Spunky Gamm Theatre: on the edge, in the black

SET DESIGNER Sara Ossana, right, works with prop designer Kristina Brown on the set of “Don Carlos,” which opens at the Gamm Theatre next month. /
SET DESIGNER Sara Ossana, right, works with prop designer Kristina Brown on the set of “Don Carlos,” which opens at the Gamm Theatre next month. /

Barbara Ruttenberg has been going to the theater since she was a child on Long Island. Now 71 years old and a Providence resident, she goes to the theater a lot in Providence, in Boston and “occasionally,” she said, in New York City.
And the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket is her favorite.
“I adore the Gamm. It does what I need a theater to do for me, not to entertain me but to challenge me and my view of the world. I want the theater to make me think differently. They make me see things with new eyes,”said Ruttenberg, who is a season subscriber with no personal connection to anyone at the Gamm.
Ruttenberg apparently is not alone when it comes to appreciating the spunky little theater with a social conscience. Since 2003 when the Gamm moved from Providence, where it was founded in 1984 as Alias Stage, the number of subscribers has grown from a mere 94 to 1,853. “We are on track to meet our goal of 2,000 subscribers this year,” said Yvonne Seggerman, managing director of the Gamm.
Securing subscribers is important because the Gamm receives approximately 50 percent of its operating income from ticket sales, with the rest coming from grants and individual donations.
Seggerman and Artistic Director Anthony Estrella recently announced that, for the sixth consecutive year, the Gamm ended in the black. A modest surplus of $30,370 is left from the fiscal year ending June 30 from a $1.2 million budget. The budget, by the way, was 14 percent more than the previous year’s $1 million, so the Gamm is growing.
“There’s never going to be more money than we need,” Estrella observed. “The theater trains you very well. If you come up as an actor, you learn to do things as inexpensively as you can.”
But that doesn’t mean scrimping on sets, costumes or lighting. “That is not an option,” Estrella emphasized. “We try to create a different world. We pride ourselves on that,” he said. “You can’t minimize the impact of designers. Without designers, the theater would be pretty boring.”
In 1998, as the result of a gift from local philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein, the nonprofit theater was named for his sister Sandra Feinstein-Gamm, who died of cancer in her early 1950s.
The Gamm is located in an annex next to the Pawtucket Armory, which was formerly a garage with an oil-stained floor and no walls where Pawtucket police once stored towed cars. Today, the 137-seat theater has all the amenities you’d expect, including a box office, concession stand and a spacious lobby boasting posters from previous performances.
Those previous shows will tell you that, as Ruttenberg suggested, the Gamm revels in challenging its audience. Past acclaimed performances include “The Elephant Man,” starring an actor now with Cirque du Soleil and “Sin: A Cardinal Deposed,” about the Catholic Church sex scandal and Cardinal Bernard F. Law.
Estrella intentionally chooses edgy plays. “It goes to the success of our theater,” he said. “You have to be able to offer people something different, something they can’t get anywhere else.” In what Estrella called “a very big milestone,” the Gamm won the Eliot Norton Award from the Boston Theatre Critics Association in May of 2007 for its first-ever commission, Paul Grellong’s “Radio Free Emerson,” as outstanding new script.
Estrella is planning another blockbuster to open the 2008 season Sept. 4. He is rewriting Friedrich Schiller’s 1787 masterwork “Don Carlos,” loosely based on real events in Inquisition-era Spain, which he will direct.
Estrella, 37, was raised in Pawtucket and is a graduate of the Trinity Rep Conservatory for young actors. Seggerman also has Trinity ties; she previously worked at the Providence theater seven years as director of sales and marketing. Many of the Gamm’s core troupe of a dozen actors also are Trinity Rep Conservatory grads. •

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