By Serena Solomon
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MIDTOWN — Hamilton Clancy's Upper West Side theater is getting squeezed on all sides.
The Drilling Company Theater on W. 82nd Street is sandwiched between new condos, and then there is the crushing financial pressure that comes with life as a community theater company in Manhattan.
"The biggest challenge is rising costs to maintaining a space and an organization," said Clancy. "Our budget is frozen. Grants and money from the state are disappearing."
But help may be on the way.
Community Boards across Manhattan are joining forces in a push for a tax incentive to encourage landlords to offer Off-off Broadway theaters lower rents.
"We have lost 26 theater spaces in the last two years," said David Pincus, chair of the theater task force at Community Board 4 and artistic director of the Work Shop Theater Company in Chelsea.
While the wording of the incentive is not finalized, Pincus said the aim is to protect approximately 50 theaters that provide creative homes to more than 400 small performing arts organizations and theater companies.
So far, Community Boards 5 and 9 have voted to sign a letter of support for the incentive idea, Pincus said, and he is anticipating that more will show their support in the coming months. He is encouraging the public to petition their local community boards to join the effort.
These theaters of 99 seats or fewer have always walked a delicate line between production costs and box office revenue, and donations that bridge the difference. Rent has always been a heavy burden.
"It is a month-to-month thing just paying the rent, and fundraising has fallen by 50 percent," Pincus said.
He said that small community theaters draw in both local residents and tourists, providing a steady stream of customers to other neighborhood businesses such as restaurants, cafes and even the dry cleaners.
In some cases clothing retailers are proving to be a more attractive tenant to landlords because they can pay two or three times the rent a theater can.
"Certainly our building could be outfitted as a clothing store," said Tania Camargo, executive director of the Soho Rep in Tribeca. "Flip it and make it a retail space."
With community theater tickets hovering between $10 and $20, theaters need to fill their houses every night to compete.
"These small cultural organizations are suffering in silence and then they are just disappearing," said Clancy. "People are going to ask one day 'what happened to that small theater that was there?'"
