Proselytizing the profound: John Sbordone and the challenge of City Repertory Theatre

Is 'off Broadway' worth the financial risk in Flagler County?

By Brian McMillan
| 12:45 p.m. September 22, 2016

John Sbordone has been the director of CRT since it began, six years ago. Brian McMillan

Palm Coast Observer
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The best thing about sitting in the audience of a small theater, according to John Sbordone, is the intimacy.

“You can hear the gasps,” he said. “If there’s a little bit of light on, you can watch the bodies straining. And the laughter, which can be infectious in any theater — in a small theater, it’s riotous.”

If anyone knows the small-theater life, it’s Sbordone. He’s the director of the whole operation at City Repertory Theatre, the man behind the magic for going on six seasons, and that includes more than just directing the plays. It’s also a small nonprofit that has to be very careful if it wants to stay afloat financially.

There is monthly pressure to pay the rent at the storefront theater, which is one of a dwindling number of suites still open at City Marketplace. And then there is the fee to actually produce a play written by someone else, which can cost about $2,000 for a musical.

Most organizations that support the arts with grants are not as likely to support theaters when they are only renting, as CRT is, as they might be to support a theater that owns its facility as is therefore considered to be more of a permanent institution.

That leaves donations and ticket sales as the primary sources of revenue, and with just 50 seats per night, CRT needs good attendance every weekend they’re open to put anything in the bank.

He had hoped, when CRT first started, to be able to pay the actors, but that hasn’t been possible. Very little is spent on props or scenery.

So why do it? Sbordone is 71 years old and is an avid golfer, so why does he need the aggravation of running a small theater?

“We set out to provide alternative theater to the normal fare that you might see in local community theaters,” he said during a recent interview in the empty theater before the beginning of a rare kid-friendly show at CRT, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” He was quick to amend his comment, not wanting to criticize other local theaters. “What they do is all well and good. We were trying to provide the alternative. Some people call us ‘off Broadway,’ a college-town kind of theater. We look at theater as an art form.”

Challenging, contemporary shows from the CRT’s first five seasons that come to mind for Sbordone include two that were on Broadway in 2009: David Mamet’s “Race” and Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage.”

And although the contemporary shows are more difficult to sell to a small town, Sbordone doesn’t plan to make any changes.

“You can’t teach them to come to other things unless you do the other things,” he said. “I guess that’s my problem: I just want to proselytize. … I haven’t grown out of that phase yet. When I get older, maybe.”

SIDEBAR: Golf and the theater

John Sbordone goes golfing a few times a week, and he’s good: He shoots about 80-82 on 18 holes, or eight to 10 strokes over par. He’s always been an athlete, dating back to his undergraduate days when he played basketball at the State University of New York on Oneonta.

“The number of different skills that you have to have to hit the ball straight, to stop it where you need to stop it, to read greens, to get out of sand traps — it’s just an extraordinary challenge, that for me seems to be always exciting. It’s hard to get bored.”

Although he usually tries to forget about the rest of his worries and just focus on the course, he does see some connections between the golf course and the theater. Both are all about creating an illusion of reality. On the course, you have a manicured green space that is supposed to make you feel like you’re out in nature; and in the theater, you have choreographed movements and mere suggestions of a setting. In both, Sbordone said, “You’re suspending your disbelief.”