A new space dedicated to community theater and other artistic endeavors is coming to Brookfield’s downtown area.
The Brookfield Theater Corporation will purchase the building at 8916 Fairview Ave., which now operates as Rodriguez Auto Repair, to turn it into a community arts center with a focus on theater.
John Dumas, who operates the group and has led its quest to establish a permanent theater space in Brookfield, said the deal is all but done.
“The terms are all settled. The two attorneys are now working out all the legal details, but that’s going very well,” Dumas told the Landmark. “We have a binding letter of intent for both parties, so there’s not going to be any backing out or anything, unless something horrible where the building turns out to [have] problems structurally, or if there’s some financial thing, or something or other, but, other than that, it’s a done deal.”
Dumas, on behalf of the corporation and the local Glaser Players theater troupe, led the charge last year to suggest the historic Theater Building, 3723 Grand Blvd., be renovated into a community theater space. The group made one of the two offers for the property when it went up for sale last fall but lost out to Brookfield, which purchased the building and has since decided to demolish it and a neighboring village-owned home in order to seek new development downtown.
He said the new space will be named the Strand Theater, after a name the Theater Building operated under at some point before its closure in 1952.
While the location is new to the group, their plans for it are not, Dumas said.
“It’s going to be a community building. We’re going to, hopefully, encourage a lot of people to do theater or music. We already have a group that has asked me about [doing] their own version of [radio variety show] ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ where they’re going to have music and spoken word,” he said. “We have dance troops that have asked … A Sound Education, I’ve talked to them. They’re thinking about maybe doing some open nights.”
Dumas said he also hopes to partner with nearby businesses downtown to supplement the Strand’s shows.
Financing a theater
The Corp will finance its purchase with assistance from the First National Bank of Brookfield, Dumas said.
“They’re a lot more community-based, but bigger banks and other banks, they don’t have that connection with the community, so it’s very difficult to borrow money” as a nonprofit organization, he said.
But that’s not all. The group will also solicit investment from members of the community through Semble, an online service that allows people to use their personal funds to invest in local nonprofits.
“They can even invest pension funds or 401k funds,” Dumas said. “If they want to be involved in this, if they want to share their support for the arts in Brookfield, this is a way they can do that.”
Todd Tarbert, the founder and CEO of Semble, said the business works exclusively with nonprofits to enable community investment so that much or all of the necessary capital for a project or purchase is raised before, in some cases, going to a bank to secure a loan for the remainder.
“It really is designed so the people that are supporting it are, historically, people that have a relationship with the organization. In the theater, it could be people that have made charitable gifts in the past. It could be patrons. It could be actors; people that just have a heart and passion for the arts,” Tarbert said. “This is not about a charitable capital campaign where people are making gifts. We’re creating an opportunity where people can be a little more intentional on where they’re allocating some of their investment capital and to consider directing some of it over toward the funding of this loan.”
Once a project receives enough funding and progresses to the point where it generates revenue, some funds will be given back to the investors who initially supported it.
“The advantage is really letting people, based on their relationship with the [organization and] their financial situation, determine at what rate they’re willing to participate,” Tarbert said. “The loans are secured by the real estate, and we do the loan servicing for the organization, so we take the administration out of it. Frankly, it operates like a bank loan, so the organization makes a monthly loan payment, and then quarterly distributions are made out to the investors. We’ve done hundreds of these over the years, and, to date, we’ve never had a loss on any of our mortgage-backed loans.”
In the near future, Dumas said, a website should go live where anyone interested can invest in the acquisition of the property for the new Strand Theater.
“We are a 501(c)(3), so we can always take donations,” he said, “but there’s also this way that people can actually say, ‘I’m part of this group. I’m part of this project. I’m part of this community.’”
