The Reader’s exposé of Profiles Theatre triggered something in Chicago that one theater-world friend calls “incredibly important”—an overdue acknowledgement and fierce repudiation of abuses to which the theater world had remained willfully blind.
“These were not children in these shows, these were adults,” Mitchell marveled, “and they all decided to just go along with all this crap? . . . Were all these women and stage managers and directors bedazzled by all the attention and full houses to the point where they simply had to submit to the abuse? Were they drugged? C’mon, people, where is the personal responsibility?”
But at worst, it’s one lousy story. And Mitchell doesn’t back down from it. “I got the point across that I wanted to get across,” he told me. “Maybe it’s a little clumsy, a little awkward, a little lazy, a little strident, but I don’t think there’s anything in there to apologize for. People in theater talk so much about diversity—diversity, which is key to everything in my opinion. But it seems to me like the line gets drawn at diversity of opinion.”
Unfortunately for Box, the firing couldn’t have been more clumsily handled.
“It totally is,” she said. “We pulled it down and realized it was stupid to do. We put it back up and then the comments disappeared and we put them back up. We were reactionary. We were upset because we felt that Colin wrote this article and refused to apologize to correct the situation to save our advertisers, and we, OK, we had to make a decision now.”
“After the Fringe we’ll have a conference call of the three partners and decide what the future will be of Bitter Lemons and if he wants to be part of it. Is he on board or is he not? Is it worth rebranding if he’s with us? Or he might say ‘I don’t want anything to do with anything.'”
