By Kevin Zimmerman
In a little more than three months, Queens loses one of its mainstay performance spaces when Long Island City’s Chain Theatre rings down its curtain one last time.
Home to the Variations Theatre Group for a little more than three years, the Chain is part of a larger building on 45th Road being converted into yet another LIC residential building.
“I got the call this week,” Kirk Gostkowski, Variations’ artistic director, said. “Now we need a new home.”
The landlord called to give Gostkowski a 90-day notice to vacant. That means he has to be out in February.
Although he will soon be running an acting company without a theater, Gostkowski said even without the sale of the building, it was time to start looking for a larger venue.
“We have grown,” Gostkowski said. “We need a bigger space, but I thought we would expand right here.”
Besides more programming, including film screenings, the Chain has also expanded its performer base. Plenty of actors, designers and interns have returned to work at the Chain.
“There are a lot more hands on deck that are truly invested,” Gostkowski said.
In 2012, Brooklyn resident Gostkowski was in the market for a performance venue. While priced out of Manhattan and Brooklyn, he focused his search in Queens and Long Island City in particular.
The warehouse space he finally settled on needed a lot of work to make it a theater.
The owner installed a new HVAC system, but Gostkowski did the rest.
“We put a lot of money into this,” he said. “We put in a floor and all new electrical wiring. We even operated half a year with an unfinished building. It was a year later before we finished the basement.”
Once the space was viable, it served mainly as home to Variations Theatre Group productions.
But Gostkowski has also been able to rent the Chain to other theater companies — such as the group planning an upcoming production of “The Dreaming,” a musical version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
One of the Chain’s more successful ventures has been the creation of The Usual Rejects, a group of Variations actors who write and perform live movie parodies.
Those shows have introduced the Chain to a new audience who would not normally attend a play, Gostkowski said.
“And a lot of those people have become return patrons,” Gostkowski said.
But even as the hunt for a new spot intensifies — and Gostkowksi hopes it will be in LIC — it will remain business as usual at the Chain, which just wrapped up a three-week run of “Wait Until Dark.”
Up next, a new version of last year’s Christmas offering, “It’s a Wonderful Life: Radio Play,” and another new play competition, the First Frost Festival.
“I wanted to go out with a big hurrah,” Gostkowski said. “And I think we set out to do what we wanted to do, which was make an artistic impact in the community.”
Reach News Editor Kevin Zimmerman by e-mail at kzimm
