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t’s in check; no worries there. Sizable, healthily so, but not epic. There’s no hair pulling, diva walkouts, or screaming matches. Not that those tendencies would be foreign in the theater. You notice it when he tells you what he’s accomplished in the last 10 years. If it sounds boastful, it’s because he’s boasting. But when you listen to what he’s saying, when you hear the context he puts his theater’s relative success in, you begin to understand the mountain he has had to climb. He says these things only to prove that they could be done. That ego, judiciously at work: “I’d like to think that we are an example, a pioneer. Maybe people started to see that [we could] make something happen. That maybe there is a market for more work like this,” says Behrend. “The risk-taking now, in most of the smaller companies, is a lot greater than when we got started.” As artistic and executive director of Road Less Traveled Productions, the theater company he co-founded with playwright Jon Elston in 2002, Behrend works against the grain. His business decisions are unconventional, though fruitful. His creative vision is jolting, jarring, sometimes of another reality. It is entirely unreasonable, in the very best sense. To put this into relative terms, the Theatre Alliance of Buffalo counted 20 full-time professional theaters at the close of the 2011-2012 season. (A handful of other theaters exist outside of the Theatre Alliance, but are not included based on membership eligibility.) Of these 20 theaters, some produce four or five-show seasons, while others produce two or three a year. Some have their own theater house, others rent shared community spaces, and a few are true gypsies, doing what they can, when they can, wherever they can. Some employ a staff of full-time employees, including an artistic and/or managing director, and some work out of the confines of their own pockets. Ten years ago, Buffalo theater was an available cultural offering, staying afloat, though difficultly, in the paltry shadow of its fabled marquee-lighted ancestors. Eyes were stuck on the past, to a time when downtown was dotted with grand theaters, and the vaudeville and nightclub circuits drew household names to our stages. Ten years ago, there were few theaters that were looking forward. The theatrical trade, like most cultural industries, is one of steadfast impermanence. On the books, it means insecure forecasts and unproven investments. On the stage, it means—most proverbially of all the theater-world mantras— that every performance is your last. It is nothing if not risky. For Behrend, that is a fuel. “I think there’s a lot of people who don’t want to take things to the next level. They’re very happy with the level that they’re working at,” he says. “I want to be somewhere BCM 28 39