BAM Crash

A 3-Year-Old Draft I Never Published

I happened to find this draft I wrote three years ago and never published. In the wake of Oskar Eustis’s declaration about the regional theater movement being over, it seems prescient.

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BAM Crash

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article entitled “Brooklyn Academy of Music Lays Off 13 Percent of Its Staff.” A little over a week ago, it was Center Theatre Group in LA announcing it was “postponing” it’s final production, closing its largest theater space, the Mark Taper Forum, and laying off 10% of its staff. The Westport Country Playhouse, a 90-year-old regional theater in Connecticut, has seen most of its staff dismissed as its board “reimagines” the venue as, basically, a roadhouse. The Triad Stage in Greensboro has been closed entirely, and the Public Theatre in NYC eliminated the Under-the-Radar Festival. Oregon Shakespeare Festival is also in serious financial trouble, cutting their staff and their season by more than half.

As they said on The Office, “My God! It’s happening.”

There appears to be a severe crisis in the regional theaters across the nation, and while many point to the pandemic as the most prominent factor, what we’re also seeing is that audiences just “aren’t coming back” like everyone hoped they would. The world changed in the two years we were locked down, and it’s a much different landscape for the arts today.

BAM president Gina Duncan, the Times said, seems to recognize this. She said in her letter to the BAM staff “that the changes were necessary in part to help BAM to ‘weather the downturn in charitable giving for the arts, and address an outdated business model that heavily relies on a shrinking donor base.’ She said that the organization faced a “sizable structural deficit” each year.” (Anyone who knows me knows why I italicized “an outdated business model.”) Announcements of cuts at the other theaters used similar language.

As some of you know, I have been writing and talking about the unsustainability of the nonprofit business model for many, many years on my old “Theatre Ideas” blog, which I wrote from 2005-2012, as well as on The Clyde Fitch Report, and briefly on my Creative Insubordination blog. I have long been skeptical about “legacy” theaters such as OSF and CTG with their massive investments in ever-larger performance spaces, and their always growing administrative staffs. Indeed, the Times wrote, the number of fulltime staff positions at BAM had “dwindled to around 200, and the latest round of cuts are expected to move the number below that threshold.”

“Dwindled” to around 200 full-time staff??? Seriously? And OSF dwarfs that: it cut its staff from over 500 in 2020 to roughly 250. CTG had 200 full-time staff. To understand what this means, we need a point of comparison. Staff numbers for OSF, BAM, and CTG prior to this round of cuts is 950 full-time positions. Multiplied by 52 weeks, that means 49,400 work weeks. By means of comparison, Actors Equity, in it’s current annual report (2021-2022), by comparison, lists 196,388 work weeks for its entire membership. In other words, the work weeks of the full-time staffs of three theaters equals over 25% of those of all of the professional actors and stage managers in the US. Administrative bloat is what happens when theaters become institutions.

It’s certainly not the artists who benefit from this situation—most are freelancers brought in for a single show or two, or for a season if they are fortunate, and paid very little, especially when compared to the Artistic Director and Executive Director. (Broadway World, in discussing the elimination of the Under the Radar Festival, rather pointedly noted that “Oskar Eustis took in $1,122,561 in compensation, but two other executives also made over $450,000: Chief Advancement Officer Laurence Jahns was at $484,240 and Executive Director Patrick Willingham was at $472,293.” The Under the Radar budget was estimated at $500,000.)

It isn’t an accident that the theaters that are crumbling today are some of the largest and most prestigious theaters in the nation, and I predict there will be more to follow. Institutions with massive buildings, and a tradition of relying on subsidy to close their budget gaps, will start to fall one after another.

To make matters worse, many of these legacy institutions have recently seen leadership changes and the hiring of a younger generation of BIPOC artistic directors who are being forced to face these hard times following the fallout of the pandemic.

Frankly, I am not certain why any artist, but especially a BIPOC artist, would want to take over a wheezing theatrical dinosaur. Sure, it’s an opportunity to cash in, but is it worth it? Does anybody believe that these theaters are going to tolerate the changes necessary to diversify their audience? Why do these visionary leaders not follow August Wilson’s call in The Ground on Which I Stand (a much more radical manifesto than #We See You White American Theatre, in my opinion) and start something of their own, building an audience of people who want the kind of plays they want to do. August Wilson:

“We need those misguided financial resources to be put to a better use. We cannot develop our playwrights with the meager resources at our disposal… Without theaters we cannot develop our talents. If we cannot develop our talents, then everyone suffers. Our writers. The theater. The audience. Actors are deprived of material, our communities are deprived of jobs in support of the art: the company manager, the press coordinator, the electricians, the carpenters, the concessionaires, the people that work in the wardrobe, the box office staff, the ushers, the janitors. We need some theaters. We cannot continue like this.”

Well, it looks as if mainstream legacy theaters can’t continue like this, either. The old way has become obsolete already—or at least we’re finally willing to recognize it. Who will step up and create a new model?

Artists, it’s your time to shine.