Photo Courtesy Troy Freund
The founder of Boulevard Theatre, Mark Bucher, was waiting tables at Mader’s while picking up occasional acting jobs on the side. Emphasis on occasional: In 1986 there weren’t many stages where unknown local actors could play. There was Clavis Theatre in Walker’s Point, a struggling company open to aspiring talent, and after them… “There were just a handful of theaters in town,” Bucher recalls. “The were the big boys, The Rep. There was Theatre X, but they rarely had outside auditions. There weren’t many choices outside of community theater. I was hungry to stretch my artistic grasp in heavier, meatier projects.”
And so, lacking alternatives, he created his own. Bucher claims he had no grand design when Boulevard debuted with Edward Albee’s Counting the Ways at St. Michael’s Waiting Room, a venue that led the way for Milwaukee’s indie coffee house resurgence. “It was a youthful place in Milwaukee’s happening Riverwest,” Bucher explains. “The Milwaukee Sentinel’s beloved Jay Joslyn wrote a review. We did a second show and a third, and then someone asked: ‘What are you doing for next season?’”
From those humble beginnings came a theater company that deserves applause for surviving; accolades for presenting always entertaining, sometimes challenging work on slender budgets; and kudos for helping revive an entire neighborhood—Bay View’s South Kinnickinnic Avenue business district.
“We’ve been the Johnny Appleseed of Milwaukee theater,” Bucher says, encouraging others to start their own companies and giving local unknowns opportunities to perform. He cites a long list of familiar names who built their résumés with Boulevard: Jonathan West, David Flores, Pamela Brown, Ericka Wade and such fresh, newer faces as Zoe Schwartz and Mitch Weindorf from last fall’s Handle with Care. Often directing and always hovering in the wings, Bucher oversaw Boulevard’s inventive, often contemporary-dress productions of William Shakespeare, Molière, Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.
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As for his pioneer role in Bay View’s renaissance, Bucher recalls the night he walked through a blighted stretch along South KK and spotted a building that seemed to call his name. “There was no Stone Creek, no Lulu, no bars except for a rough place called The Big Beer Bar, there was a dirty George Webb. Bums used to piss in the street,” he says. Bucher rented that abandoned storefront, then its empty neighbor and the offices upstairs. Eventually, Boulevard bought the building at 2250 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. Slightly more than two years ago, however, they sold the structure.
“There was a wonderful period when our neighbors were Schwarz Books, Café Lulu, a feminist bookstore and an art gallery down the street,” Bucher says. “The neighborhood changed. The bookstores closed and the gallery moved away. The neighborhood became rowdier late at night—extremely loud from the bar noise. In 1986 we had drunks pissing in our doorway and it started happening all over again. In ’86 they pissed 99-cent Budweister. In 2013 it was Chardonnay and Jameson, but urine is urine.”
Since the sale, Boulevard has had no fixed location, performing at venues as varied as the South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center and Plymouth Church on Milwaukee’s East Side. “It’s exceptionally freeing,” he says, explaining that he no longer has to sweep the floors or shovel snow from the roof. “It frees us to focus on creativity.”
Outstanding memories? “We did William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life with a cast of 35 on a phenomenal set—a bar room with an antique pinball machine. Then there was our evening of Harold Pinter one-act plays. The night before opening night, the pipes broke and the basement flooded. We managed to open the show anyway.” Bucher feels honored by a proclamation from Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, honoring Boulevard’s 30th anniversary.
While many alternative theater companies have followed in Boulevard’s wake during the three decades, many have dissolved after a few seasons. “Spite. Vinegar. Foolishness,” says Bucher, explaining his persistence.
For the remaining half of the 2015-2016 season, Boulevard hopes to mount Lucas Hnath’s The Christians at Plymouth Church and a reading of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker at a site to be determined.
For updates, visit boulevardtheatre.com.
