The original concept for Bare Minimum Productions was a low budget production company that produces high-quality scripts with minimal sets. Then we hired David Miller as a set designer. The next thing we knew, we were discussing plans to build a parapet and a moat. Oddly enough, the setting for our first show is an apartment in the Midwest.

Still it was a fine blueprint for a moat, and when you’re staring at it through the three-martini haze that we’ve come to refer to as our “production meetings”, you just can’t help but give the okay.

How we got talked into the stained-glass elevator with hydraulic lift, we’ll never know.

But to make a long story short, before we knew it, we were approving plans to hire a composer to create original music, a costume designer to actually sew the clothing right onto each actor, and a lighting designer who’s always wanted to light a show from the earth’s orbit – an effect that, though costly, could surely secure us in the history books.

And so here we are, unable to say that we produce low-budget shows, just as we’re unable to say, “here’s the rent check,” to our landlords.  And now we have to come up with another justification for our company name, seeing as we had our logo embedded in the side of the Prudential Building with Siberian black diamonds (at the suggestion of our PR person).

So bare minimum refers to the amount of willpower we have when saying no to pretty blueprints, fancy gadgets, and anything involving NASA (we’ll pretty much approve any designer request if it’s prefaced with the phrase “high-tech engineering by NASA”).

It also refers to the expected return investors will get with our productions.