Performing Arts Center and Buffalo State College in order to free itself from administrative burdens and to open opportunities for artistic growth. The precise details of these arrangements? Unknown.

The day after the press conference, I spent part of the afternoon with Dean and Leslie Cohan. Dean is the son of Studio Arena legend Blossom Cohan, the vivid and indomitable publicist and die-hard Studio Arena booster who was employed at the theater for more than 40 years. Blossom’s last job at Studio Arena, which she held until her dying day, was historian and archivist. The Studio Arena archives, an expansive collection of programs, posters, press materials and photographs, dating back to the origin of the institution as Studio Theatre in the 1920s, is named the Blossom Cohan Archive.

Yesterday afternoon, I stood with Dean and Leslie and Buffalo State College Archivist Daniel DiLandro and college associate vice president and library director Maryruth Glogowski as a crew loaded the last of hundreds of boxes into the E.H. Butler Library at Buffalo State. In the first tangible expansion of the existing internship partnership between Studio Arena and Buffalo State, the college has assumed responsibility for the stewardship of the Blossom Cohan Archive and for making the artifacts of the history of Studio Arena Theatre available to scholars, researchers, theater fans and journalists “in perpetuity.”

As she is wont to do, Leslie cried. Dean beamed. The college is ecstatic.

Studio Arena no longer needs to employ an archivist and historian. The college, home as well to the Monroe Fordham Regional History Center, also has partnerships with the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, and this archival collaboration, in the works for weeks, is a logical fit. The archives of Studio Arena Theatre will now be more available and useful to scholars, to the community and even to Studio Arena Theatre itself, than they have ever been before.

Conversations continue about other possible areas of growth for this relationship. The big piece is the academic component, and this too comes at a fortuitous moment. Longtime Buffalo State Theater Department chair Donna McCarthy is retiring at the end of this academic year and Drew Kahn will step up to the plate, eager to advance his own vision for the future of the department.

The retooling of Studio Arena is woefully overdue. Indeed, grotesquely overdue. And I don’t just mean financially. The one-time pioneer of the regional theater movement had become redundant even in its own city. The prospects for its return in revitalized form are numerous and the crisis of a bankruptcy may be just what the doctor ordered. As Blossom Cohan said to me in the year before her death, “Studio Arena Theatre is about to enter a period of severe financial hardship, and you know, that will be very good for us, artistically.”

I doubt that she envisioned an actual bankruptcy, but her words could prove prophetic, nonetheless. We can all hope so.