Occhipinti, whose resumé includes co-founding the Absolute Theatre Company in Chicago in the 1980s, first came on board at VPT as an actor in the 2001 production of Flowers for Algernon, and was asked to join the company’s resident team. Not long after, the VPT board announced that, due to a budget deficit of about $39,000, they planned to close up shop permanently. Occhipinti decided to see what he and others could do to save the Madison Street facility.

“I asked them to give us a year, and I took it on,” he says. Upon becoming artistic director, Occhipinti discovered that a large portion of the debt was owed on royalties to licensing organizations such as Dramatists Play Service, and he negotiated arrangements that allowed the company to continue to produce by paying new royalties upfront while paying down the past debt.

“I told them we’ll take the responsibility to pay the debts, but we can’t do that if we can’t do shows,” said Occhipinti.

As the debt went down, Occhipinti also began an ambitious capital campaign to renovate the theatre. “I went to every networking thing possible [in Oak Park] just to get to know people. I started meeting business people, the Chamber of Commerce, the bankers, and anyone I could think of just to get sponsors.” The space, which stayed open during construction and was finished in 2007, now boasts a new lobby, updated sound and light systems, and a 60-seat black-box studio in addition to the 180-seat mainstage.

Occhipinti’s programming also emphasized new works, including musicals such as last fall’s The Medium at Large, featuring Tony-nominated actor John Herrera and a book by The Artists’ Way author Julia Cameron. The company’s studio series branched out into edgier contemporary fare, such as Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive.

All this, according to Occhipinti, was geared toward raising the company’s profile and moving it away from a community theatre organization to a non-Equity professional company.

“The biggest hurdle was that it was a community theatre for so long and people want to keep it in that image,” says Occhipinti. “We’ve gone beyond that. In the last couple of years, we’ve had about six international theatre artists here.”

The company has also brought in musical artists, including Lyric Opera singers and Lisa Zane, the cabaret artist and sister of Billy Zane. “I joke that when I came out here, if you showed up at an audition, you got a role. Now you have to show up and have talent,” says Occhipinti.

For his part, Taube, who has most recently taught directing at Act One Studios and worked freelance with several companies, says he had thought of VPT as a community venture—until he went out to audition for the Vogel play and was “shocked at how much the space had developed. They were doing so much wonderful programming. When the position opened up, I jumped at the opportunity. Especially as I talked to Carl and the board members, it seemed like a terrific opportunity for someone who wanted to take some risks and do some good work.”

Taube plans to hone the company’s mission in the direction “new American classics.

“For a lot of people, when they refer to American classics, they are referring almost exclusively to plays from the 1940s and 1950s, but so many wonderful playwrights have come out post-1970s,” he says.

Taube’s 2009-10 mainstage season kicks off with a chestnut—Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You—and then segues into Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, A Chorus Line, and The Marriage of Bette and Boo by Christopher Durang. His theme this upcoming season for the smaller studio space is “Women on the Edge,” involving “either women playwrights with an edgy sensibility or plays by men with an edgy female central character.” Once again, the first play will be a golden oldie—William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker—and the rest of the season will be more contemporary, with John Patrick Shanley’s Savage in Limbo, Mud by Maria Irene Fornes, and Naomi Iizuka’s gritty contemporary re-telling of Greek myths, Polaroid Stories.

Occhipinti isn’t just leaving Village Players; he is also bidding farewell, at least for now, to his theatrical career. A massage therapist, he has spent 30 years doing alternative healing and energy work, and he plans to devote more time to that now that he’s not on a “seven days a week, morning to night” schedule with VPT. His last hurrah at the theatre he helped save will be at a party honoring his achievements on Aug. 26, and after that, he’ll head out to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur for a couple of months to “fill my own vessel.” Nearing 60, Occhipinti doesn’t see himself returning to theatre, but he also says, “I’m old enough to know that you never say never.”