Fund Artists, Scale Back

Monica Byrne's Inspiring Vision for Theater

“Idealism…may in itself be put down as the first ideal of the art theater.”

Sheldon Cheney, The Art Theater (1917)

Anyone who has followed my writing over the past 15+ years knows the Buckminster Fuller quotation that I have held to as a motto: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Nevertheless, I have also (perhaps mistakenly) believed that the first step to building a new model is to acknowledge that the old model doesn’t work, and I have spent a great deal of time trying to convince people that there’s a better reality “out there.” Sometimes I feel like the guy in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave! But as Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And many people continue to see their salary (or at least their dreams of a salary) as based on their commitment to the old model, no matter how dysfunctional.

But the latest spate of closings to jolt the nonprofit theater scene—we had another one yesterday: the Tony Award (tm) Winning Theatre Works Silicon Valley, which announced it needs to raise $3M by November just to complete the company’s 2023-2024 season—seem to have encouraged more people to finally acknowledge that something may actually be wrong. Yesterday, playwright and novelist Monica Byrne published in the Washington Post a refreshing—indeed, inspiring—take on the current situation that focuses less on saving those theaters that are struggling and more on imagining the foundation of a new model for the future. The article is called, significantly, “Why theater (in its current form) does not deserve to be saved.” (gift article)

Her vision is based on a simple foundation that could easily be accomplished without requiring any increase in funding:

“For theater, as we know it, to have any future at all, a new economic model must take its place, founded on a simple principle: fund artists directly. Then let the artists produce their own work, rent their own venues and pay their own collaborators.”

In other words, put artists back in control of the means of production.

For over thirty years after its founding, the NEA did just this, and while it wasn’t perfect, it worked pretty well. In the 1990s, though, in the face of attacks on the NEA by craven politicians like Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato who were upset about federal money going to controversial artists, a “compromise” was reached that the NEA would continue to be federally funded but that their grants would go only to institutions and not individual artists. That way, Crazy Artists could be kept under control by putting them under the watchful eye of Boards of Directors mostly comprised of wealthy community members with an interest in the arts but no actual experience. The result was predicable: “In 1965, there were 56 nonprofit theaters; by 2000, there were 340.” A 600% increase. Hey, if the only way to get money from the NEA and state arts boards was to be an institution, well, let’s build an institution!

The problem is that institutions love to get bigger. Bigger buildings (what Harold Clurman called the Edifice Complex), bigger staffs, bigger budgets, and bigger deficits. Ms. Byrne summarizes:

“In 2006, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis moved into a grand $125 million complex. Four years later, Arena Stage opened its 200,000-square-foot, $135 million Mead Center in Southwest D.C. As recently as 2021, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago completed a $73 million ‘urban theater campus.’ Smaller theaters followed suit, with the same assumption: that physical size provided stability.

Meanwhile, however, an insidious feedback loop was taking hold. The bigger theaters got, the more assets they had to maintain, the more administrators they had to pay, the more capital campaigns they had to launch, the more debt they had to take on, and the more seats they had to fill to break even. But as the NEA noted in a 2008 report, ticket sales were declining. Size no longer meant stability, but liability.”

To state the obvious, it takes a lot more audience members to meet a budgetary goal of 70% capacity if you have an 1,100-seat theater than if you have a 500-seat theater. And so here we are. It’s the large- and medium-sized theaters who are suddenly collapsing, and at the risk of sounding hard-hearted, I’m OK with that. I am reminded of what happens when a tall tree falls in a forest: yes, it makes a noise, but it also provides new life, as Project Learning Tree explains:

The nutrients a tree used to build itself during its lifetime are spread into the soil and make it richer for other plants around it to use. These nutrients are essential for small trees to grow and replace the dead ones….The space left by a fallen tree allows more light to reach the forest floor as well as space for other vegetation to take root and flourish. If a tree falls and takes others down with it, this helps the plants around it even further….Hollow logs are used by bears and smaller animals like foxes for making their dens. Also, a great variety of detritivores make their home in decaying wood, like millipedes and slugs.

Back in 2011, Holly Sidford showed us that the 2% of nonprofit arts organizations with the largest budgets scooped up fully 55% of the charitable giving in the sector. If a few of those theatrical trees fell, perhaps some smaller organizations with more sustainable budgets might flourish in the new light. Ms. Byrne gives and example from her own experience with a smaller theater:

I come from a background where we regularly put on plays for $10,000 to $15,000. We frequently sold out our runs — all three of my first plays in Durham, N.C., sold out, or nearly so. We always paid everyone something. Double that budget to $30,000, and we could have paid well. Extrapolate that into the millions, and hundreds of artists could have been writing and producing their own work — and paying their collaborators directly during quarantine.

In addition, Ms. Byrne (and I) see the possibility that many new, smaller theaters might spring up using fewer resources while exploring an aesthetic less resource-intensive and less wasteful:

“It’s true that scaling down would mean prioritizing certain kinds of theater over others. But this is the case in every era: Some aesthetics thrive while others die out. Instead of a world in which you pay astronomical prices to see another tired revival from the mezzanine, imagine there are a dozen theater cells in your area, performing new work in backyards and parks and city squares and empty storefronts. Art that is fresh, fluid, immediate, accessible and affordable—to make and to see—all because we collectively decided to fund the artists directly. That’s the future I want. I can live without million-dollar rotating sets.”

