Mark Bucher of Boulevard Ensemble Studio Theatre
The Bay View company's artistic director preps the upcoming production Roses In December
Roses In December plays at Boulevard Ensemble Studio Theatre through Jan. 18.
During his first eight years running the Boulevard Ensemble Studio Theatre in Bay View, Milwaukee native Mark Bucher served sauerbraten to tourists at Mader’s on Old World Third Street to pay the bills. Fifteen years later, the Boulevard is his full-time gig, but it hasn’t gotten any easier to pay the bills or fill the seats. Decider recently sat down with Bucher to discuss the state of the arts in Milwaukee, exotic German meats, and his upcoming production of the comedy Roses In December, which opens Dec. 26.
Decider: Why did you choose Roses in December for the Boulevard?
Mark Bucher: I just think it’s a good show for the Boulevard, in the sense that it’s about language. It’s a feast of language. It’s articulate and has a level of wit. It’s a mild mystery about discoveries—about when you should leave the party and when you shouldn’t. The realization that what we choose to hang onto may not be serving us, it may actually be harming us. Memories and emotions and pettiness hurts along the way. One of the characters understands that life can be so much more if you let go instead of tightly holding on. Shaking your fist at the skies like Lear doesn’t help, but then even Lear had Cordelia.
D: What have you learned after running an independent theater for more than 20 years?
MB: I started a theater, a nonprofit art organization, 23 years ago that I think has had a vital economic impact on this neighborhood and has engendered other individuals to go off and start theater companies or enjoy other careers in the arts. What’s disturbing to me is that the struggle has not decreased. If anything the battle to pay the mortgage every month has gotten harder. That part is discouraging, but I have met a lot of great people. In a sense, I look on the last 23 years as going to school, and I’ve definitely paid my tuition. You have to learn to continually listen to what the city, the medium, the population and the populous are telling you. That’s hard and it never ends.
D: As a former Mader’s waiter, what would you say sells better: theater tickets or sauerbraten?
MB: Sauerbraten. Mader’s has been going since 1902, God bless them, and they are still open. I was there for 20 years, and it actually taught me a lot about management and money. When I started the theater, I was working both jobs at the same time. After the first eight years, people started telling me, “You can’t run the Boulevard like it’s your own station in a restaurant.” I listened and that was a mistake. We are trained to think that if we follow a standard set of rules it will lead to success, but what it leads to is homogenization and a staleness of the soul. If I were talking to my past self or another young person, I would say, “Go off and run your own theater company or your own gallery, but shut it down after five years and then go somewhere else and start all over again. Don’t let it get to the middle level, because the middle level is a desert.” It’s like you can make that jump from the first to the middle level, but it’s very difficult to get from the middle to the top level. Extremely hard. The only way you can do that is if you marry well, you inherit your family fortune, or if you have certain relationships that you are comfortable with exploiting — in every sense of the verb exploit.
D: You are known for taking a lot of artistic liberties in your productions. Do you think pushing boundaries has helped or hurt you?
MB: I have been known to re-conceptualize some of the works because of economic and spatial limitations. In a sense, what I have done is made enhancements or expanded the perspective of previous works. For the most part, I give myself better than passing grades at being creative on how we do this on a minuscule budget. Some people who are a bit more traveled and have attended some of our past productions—and we’re talking about 23 years, so that‘s over 120 shows—have said to me, “This is better than what I saw off Broadway or in London.” Not better in the sense of more expensive, but the show was more invigorating or fresh or pure. With some educated palettes it has helped me. In other corners it pigeonholes you. It reduces you and limits you. Not as a man and not as an artist, but people’s perception is their reality. Someone may say to you, “It’s just a little, dusty, shitbox theater.” That’s what they are always gonna think and they won’t be able to see beyond that. Does it ultimately serve me? It serves me for my personal reference. It doesn’t serve me for what the standard definition of success is. There is a reason it’s hard to find second-tier, paraprofessional or middle ground artists. There are very few people in their late 40s, 50s and 60s who can live on poverty level or slightly above poverty level wages.
