Hail Tom Peterson

“Hail, Tom Peterson: The Ailing Brave Hearts founder is a true arts hero,” Isthmus (Madison), October 28-November 3, 1999

Tom Petersen, the tenacious artistic director of Brave Hearts Theatre, has won the love and respect of a large community in Madison. No one doubted that before an October 19th benefit performance that raised money for Petersen to help meet expenses incurred by a brain tumor. But no one expected such an amazing turnout at the Esquire Theater.

“The place was packed,” says Marcy Weiland, artistic director of Mercury Players Theater. “I was most surprised and delighted by the number of people.”

Ray Olderman, one of the organizers of the benefit, calls it “a terrific success,” reporting that more than $4,000 was raised.

Operating his small Atwood Avenue theater with the romantic notion that performance matters more than profit, Petersen provided a low-cost home for theater troupes, performance artists, musicians, dance companies and anyone else with an idealistic artistic project. He nurtured fledgling troupes like Mercury Players Theater and First Banana Productions, allowing them to grow into formidable local organizations.

“He supported everything,” says Sarah Austin, a former Madison actress now living in New York whose work at Brave Hearts included roles in “Temp Slave” and “The Living.”

Weiland adds: “He had a very open policy in terms of risk level, trying things you wouldn’t dare try otherwise. He contended all along that we needed a space like that in order to kick-start the arts.”

That space was jeopardized last May when Petersen was evicted from the building at 1988 Atwood Ave. He temporarily relocated to the Grieg Club on Williamson Street, while making an unsuccessful bid to secure the former East End building at 2053 Atwood Avenue. Meanwhile, the Grieg Club gave notice that it would not renew the theater’s lease, which expired October 1st.

“The last few times I saw Tom, he looked incredibly stressed out,” says Austin. “Normally this sort of thing doesn’t bother him. But he was having a hard time with funding.”

Then doctors informed Petersen that his tumor, seven years in remission, had returned, spreading so seriously that neither surgery nor chemotherapy was a viable treatment. His wife of three years, visual artist Lou Ann Erickson Petersen, has stopped working to provide Petersen the 24-hour care his condition requires. Friends have been helping to feed the couple every other day, and have come by daily to help out.

“I just live for moments when Tom is really lucent,” says Erickson Petersen. “He can be really on, really wise. We are living daily. We have a lot of faith. We have all along. Everything is in God’s hands.”

Those who have worked with Petersen are clearly devoted to him. First Banana’s Stephen Montagna, whose May production of “The Living” closed Brave Hearts’ Atwood Avenue space, feels that “there is no one else in town like Tom Petersen. There is no one who has so singularly sacrificed the way he has in terms of making Brave Heart’s not a business but a community service.”

But inevitably, perhaps, that sacrifice came at an agonizing cost. Says Weiland: “In the first couple years I worked at Brave Hearts, his policies and practices infuriated me, and I used to argue with him about it. When I’d say, ‘I’m concerned that the theater won’t survive unless you’re more hard-nosed about making people pay,” he’d say, 'This is the only way it will work.’

“Once I said, 'The thing is, [Mercury Players] try to always pay what we owe, so then we end up subsidizing the other groups who don’t.’ And his response was, 'Yes, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Don’t you think that’s the right thing to do?’”

Petersen continues to rest at his Atwood neighborhood home, his future uncertain. “I feel like we’re on a plateau,” his wife says. “I ask everybody to keep him in their prayers.”

The future of Petersen’s theater, or at least his “model” of theater, may not share the same uncertain fate. Montagna speaks of an effort now being made “by people whose hearts are very close to the Brave Hearts taking steps to make sure something continues on. I’m confident that something will replace Brave Hearts because there is such a need for it.”

Weiland agrees. “I think there is definitely a push to have a space like that, hopefully with Tom as a part of it. I’m not convinced he is going to die next week. These things are very mysterious.”