Filling Pockets

Published November 13th, 2024 at 12:04 am

Community-produced performance art is a true labor of love, especially when the artists bringing their shows to the stage don’t get paid. Starting this month, Albuquerque Little Theatre is looking to change the game with their new Pocket Theatre initiative which will pay artists a stipend for their work, and the theater is offering every bit of available space to do it. Later this week, the Little Theater will host its inaugural Pocket Theatre performance: the four-person, one-hour play Exit, Pursued by a Bear.

The theater’s new executive director Rob Armstrong Martin said one of his goals is diversifying what the theater has to offer, showcasing various small acts and local performers. With Pocket Theatre he plans to take it one step further by paying each performer a baseline of $25 on top of  a cut of box office proceeds, which will be evenly divided among all performers in each show.

“We’re really excited to get into the business of smaller productions designed for boot-strapping startup artists,” Armstrong Martin says. “This is a town that expects all artists to work for free, and we want to change that by being a different example.”

Christy Burbank, the theater’s marketing director, says Exit — a dark comedy about a woman leaving her abusive husband — is the first of many performances where artists are encouraged to make creative use of any space, from the green room to the parking lot or even the stairs in the lobby.

“We’ve turned our rehearsal room into a makeshift performance space, and not in some sloppy kind of way,” Burbank says. “We’ve painted the ceiling black, we’ve added red curtains all around the room that are going to be permanent so we can do this on a regular basis.”

Burbank says the theater also plans to start offering concessions during performances. Exit will have a gas station-style nacho bar — a guilty pleasure complete with pickled jalapenos and cheese by the bucket full. 

“We’re toying around with immersive theater, trying some new things and seeing what sticks, seeing what resonates with audiences, and growing from it,” Burbank says.