So there are two necessary aspects to this new vision:

• Control by artists

• Scaling down

These are also the cornerstones of my forthcoming book. Ms. Byrne notes that this will require “that audience members and funders, large and small, public and private …understand that bigger doesn’t mean better; adaptable means better, and adaptable usually means smaller.” The trend away from gigantism has been underway in the business world for quite a while. In 2005, business guru Seth Godin announced “Small is the new big,” and went on to describe why:

Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.

Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

Small means that you can answer email from your customers.

In other words, small means greater engagement between artists and community.

Jason Fried, the founder of the tech company 37signals, maintains a strong commitment to keeping his business small, personally sustainable (overtime is strongly discouraged except in the direst emergency), and profitable. “Small is not less than,” Fried asserts. “It’s greater than. It’s faster than. It’s friendlier than. It’s closer than. It’s better than.” It requires creativity and innovation: “You don’t get to lose money like [big companies] do. Instead, you have to make it work. That means doing the great work that small organizations must do to survive, thrive, and stand out.” Mr. Fried and is co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, have a podcast on which they discuss their ideas and values. In a recent episode entitled “Come Small, Come All,” Mr. Hansson might have been describing large regional theaters when he said about startup companies who are losing money year after year but are being bailed out by venture capital firms:

It’s almost like a version of the resource curse that both companies and countries can end up in a bad shape if they just have this spigot of money pouring at them that they can’t direct in sort of productive ways that they end up in this dysfunctional state where their habits are attuned to this very specific peculiar odd environment where there’s just this faucet of money spewing at you. And the moment that faucet is turned off, they’re like, oh shit, what do we do now? I don’t know. Do you know what we do? What do we do? Oh, let’s fire a bunch of people. Let’s re-jig, let’s do all of this stuff because they have not built the habits of running a sustainable business because they’ve never had to run a sustainable business.

The idea that smallness has value isn’t new to theater, either. In 1968, Peter Brook famously opened his book The Empty Space with “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.” He doesn’t recommend keeping theater quite this minimalist, but many of his most famous productions follow such an aesthetic, and did so with no loss in aesthetic power. I’m thinking of his 1988 production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which NY Times theater critic Frank Rich described thusly:

“Mr. Brook has stripped ''The Cherry Orchard'' of its scenery, its front curtain, its intermissions. Even the house in which the play unfolds—the Brooklyn Academy of Music's semirestored Majestic Theater—looks half-demolished, a once-genteel palace of gilt and plush now a naked, faded shell of crumbling brick, chipped paint and forgotten hopes.

What little decorative elegance remains can be found on the vast stage floor, which Mr. Brook has covered, as is his wont, with dark Oriental rugs. And that—plus an extraordinary international cast, using a crystalline new translation by Elisaveta Lavrova—proves to be all that's needed. On this director's magic carpets, ''The Cherry Orchard'' flies. By banishing all forms of theatrical realism except the only one that really matters—emotional truth—Mr. Brook has found the pulse of a play that its author called ''not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce.”

Brook could have had all the money he wanted, but he preferred a more minimalist aesthetic in order to focus the work on its most important aspects. Brook’s equally famous contemporary, Peter Hall, had a similar conversion when he took over London’s Old Vic. He wrote:

John Gunter developed a simple design where the actor and his text was clearly presented on a well-planked stage. The actor, his passion, a few visual elements and some bare boards: this was all we had or needed. The audience's imagination was encouraged—we had no technology or complication.... By having a strong design discipline at the Old Vic—in effect a permanent stage—we spent little of our money on building and rebuilding sets. Our changeovers from one play to another took one hour—no more than is customary to set back to the beginning of a single play. We were able to play real repertory—which meant a change of play after every performance.... Did the permanent stage at the Old Vic result in monotony? I don't think so. There were no complaints from the critics or from the public, and several other designers enjoyed using John Gunter's stage as an environment in which they could place the essential images for their own play. Everything on the stage was strictly demanded by the action, and at all times we tried to avoid decoration. We never needed to go 'dark' in order to dress rehearse a new play, because the ready availability of the stage allowed us to dress-rehearse during the day. We then maintained our repertory each evening. The maximum use of the stage was therefore enjoyed both for rehearsals and for performances. And for seven days a week, theatre was alive.

Smaller, sustainable, resource-light theaters that are not reliant on massive grants and contributions allow the possibility that theaters might more easily be established in a variety of communities across the nation, theaters that could focus on serving smaller, previously ignored segments of the population. The result would be the democratization of theater, which would benefit the entire theatrical ecosphere.

“Artists are the ones who find new ways forward in times of change,” Ms. Byrne concludes. “That’s our job. We innovate. Let us.”

Indeed: let us.

Let. Us.

Because if you don’t let us, I guarantee we’ll do it anyway, and you’ll be sorry to have missed out.