Final Curtain

John Manfredi and Suzi Regan reopened the Network in August 2014, three months after the board of directors closed the deeply indebted theater for the first time. With Manfredi as executive director and Regan as artistic director, they produced top-notch productions for a season and a half, but still struggled financially.

In October, they launched an emergency appeal for $50,000. Many artists and some audience members responded with small donations that got them close to the goal and kept the theater open though December. But attempts to bring out the big donors failed.

“Our last pitch to a significant philanthropic donor in the arts was met with ‘I promised myself I would never ever give money to the Network again,’ from a guy who could have written a check for the whole debt and not blinked,” says Manfredi. “That was a consistent message since we started. Combine that with our refusal to sell subscriptions for next year without more funding for this year, and the theater was not sustainable.”

They couldn’t even borrow money. They’d made significant headway paying debts to the IRS, the state, and the actors’ union, and even paid down more than a quarter of a bank loan inherited from the prior administration–but nobody wanted to get behind the IRS and the state in a collection line. “Not only did the previous regime spend the employer portion of payroll taxes but the portion they deducted from people’s salaries,” Manfredi says.

Former executive director Carla Milarch says she wasn’t involved in finances the last two years or so, after becoming associate artistic director, and can’t comment; Erin Sabo, the last managing director, says she “would prefer not to comment on PNT anymore because at a certain point I was being vilified and not any one person is to blame. I wish everyone involved only the best out of life.”

Regan says even board members didn’t know how broke the theater was when they closed it the first time. They had been told the debt was about $300,000; it turned out to be more than $450,000. Manfredi says that when he and Regan walked into the building, they found twelve registered letters from the IRS that nobody had responded to.

“The first time they got caught with [unpaid] payroll taxes, the donors jumped in and helped them out,” says Regan. “The second time, a couple of people jumped in. Unpaid bills from the IRS was only the beginning of the mountain of unpaid bills we discovered. There appeared to be a lot of fudging and not a whole lot of transparency, and the big money people felt betrayed.”

The board has had several outside training sessions regarding governance and operations, and about 30 percent of the members are new since the first closing. Manfredi says they weren’t at fault: “They have proof that they were asking the right questions and were getting the wrong answers.”

Playwright Annie Martin credits Regan and Manfredi for trying “to save this organization from financial ruins that had been accruing from years of mismanagement. It meant that they couldn’t just focus on making great theater, but they also had to work to try to erase a debt … rebuild trust in a community, and keep a stiff upper lip when attacks and innuendos were lobbed at them as they tried to get the doors reopened.”

Adds Martin: “The fact that anyone would be able to do any theater in those circumstances is incredible, but they managed to create some damn fine works while putting out fire after fire after fire.”