TimeLine Adds Two New Full-Time Staff Positions

TimeLine Theatre Company announces today that it will add two new full-time staff positions beginning July 1, 2010. Founding TimeLine Company member and award-winning director Nick Bowling joins TimeLine's staff as Associate Artistic Director. And Tracy Domeracki, who has worked part-time as Audience Services Manager since September 2008, will join the full-time staff in that position. The full-time Audience Services Manager position is made possible through a special project grant from Prince Charitable Trusts.

The addition of these staff positions increases TimeLine Theatre's full-time staff by 50 percent. Bowling and Domeracki will join Artistic Director PJ Powers, Managing Director Elizabeth K. Auman, Director of Marketing and Communications Lara Goetsch and Development Manager Lydia P. Swift in managing the day-to-day operations of TimeLine Theatre Company.

"This step of expanding our full-time staff is crucial to support TimeLine's ever-expanding, year-round artistic programming, and to help the organization achieve its short- and long-term strategic goals," Auman said. "The growth we have experienced over the past 18 months would not have been possible without the work Nick and Tracy have already been doing on behalf of TimeLine, so it is a natural next step. We are particularly grateful to the trustees of Prince Charitable Trusts for making it possible to add Tracy full-time sooner than we would have been able to on our own, and to the MacArthur Fund for Arts and Culture at Prince for their ongoing general operating support."

In the newly created role of Associate Artistic Director, Bowling will work closely with Powers, assuming many responsibilities for the management and maintenance of TimeLine's productions and other artistic programming, while also playing a key role in fundraising and audience development initiatives. "I am delighted to be able to collaborate with Nick to continue to grow TimeLine's artistic programming" Powers said. "Nick and I have been working together for 16 years, and he was one of the driving forces behind the creation of TimeLine in 1997. Through the years the productions he directed have been among our most celebrated, and I couldn't be happier to expand his role and to work together to fulfill TimeLine's ambitious future goals."

Nick Bowling

Nick Bowling was the founding artistic director and is now a Company member of TimeLine Theatre, where he has directed 15 productions, including the multiple Jeff Award-winning The History Boys and TimeLine's current production of Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention. Both of those productions attracted national attention from The Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout, who declared both The History Boys and The Farnsworth Invention to be more effective than their Broadway outings. In his review for The Farnsworth Invention on May 28, 2010, Teachout wrote:

"TimeLine's spare, bare-bones staging, directed by Nick Bowling ... scrapes all the slickness off Mr. Sorkin's script and infuses it with a surging physical vitality that knocked me off my feet. ... This isn't the first time, by the way, that a TimeLine production changed my mind about a show that had previously struck me as too glib for its own good. I felt the same way about Mr. Bowling's 2009 staging of The History Boys, which packed a far greater emotional wallop than the original National Theatre production that transferred to Broadway from London in 2006. To accomplish such a feat twice in a row is not just impressive but downright extraordinary."

Bowling has been nominated for eight Jeff Awards for Outstanding Direction and has been awarded five, for TimeLine's The History Boys, Fiorello!, This Happy Breed and The Crucible and Eclipse Theatre's Another Part of the Forest. He also has directed around Chicago at Porchlight Music Theatre, Writers' Theatre, Shattered Globe Theatre, Rivendell Theatre and Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, among others. He will next direct TimeLine's 2010-11 season productions In Darfur by Winter Miller
and The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Bowling holds a BA degree in musical theatre from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and received his MFA degree in directing from The Theatre School at DePaul University, where he also has served on the directing faculty. He has worked for 10 years as Vice President of Operations for Corporate Concierge Services in Chicago, and was previously the associate artistic director and casting director at Court Theatre.

"This is a dream come true for me," Bowling said. "Working full-time in the theatre is what almost every theatre artist wants, and the fact that I am getting to do it at TimeLine, a company that I consider home, is an added bonus."

Tracy Domeracki holds a BA degree in theatre arts from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., and first joined TimeLine as a marketing intern in June 2007. During the 2007-08 season she worked part-time as a house manager and continued volunteering in the box office. She was hired to the part-time position of Audience Services Manager in September 2008. Through three years of incredible audience growth and the busiest 18 months of TimeLine's history, which included an extended run of The History Boys and a 50 percent increase in subscriptions, she has been instrumental in ensuring that TimeLine has been able to maintain a high level of customer service and to enhance marketing initiatives.

About TimeLine

Founded in April 1997, TimeLine Theatre Company's mission is to present stories inspired by history that connect with today's social and political issues. During its first 13 seasons, TimeLine has presented 43 productions, including six world premieres and 12 Chicago premieres. Recipient of the 2006 Alford-Axelson Award for Nonprofit Managerial Excellence and the 2009 Richard Goodman Strategic Planning Award from the Association for Strategic Planning, TimeLine has received 42 Jeff Awards, including an award for Outstanding Production seven times.

Now Playing at TimeLine: The Chicago premiere of The Farnsworth Invention, by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Nick Bowling, extended through July 24, 2010.

TimeLine is led by Artistic Director PJ Powers and Managing Director Elizabeth K. Auman. Company members are Nick Bowling, Janet Ulrich Brooks, Lara Goetsch, Juliet Hart, David Parkes, PJ Powers and Benjamin Thiem. TimeLine is a member of the League of Chicago Theatres, Theatre Communications Group and the Lakeview East Chamber of Commerce.

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