Dear Reader—I’m aware that my newsletter has been coming out more frequently than I had intended, and my concern is that it is coming out more than my readers would like. But for some reason, we seem to be at a tipping point in the media regarding the demise of regional nonprofit theaters across the country, and that’s one of my main concerns right now. (Stay tuned for an announcement below.)
Today it was the Washington Post’s turn to sound the alarm in an article by Peter Marks entitled Theater is in freefall, and the pandemic isn’t the only thing to blame. In it, Marks provides a disturbingly long summary of regional theaters that have either closed or severely reduced their staffs and/or their seasons. Here’s the list:
Long Wharf Theatre—gave up its theater and is now homeless in New Haven.
Center Theatre Group—cut it’s budget and “paused” programming in the Mark Taper Forum.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival—after raising $2.5M in emergency donations in April in order to keep it’s 2023 season afloat, is now trying to raise another $7.5M or the season might be cancelled.
Triad Stage—permanently closed.
Southern Repertory Theatre—permanently closed.
New Ohio Theatre in New York—permanently closed.
Public Theatre—eliminated Under the Radar Festival in a cost-saving measure.
Arena Stage—”working with what its leaders call ‘deficit planning’…[and] reducing the number of plays they produce.”
Lookingglass Theatre Company—ceasing operations until late spring 2024.
In my neck of the woods, the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Westport Country Playhouse have become roadhouses who occasionally do a play readings. And I’d add the Brooklyn Academy of Music, who cut their staff by 13%.
And of course, it’s not just the large theaters who are struggling. Yesterday, American Theatre distributed an article by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho called “BoHo Theatre and the ‘Brutal Calculus’ of Chicago Storefronts,” which describes the closing of the 20-year-old BoHo Theatre. Couthino provides a list of casualties: “In 2023 alone, First Folio Theatre, Sideshow Theatre Company, The New Coordinates, and Interrobang Theatre Project shuttered after grappling with these exacerbated issues.”
What was notable about Peter Marks’s article (and the reason for my having sent you yet another newsletter) were the quotations he has from various experts in arts management. For instance, Michael M. Kaiser, the former head of the Kennedy Center who now chairs the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Univ of MD, said about the closings: “It’s happening more and more, and it’s going to be an epidemic. I’ve always believed that we were heading for a time that we were going to lose a whole lot of midsized cultural organizations. And I still believe that’s true.” (He particularly believed that was true when he was head of the Kennedy Center and thought he should be getting a lot more money that was then going to smaller venues, but whatever.)
Later in the article, Amy Wratchford, president of the arts management consultancy Wratchford Group, makes an alarming prediction: “By this time next year, I think the industry will shrink by half.” Gulp! She continues, in what is surely a phrase designed to send chills up and down the spine of arts leaders everywhere, that the nonprofit theater is suffering from “donor fatigue,” which Marks explains is “a reluctance by some financial supporters to continue to shore up struggling institutions.” Apparently, there is a limit to the number of times you can ask donors to reach into their pockets before they start asking whether you might need to change the way you’re doing things. “What we’ve got,” Wratchford says, in what seems to me to be an understatement, “is a disconnect between theater and the people who fund it.”
This is why I react so strongly to those who continue pining for more support for the arts. Basically, the term “donor fatigue” combined with the continued government disinterest in the arts says, in effect, “the party’s over” for a nonprofit model founded on the constant generation of unearned income. Michael Kaiser, without coming out and saying it, blames the financial crisis on some theaters becoming woke without “bringing their audiences or their doners or their boards along with them…And as a result, I think we’re seeing some serious loss of audience and board support and donor support.” Maybe—after all, the rich donor demographic is not noted for being particularly liberal in its politics. Those who live by the Board, die by the Board. But I think there is more to it than the glib “go woke, go broke” meme. But who knows, maybe there are former OSF subscribers standing up their program on a fencepost and blasting it with their AR-15s, who knows?
It’s interesting and even heartening to see how the Long Wharf Theatre has been finessing its homelessness to continue to create interesting work. Their Artistic Director, Jacob G. Padron, who grew up on shows at El Teatro Campesino, shifted the theater to an “itinerant” theater model in an effort to serve underserved communities by taking theater to them. For instance, they took a “concert reading” of the musical Jelly’s Last Jam to a space in the city’s Dixwell neighborhood. In the fall, they will tour the solo show Year of Magical Thinking to private homes in New Haven, which is fascinating. They’ve also expanded to include digital work and films under their umbrella.
While I can’t say that I expected this sudden implosion within the regional theater world, I have for many years promoted the desperate need for the theater to explore different business models, and have been continually poo-pooed as alarmist, and told that there simply was no alternative to the nonprofit model. Well, I’d suggest it is time to start thinking fast, because the band is already playing on the deck.
ANNOUNCEMENT: To help with that process of reimagination, I have written a book that I’m calling (at the moment) The Empowered Theater Artist: A Process for Starting a Company and Taking Control of Your Creative Career. It is for people with an imaginative spirit who are interested in starting a new theater company with the goal of sustainability, not for people trying to make an old theater work better. (Although it might have been useful to Bojo Theatre if they had had it when they were starting.) It involves reimagining how we create theater from the bottom up—indeed, the first chapter, Chapter Zero, is entitled “Forget Everything.” I’m creating a landing page for people who wish to be notified when the book is available, and I will let my Substrack subscribers know first.