O.C. troupe stages a fundraising coup
Through the incentive of a dollar-for-dollar matching gift, Chance Theater has been able to meet its capital campaign goal of $890,000, the Anaheim Hills theater company announced at its annual gala.
by Eric Marchese
At the Aug. 29 event, Managing Director Casey Long said that, having raised $790,000 as of this past spring, “we still had $100,000 to go, so several donors stepped up and issued a $50,000 challenge gift.”
The matching gift, dubbed the “Final Encore” of the capital campaign, meant that every dollar raised through Nov. 1 would be matched by a second dollar, effectively doubling all donations.
Long said the donors of the matching gift funds – Wylie and Bette Aitken, Larry and Sophie Cripe, Mary Kay Fyda-Mar, and Tod and Linda White – “had been major supporters all along.”
“We had some amazing people step up during this final phase of the campaign,” Long said in a telephone interview. Donors, he said, included “people who adopted chairs, people who gave us cash while at the theater, people who mailed in checks.”
Gradually, he said, “the amount kept growing, and it was really great seeing people step up.” Donations ranged from 5- or 10-dollar bills dropped into a contribution box in the lobby to sizable checks.
Perhaps the biggest announcement at the gala, though, was the revelation that the Cripes had donated $100,000 – and that in honor of this, Chance Theater’s main stage is henceforth to be called The Cripe Stage.
Long later clarified that the Cripes’ donation of $100,000 wasn’t a one-time gift, but rather an accumulation of many smaller gifts given repeatedly during the course of the entire capital campaign, stretching back to its inception in early 2013. Some of those amounts, Long noted, were given anonymously.
The renaming of a performance space to honor the financial support of major donors is, of course, a tradition in the world of theater – and not the first time it had been invoked by Chance.
The opening of the company’s new space in January 2014 brought with it the news that once unveiled, the all-new, lighted marquee over the front door would read “Chance Theater @ the Bette Aitken Theater Arts Center” in honor of the $250,000 gift of Bette Aitken and husband Wylie.
At the height of the gala, the Cripes took to the podium to say a few words, all to thunderous applause. Earlier in the evening, before the news had been announced, Larry Cripe elicited hearty laughs in his role as the dodgy mayor of “Chance City” and his straight-arrow police detective twin brother in a comical murder mystery staged for the gala’s guests.
Nearly lost in the shuffle of the excitement over the capital goal being met was the news, also announced during the gala, that Chance has two new board members in Robert Berman and Rachelle Menaker.
Long said the capital campaign being completed with more than two months to spare “takes a major load off the shoulders of the staff and board where we can stop worrying about paying for the building and go back to doing what we do – creating art.”
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