Longtime artistic associate Jennifer Avery, who has acted in several Next productions, including the recently closed War With the Newts, has stepped into the AD position, and Jim Davis, Next’s production manager for the past four seasons, will serve as interim producing director. Next’s managing director, Kevin Heckman (who is a Performink columnist) has also resigned and will be leaving Next at the end of July.

Avery, who is also associate artistic director for Strawdog Theatre (she is now a member of Actors’ Equity and cannot perform with Strawdog), plans to stay in the position for six months, though she hopes that the selection committee will hire a permanent artistic director by the end of four months so that there will be time to ensure a smoother transition.

“I took the job with the understanding that it is interim,” she says. “My focus is on moving this wonderful organization forward for the next six months.”

In addition to her associations with Next and Strawdog, Avery served five years as an assistant to Joyce Moffatt, the general manager for the Harris Theater, “before any groundbreaking was done.” A graduate of Smith College, Avery studied and worked in New York in various arts managements capacities before moving to Chicago in 1993.

Though Avery says she isn’t interested in the job on a permanent basis, she isn’t just a placeholder, either. The season selected by Southerland, whose departure came in the wake of revelations about plagiarism related to his production of M.E.H. (Margaret) Lewis’ Return to Haifa this past spring , has been pre-empted, and Avery is in the process of selecting a new season.

“I don’t have the names right now, but we’ll be announcing as soon as humanly possible,” says Avery. “We have narrowed it down to a couple of things and we are trying to secure the rights, and we’re not making any announcements until we’ve secured the rights.” (A reasonable position, given that the troubles with Haifa included the fact that Southerland did not obtain underlying rights from the estate of Ghasan Kanafani, whose novella formed the basis for the Lewis play.)

Heckman’s decision comes on the heels of the Southerland debacle, but he says it was in the works for a while, and had much to do with how the job was structured when he took the job in summer of 2008.

“I think the board had a particular idea in mind of what they really wanted this job to be that was a little bit different from the job description,” he says. “The parts of the job that I was most interested in were the parts that they weren’t putting as much emphasis on.”

In particular, he found that he was doing more day-to-day general management—balancing checkbooks, etc.—than engaging in larger issues of strategic planning and community outreach. However, the situation was certainly exacerbated by the lawsuit filed by Israeli writer Boaz Gaon, alleging plagiarism from his play version of the Kanafani book.

“It made it hard to focus on all the things that we needed to do to move the organization forward,” says Heckman.

Next board president Judy Kemp says that the selection committee, comprised of four current board members, a former board member, and “an outside community person” (Kemp is on the search committee, which is headed up by the board vice president, David Hart), is heavily focused on Chicago candidates for the permanent artistic director’s post. Southerland was hired from Boston, where he founded the now-defunct Boston Theatre Works. Jason Loewith, whom he replaced, is now the executive director for the National New Play Network in Washington, DC.

“The first and highest priority is that we’re going to look locally,” says Kemp. “We are not going to look beyond Chicago unless for some reason we can’t find a candidate here, but we have an enormous group of talented and capable people in Chicago and we shouldn’t have to go beyond that.”

Kemp says that she has received at least a dozen unsolicited resumes for the AD job, but is excited to have Avery at the helm for now.

“She was really interested in the position, and we had been advised by a lot of people who have management experience to look for an interim AD who is not interested in being a candidate,” says Kemp.

Next seems to be in a process of redefining the structure of the organization, if not the mission.

“We’ve sort of pulled out old notes and are looking at the job descriptions,” says Kemp. “Therefore, we have the opportunity to change job descriptions. The artistic director might be more of a producing artistic director. Will we keep a general manager? Some of it depends on the candidates.”

Though Kemp identifies Next’s budget at just around the $500,000 mark currently, she also notes, “We can’t pay the kind of money we’d like to. But we do want to be true to our mission and continue doing the work.”

In addition to hiring a new artistic director and the organizational equivalent of a managing director (Davis too has indicated that he is not interested in making his interim position permanent), Kemp says that Next is also in the middle of a board development process underwritten by the Taproot Foundation, which should be finished in the next couple of months. Currently, there are 12 members of the board, which is two shy of the usual 14. One thing that did come out of the Southerland situation is that the board now has an attorney who can handle contract and copyright issues. Says Avery, “Some precautions have been put in place so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”

Says Heckman, “I think it’s better for the long-term health of the organization to build a new leadership from the ground up that they are really excited about. Find people with great skills and build around those skills.”

Heckman, who also served in several management roles with Stage Left Theatre , including managing director and producing artistic director, hasn’t ruled out returning to an arts management job in the future. He will also, according to Avery, be directing a show in Next’s Dark Night Series, which was a programming innovation that began last season under Southerland.

“I think the board is energized and rejuvenated and paying attention in all the right ways, in the way you’d hope after facing a crisis,” says Avery. “I wasn’t a part of [the Southerland situation], so I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about it, but I don’t want to deny that it happened. One of the wonderful things about this company is that there has always been a really open dialogue with the community. So we discuss what happened and we move on.”

And though Kemp acknowledges that some subscribers are holding back until Avery can announce the revamped schedule, Avery says, “I can’t believe how positive it’s been. I’ve talked to a lot of subscribers who are really excited that everything’s going forward, and they are OK that the season is changing. It’s the 30th anniversary of a really amazing theatre company in this city.”