Abercrombie Responds!
Housekeeping
First, welcome to my new subscribers. Thanks to a recent link from fellow Substacker BRIAN EUGENIO HERRERA, we have surged to 83 readers! Now that Building a Sustainable Theater has been released, my intention is to provide you with more regular communication in the future.
Speaking of Building a Sustainable Theater, I am thrilled to report that, as of this morning, the paperback version is finally available on Amazon. I had to go through several layers of chatbots to get the problem addressed, but when I finally was passed to Manesh, the problem was solved quickly.
I received my first sales report on the paperback, and was pleased to see that at least eight copies were sold (Laura and I are already shopping for yachts.). To my surprise, five of those sales were in Europe! Go figure!
In addition, traffic on for the online version has surged in the last few days, which I think is the result of the Herrera mention.
There has been no more movement on a HowlRound interview, so I’ll likely follow up soon.
I am also considering creating an ebook and paperback for DIY Theater MFA: Growing Your Theater Skills When You Don’t Have the Time, Money, or Opportunity to Pursue a Graduate Degree in the future. Stay tuned.
The Return of Abercrombie
My old friend Abercrombie, whom you first met in my previous post, “The Obstacle of Startup Funds,” has responded to my post with two more of his own. And because he’s a good guy, he has moved all three of them to their own website so that he is able to continue to maintain his anonymity while allowing you to read them in full. The site is called Abercrombie Talks Theatre (I love it), and he has published three chapters with the promise of a fourth: Chapter One, Chapter Two, and Chapter Three. We have also exchanged emails.
Near the start of Chapter Three, Abercrombie issues a warning to those who might be tempted to get too giddy about building their own theater: “But please be warned: the odds of starting and sustaining a viable theatre are just as long and just as against you as the odds are of becoming a sustainable working actor.” While it remains to be seen whether he is right in this assessment, let’s temporarily accept it as true for argument’s sake: let’s say the chance of success is a wash between the traditional path toward a career in theater and the path that I have described in Building a Sustainable Theater. Is it just an instance of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire? What do you gain if your start your own theater? Well, actually, I’d say quite a few things:
you might actually do some plays instead of just auditioning, thus increasing your experience and building your resume;
you are in charge, so your success rests on your own decisions rather than the decisions of others;
you can live anywhere you want, and you don’t have to travel;
you can choose when you work;
you can choose what plays you do and who you do them with.
Maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly in my old age (maybe?), but those are all things I’d find attractive. Your mileage may vary.
Abercrombie also does a deep dive into the National Endowment for the Arts’ latest “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.” The statistics do, indeed, show a considerable drop in participation, especially among groups that had previously been cornerstones, like the over 55 demographic and people with a graduate degree. As someone with a foot in both of those categories, I can testify that going into public spaces in 2022, when COVID numbers were better but still a bit daunting, was not a casual decision. Will those numbers improve? Not if the reports of this year’s attendance are true, but they might. I can’t argue with Abercrombie’s alarm, nor his conclusions:
To put it plainly, theatre is dying because the market for theatre is dying. All the theatres that closed or reduced their seasons over the summer have clearly seen the writing on the wall. Theatres that have remained open have, on the whole, yet to recover to their pre-pandemic numbers. In a stagnant and shrinking market, it is clearly an immense challenge to think about creating a sustainable career in theatre, no matter how you go about doing it. Theatre is in an entropic spiral, and usually when that occurs, it's best to let the spiral take its course, much like the best option when fighting a forest fire is simply to let itself burn out.
As has been true throughout out friendship, the Venn Diagram that describes Abercrombie’s and my beliefs have a considerable degree of overlap. I think where we diverge this time is in our conclusions about the future: Abercrombie believes that “whatever comes next will take several generations to produce;” I believe now is exactly the time to get in on the ground floor.
To explain this difference, I’d like to revisit Abercrombie’s metaphor of a forest fire. Like him, I agree that there isn’t much to be done about the current blaze except let it burn out, although I don’t think is anywhere near over. The question is what to do next.
In an article by the Sierra Club entitled “What Happens After a Wildfire Sweeps through a Forest?,” author Alison Cagle writes:
“Post-fire forest regeneration is not the same as forest recovery. One way to think of post-fire recovery is that it involves the return of same-mix species of trees, shrubs, and grasses. For example, recovery of the forests burned by the recent Ferguson fire outside Yosemite National Park would see a new generation of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine seedlings replacing the dead trees.”
My book does not describe a process that leads to the recovery of the regional theater scene, in which there is a return of “same-mix” types of medium and large theaters built on the same nonprofit model reliant on unearned income and large staffs. No, I’m more interested in what Cagle called regeneration:
“But a landscape can regenerate without necessarily returning to its previous mix of trees. Oaks might replace pines, or drought-tolerant shrubland might take the place of the moisture-loving trees. Which kind of plant community recolonizes the burned forests depends on a region’s climate in the months and years after the fire, since higher temperatures and decreased precipitation can compromise a forest’s chances of full recovery.”
My model for building a sustainable theater does not attempt to reproduce the current theaters, but rather to grow theaters differently according to the specific region’s artistic climate. That’s why such a large part of Building a Sustainable Theater is focused on running tests within the community. The problem with the SPPA is that it is comprised of national data, and gives the impression that the trends described are uniform across the nation. But theater is a local art — it exists in a regional artistic climate that may or may not reflect the larger trends.
To his credit, Abercrombie acknowledges this: “At the community-based level, it is absolutely critical that you do the necessary marketing to find what that niche is. It is not enough simply to say "I want to start a theatre doing XX." You need to know what the market will support.” Yes! Precisely! That’s the topic of Part 4, and especially Chapters 18, 19, 20, 21, and 25. In other words, if you’re wanting to create a forest of oak trees and your preliminary tests indicate that the environment will only support drought-tolerant shrubs, you either need to adapt your vision or find a more oak-friendly place!
As Abercrombie knows, I have long promoted the need for theater to spread more widely into communities of all kinds, sizes, and places. Now’s the time! Just because the current regional theaters are burning doesn’t mean there are no opportunities for theater anywhere (or any other art form, for that matter, at least looking at the SPPA data). Each community will require a different business model, and each theater will have to grow differently and at a different rate, and produce different plays in different ways. In other words, they must adapt to their local environment. But finally — finally! — the forest canopy is no longer dominated by a handful of tall trees. Perhaps sunlight might finally make it to the flora on the forest floor.
I’m looking forward to Abercrombie’s vision of the future in Chapter Four of Abercrombie Talks Theatre. My vision, as always, is based on Buckminster Fuller: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” I think now is the perfect time to do that.