As Medicaid cuts trickle down, a Springfield theater closes its doors 

“Sunday in the Park With George” is a 1984 Stephen Sondheim musical, about the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat working on his 1880s masterpiece, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”

It’s a meditation on art, commerce and connection. At Springfield’s Pegasus Playhouse, where a production of the musical is underway, those aren’t just themes. They’re real-life concerns: The theater can no longer afford its rent, as federal cuts to Medicaid have trickled down to the small playhouse’s funding.

This weekend, the final round of performances of “Sunday in the Park With George” is also the final time Pegasus Playhouse will be performing a full production in its home, at 402 Main St. in Springfield. 

For Pegasus founder and director Scott Frazier-Maskiell and his crew of “Peggles,” the nickname for veteran Pegasus performers and crew members, it’s a major loss. 

A community theater may not come to mind as an obvious casualty of Medicaid cuts. But Pegasus’ main funder is Alive Holistic Counseling, the therapy business of Erin Frazier-Maskiell, Scott’s wife and a fellow actor in Pegasus productions.

About 50% of Alive Holistic Counseling patients were on Medicaid. Initial cuts to the program were catastrophic for reimbursement rates, Erin Frazier-Maskiell said in an email. The recent announcement that PacificSource’s coordinated care organization would stop serving Lane County Medicaid patients means more uncertainty.

Scott Frazier-Maskiell said the annual cost of running Pegasus is around $100,000, with the bulk of that going toward rent and production rights for shows. The first week of September, he said, they realized they wouldn’t have the funding to keep Pegasus in its building. 

That was one of the hardest weeks of his life, telling audiences that the theater would be closing, breaking the news to the children performers who had grown up on its stage that it wouldn’t be theirs anymore.

But with “Sunday in the Park With George” opening in a few weeks after the revelation they would lose the theater, the cast and crew couldn’t stop moving. The show had to go on. 

“This is the hardest one we’ve done,” Scott Frazier-Maskiell said. “Not because it’s a hard show, because we always have crazy challenges. I think this has been the hardest one because I’m grieving while creating.”

How a Pegasus landed on Main Street

Pegasus Playhouse opened in 2019 as a youth theater. Scott Frazier-Maskiell had previously worked for The Rose Children’s Theatre and wanted to bring his experience in the New York theater world to Lane County after his family settled here. Without a dedicated venue, he found spaces for productions on stages around Eugene and Springfield. 

They moved into the Main Street building in 2022, thanks to a friend and philanthropic real estate agent who gave Frazier-Maskiell first look. Finding a venue in Eugene had been problematic, because of municipal laws on adequate parking surrounding a space, but Springfield had no such restrictions.

The space had a facelift to be reborn as a theater, after its previous life as a retail building. A wall was moved to make a backstage area, and a stage was built. They bought and installed the original 1920s seats from Eugene’s Very Little Theatre to make the 113-seat auditorium.

Frazier-Maskiell, who had New York theater experience in lighting design, choreography, and technical direction, has taken on much of Pegasus’ workload himself as a theater jack-of-all-trades. But it’s also a family endeavor — even outside of collaborating with Erin to finance Pegasus. Their daughter Story became an actor and frequent costume designer. 

Story, 17, reflected on favorite memories in Pegasus productions, like playing Olive Ostrovsky in the “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” She said she shared her parents’ mindset that there was hope for Pegasus’ future.

“Both of them are very determined to keep this going, no matter what,” she said.

‘Take care of each other, however it goes’

Its scrappy and collegial nature made the theater a special place, veteran “Peggles” said. 

Stage manager Angela Lewis said that when she studied theater in school, people were “annoying, perfect” in their exacting standards. Pegasus was a warmer environment. 

“Here you can just laugh about it and make sure it gets fixed,” she said, reminiscing about knocked-down wires and messed-up lines in productions past. 

For 14-year-old Marilyn Goudy, who auditioned for “SpongeBob SquarePants” with only one previous stage role under her belt, Pegasus gave her a lead role and newfound confidence. 

“They were like, ‘You want to be SpongeBob?’” she said. “I was like, ‘Sure.’ I was really shy, and that definitely helped me open up.”

Without the big budgets of the Hult Center or Oregon Contemporary Theater productions, artistic director Laura Waters hand-painted the props and scenery. Her pointillism-conjuring backdrops for “Sunday in the Park With George” set the scene of the French park of La Grande Jatte, emulating Seurat’s vision with hundreds of painted circles.

But the most rewarding part of it is seeing her daughter, Tatum Dunn-Waters, and Goudy, whom she calls her “other daughter,” growing up on stage together. (Dunn-Waters was the Sandy Cheeks to Goudy’s SpongeBob.)

During a group interview, multiple “Peggles” quoted part of their preshow mantra, which the cast and crew does as a group chant before each performance: “Take care of each other, however it goes.” Though it was written to capture the chaotic nature of scrappy live performances, it’s taken on a new meaning as Pegasus closes its doors. 

“This is sort of like the breeding ground for the larger Eugene theater community to bring in all these young actors, and where they’d be able to find their voices and feel comfortable doing what they do on that stage,” said Scott Machado, a “Peggle” who would have had his theater directing debut this holiday season. “I hope that [Frazier-Maskiell] is able to find some other place to continue to do what he does. It’s so, so important.”

What comes next

As he introduced a Friday evening performance of “Sunday in the Park With George,” which he also acts in as a jealous contemporary of the painter Seurat, Frazier-Maskiell talked about the impending closure and importance of supporting the arts in a difficult financial moment. 

“You showing up here tonight is activism,” he said. “You coming to see a show is activism. Please continue to do so, wherever and whenever you can.”

Frazier-Maskiell is resolute that Pegasus will continue, shifting back to its earlier model of bringing children’s theater to venues around Eugene and Springfield. He said Pegasus’ summer camp program, where students do multiple summer stock productions, including a full Broadway show, will continue.

Pegasus will have to leave its building by the end of October. Posters for the shows that would have filled out the season are still on the window of the building. 

Pegasus, Frazier-Maskiell said in an interview, has been a safe space for so many: Youths being treated like serious theater artists, adults who felt like they couldn’t get cast or listened to in Eugene and Springfield’s other theaters.

The Pegasus motto is “Theater for Everyone,” something Frazier-Maskiell is confident will keep going as he looks toward a post-Main Street future.

“That stays,” he said. “That isn’t a building.”