"Subscriptions Are Dead, Long Live Subscriptions"

by Rosie Brownlow-Calkin

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[As most theatergoers know, the regional repertory theaters in the United States depends heavily on subscriptions for their audiences.  The programs may vary from company to company and even from season to season as marketing tactics change or someone comes up with a new concept, but some kind of subscription plan has been the mainstay for regional theater since the movement began, essentially following World War II. 

[In recent decades, however, theater audiences began to shrivel.  Potential audience members aged and younger people didn’t sign up to replace their elders.  The reasons vary, of course, but the repercussions have been a whittling-away of the base of the rep companies’ principal source of attendees and, thereby, their income base.

[The latest issue, Spring 2024, of the Theatre Communications Groups American Theatre, which has become a quarterly magazine since returning to print after going online during the pandemic shutdown, carried a couple of articles dealing with this and related issues. 

[As part of my ad hoc series on the regional theater in the U.S., focusing on its significance in our culture and the problem it currently faces, I’m republishing Rosie Brownlow-Calkin’s “Subscriptions Are Dead, Long Live Subscriptions!” on Rick On Theater.  The article originally appeared in AT in the spring issue and was posted on the website on 4 June 2024.]

Theatres are taking a hard look at a well-worn patron model, and coming to different conclusions about its usefulness.

When Amy Kaissar wrote her graduate thesis on the topic of nonprofit theatre subscriptions [“Theatre Subscriptions in a Changing World,” MFA thesis, Division of Theatre, School of the Arts, Columbia University, 2005], her basic argument was: They’re not dead; we just haven’t invested in them. Now, 19 years wiser, and after 15 years in leadership positions, Kaissar, the current co-producing director at Bristol Riverside Theatre [BRT] in Bristol, Pa., confessed, “I’m not sure I would 100 percent agree” with her earlier assessment.

The hedging is important here—it’s not that her outlook has done a 180. But so much in the intervening years has complicated her earlier certainty, including, of course, the pandemic lockdown of the past few years, which impacted every aspect of the industry. But even without that bumpy chapter and its even rockier aftermath, the outlook for subscriptions has long been multilayered. Even now, for all the public hand-wringing about the state of the theatre, artistic leaders, audiences, and a quantitative survey of 84 companies from across the U.S. conducted by American Theatre presents a remarkably multifarious picture rather than a uniformly bleak one.

The complexity begins with the very definition of subscriptions. Butts in seats is an easy number to measure (How full is the house? Down about 25-30 percent nationwide, on average), but what makes a subscription a subscription? Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I., and Shotgun Players in Berkeley, Calif., to name two examples, have embraced the flexible models that have gained traction in recent years (pay in advance for a set number of tickets and redeem for the best available seat for any performance on any day in the show’s run), while 4th Wall Theatre Company in Houston and Oregon Contemporary Theatre in Eugene are leaning into what many in the industry refer to as the “standard” or “traditional” model (pay in advance for the same seats on the second Thursday of every run, say). The REV Theatre Co. in Auburn, N.Y., has ditched flex passes entirely.

Road Less Traveled Productions in Buffalo, N.Y., and Dobama Theatre in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, like several others in the survey, are rolling out what they call “memberships,” but nearly all of these differ from flex subscriptions in name only—with the notable exception of Open Stage in Harrisburg, Pa., which offers a pay-by-the-month model patrons can cancel any time (and for the record, