After many years of talk, the second stage at Park Square Theatre is finally sounding real — it will open "no later than next January," artistic director Richard Cook said.
Park Square's selection last week of three small companies as producing partners signals how it wants to use this new $3.3 million theater, which holds significant promise for the company's attendance, revenue and artistic capacity.
Theatre Pro Rata and Sandbox Theatre each will stage one show a season for three years, and Girl Friday Productions will put up a show once every other year in the 200-seat theater.
The new stage is the keystone of a $5.3 million development campaign. Park Square is within $500,000 of reaching that goal. Included in the 13,000-square-foot project is a downstairs lobby, new rehearsal hall, dressing rooms and backstage storage for the new stage and the existing 350-seat proscenium upstairs in the Hamm Building. Cook said he hopes to begin work in April.
"It's important to move now," he said in an interview. "Materials and labor are starting to escalate, and we made this promise to the community, so the board and leadership are anxious to start delivering."
Park Square intends to produce or present 19 projects on both stages in the first year — a staggering number for a midsized company. Fourteen of those would be Park Square productions, including four remounts. By comparison, the Guthrie in 2012-13 produced 16 shows on its three stages, plus two World Stages presentations.
Park Square hopes to hit attendance of 90,000 by the end of 2015 — including about 35,000 students — up from 60,000 today. The annual budget is expected to rise from $2.3 million to well more than $3 million.
"Our hope is that a lot of people will crack our doors for the first time," Cook said, "but this is not a ballooning type of market for subscription sales."