In fact, the success of Profiles’ production of Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe, which ran for several months this year, first at Profiles’ home space and then in the cabaret at the Royal George , prompted Profiles’ artistic director Joe Jahraus and associate artistic director Darrell W. Cox to look into acquiring Stage Left.

“It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for many years—that it might be nice to have the flexibility of a second space,” says Jahraus, who founded Profiles in 1988 as a resident company at Wright College. They moved to their current location in 1990, and Cox joined the following year. “The opportunity never came up, and so much of our time is spent producing that we never had a lot of time to look into it. The Stage Left thing came up when Killer Joe took off. We wanted to shop around and maybe take our next show, Body Awareness [by Annie Baker] to another space, when we were still thinking that we’d keep Killer Joe at Profiles. We approached Stage Left and they said they were moving to Theater Wit and giving up their space. It sounded like they weren’t pursuing another company taking it over. That’s when we started talks with them because we’d hate to see that space disappear. It’s a great little theatre.”

Stage Left will retain office space at their old facility—according to managing director Laura Blegen, the company has maintained separate leases for the offices and the theatre, which do not share an entrance. The mailing address for Stage Left will continue to be at 3408 N. Sheffield.

Asked if they planned to implement curatorial oversight for the rentals, Jahraus says, “That’s part of the idea in not calling it Profiles Theatre Two. It can be very much clear that it’s a rental house.” And though he says that they are open to doing a season-long rental to one company, “It’s more appealing to me to have a space where a lot of small emerging companies can get started.”

Profiles will give the old Stage Left lobby a makeover and upgrade some of the lighting and sound equipment. Though the current configuration is proscenium, Jahraus notes that they may experiment with turning the Second Stage into an alley set-up, similar to what Profiles has now. The space will officially re-open in November with Goat Song Theatre Company’s production of The Balcony by Jean Genet.