Todo Con Nada Faces Eviction (Again) Over Back Rent | Playbill

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News Todo Con Nada Faces Eviction (Again) Over Back Rent In a desperate, eleventh hour attempt to cure close to $20,000 in rent arrears, Todo Con Nada will present a one-night benefit staging of Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" on Oct. 16 at 8 PM.

In a desperate, eleventh hour attempt to cure close to $20,000 in rent arrears, Todo Con Nada will present a one-night benefit staging of Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" on Oct. 16 at 8 PM.

The choice of Capra's classic conjures images of financial desperation and may, founder Aaron Beall hopes, inspire a similar windfall happy ending—in this case by generating enough contributions to keep the landlord from shutting the theatre the next day.

A co-founder of New York's Fringe Festival, Nada founder Beall is an entrepreneurial force in the downtown theatre scene. After helping to establish the Fringe Festival he went on to create another New York theatre collaborative, the Pure Pop Festival.

Several long term friends and associates of the theatre are coming together to support the fundraising effort. Actress Kate Hampton (Broadway's The Best Man) will appear in the benefit staging on Oct. 16.

* Several Downtown artists have received their start at the low-ceiling basement storefront that is Nada's headquarters. The Target Margin Theatre, which has since become the darling of foundations and The New York Times, had its first defining success at Nada with Titus Andronicus, as did the avant garde Elevator Repair Service, now a staple at P.S. 122. Brian Park's plays Vomit and Roses and Wolverine Dream (later joined under the title Americana Absurdum), which recently took home a prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, debuted on Ludlow. Nada was also home to some of the young efforts by verse playwright Kirk Wood Bromley and playright-screenwriter Todd Alcott ("Antz," "One Neck"). Obie-winning actor James Urbaniak often performed there, as did performance artists Deb Margolin and John Leguizamo and Drama Dept. director Randall Curtis Rand.

Beall and a few collegues began the theatre company that would become Nada in the mid-1980s, with Beall eventually taking over as leader and renaming the troupe Nada, and then Todo con Nada. Beall's operation was primarily a presenting house, with performers and companies filling the space while Nada claimed the lion's share of the box office. This arrangement was useful to struggling artists, since fledgling groups often could not afford to rent a theatre on their own (although complaints surfaced in recent years that the artists were not receiving their share of the intake).

Beall put Nada on the map in 1995 with a three-month Hamlet festival, featuring Shakespeare's play and other Hamlet-themes attractions. The next season saw an ambitious, and ultimately financially unsuccessful, Faust featival. Since then, Beall has always thought in big terms, conceiving a new festival every few months. Over the years, the fluctuating Nada empire of theatres has included the Piano Store, the House of Candles Theatre, both on the Lower East Side; Nada 45 on W. 45th Street; and Nada Show World on Eighth Avenue in Clinton. Rent and fire law troubles have plagued Beall for years.

Along with John Clancy of The Present Company and Jonathan Harris, Beall co-founded the New York International Fringe Festival. However, during 1998, the second year of the fest, Clancy and Beall had an acrimonious falling out over financial and legal matters. The following year—in what many viewed as an act of naked aggression but which Beall said was simply an effort to keep afloat—Nada began the Pure Pop Festival, a multi-show event which ran at the same time, and in the same neighborhood, as the Fringe.

A call to Aaron Beall was not returned by press time.

Todo Con Nada is located at 167 Ludlow St. For information call (212) 420-1466.

-- By Murdoch McBride

 
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