Assessing Jeune Leune

Last Monday, a day after learning that Theatre de la Jeune Lune would shut down, singer/actress Momoko Tanno walked through the company's cavernous warehouse building in downtown Minneapolis.

Collecting memories, she eyed scenery from past shows, including a boat used in "Figaro," a reimagined Jeune Lune opera that won rave reviews.

"It's such a unique space, and it has all these ghosts," said Tanno. "How could this be lost?"

That is the question being asked after Jeune Lune's board voted last weekend to cease operations after 30 years and sell the building in the face of a $1 million-plus debt. (Theater officials did not reveal the exact amount.) Only three years ago, the company received a Tony Award as one of the nation's outstanding regional theaters.

"Retrospectively, maybe the theater should have launched a [fundraising] campaign earlier," board chair Bruce Neary said in an interview last Sunday. "We had a terrific team on board at the end. We just ran out of money."

Could the theater have been saved? Do theaters have a natural life cycle, as some in the company have suggested? Is this closing an anomaly, or a cautionary tale with implications for other arts groups?

(Scores of readers commented at startribune.com when the story broke. Opinion there seemed roughly divided between those blasting the city for promoting sports bars and stadiums while allowing a treasure like Jeune Lune to perish, and those claiming that the theater had lost its edge and had only itself to blame.)

Some have hinted that the Jeune Lune board was too much in thrall to the troupe's visionary artist/founders.

"It was a unique institution, with everyone coming on to serve the art," said Gordon Wright, who has been involved with Jeune Lune for 12 years and is on its 17-member board. "[The board] was always sort of reverential to a fault. That may have been one of the key contributing aspects of the downfall."

It's a haunting paradox: Some of the things that made Jeune Lune great also led to its demise. The company was founded in 1978 by young idealists as an itinerant collective that toured France and, later, the United States. As it grew and settled down, it maintained a structure with five leaders. The collective generated original, memorable work, but as the leaders aged, their interests diverged.

"When you have five heads in one noose and they're pulling the same way, you get things done," said Wright. "But if they're pulling every which way, that's not how you go forward."

By the time the company won the Tony Award in 2005, the troupe's leadership had grown apart.

"The company was a family, and families are complicated," said Kevin Bitterman, who worked at Jeune Lune for three years.

The drift was evident soon after the Tony announcement, when the troupe opened "Lettice and Lovage," a traditional staging of the British farce that ran counter to Jeune Lune's penchant for reinvention.

"That show was symptomatic of the struggle going on inside the theater," said Wright. "You win a Tony and you celebrate by putting on a poor choice of art and poor handling of that poor choice. We were no longer a cohesive unit."

Art vs. money

For many, the shock and sadness are deepened by the fact that other Twin Cities theaters have faced similar crises and survived.

Five years ago, Penumbra Theatre's board also faced a life-or-death dilemma in the form of a $600,000 debt. An action plan recommitted to Penumbra's artistic director and mission, slashed all nonstage operations, dropped productions, laid off more than half the staff and cut salaries. Over time, it worked. Last December, the company announced its debt had been retired.

By the end of last year, Jeune Lune had take drastic measures -- trimming its $1.7 million annual budget by one-third and cutting staff. Two years earlier, it had ditched its collective structure and made co-founder Dominique Serrand the sole artistic director.

Serrand was known for a lack of interest or familiarity with questions about money, referring all those to the board chair.

"What's so disappointing is that they're being judged by the numbers," said Penumbra founding artistic director Lou Bellamy. "They weren't making gadgets over there. This should be a conversation about art. But sadly, it always comes down to numbers hanging over you like the sword of Damocles."

Rising profile, declining sales

In the late 1990s, according to former managing director Steve Richardson, Jeune Lune began to cover shortfalls by borrowing against the equity in its headquarters. "We used the building as our endowment," Serrand said last November.

More recently, the company also cut marketing outlays and chose not to announce a Twin Cities season for this year, even as they embarked on successful tours of several U.S. cities.

"It was never meant to be an institution," said former co-artistic director Robert Rosen. "It was never meant to be a regular, regional theater. And there was great resistance to becoming that."

Ripple effect?

Jeune Lune is the biggest Twin Cities theater to cease operations in decades. The company was part of a robust tier that includes five similarly sized theaters -- Penumbra, Park Square, the Jungle, the Illusion and Mixed Blood -- all about the same age as Jeune Lune and all still run by their founders.

Some, such as Penumbra and the Jungle, have initiated succession plans by bringing in associate artistic directors. Others have shored up their management sides, seeking to ensure longevity.

"I know there's a strong desire to understand, maybe even change history, but we're looking forward from here," said board chair Neary.

Jeune Lune has seeded the nation with some terrific artists who learned and practiced their art in that building, which will go up for sale soon, said theater officials. It was appraised at $3 million a year ago, before the real-estate slump.

A new outfit may yet emerge in some new form. Jeune Lune's theater artists will certainly seek other outlets for their creativity. But can it recapture the magic of Jeune Lune? What made the company special was the aggregate of its many wacky parts.

"I'm of mixed emotions about the closing," said Rosen. "There were many days when I would take out my keys, jangle them in the door and go into the theater when I would marvel at it. How many theater artists in the country -- no, the world -- have the keys to their own theater?"

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390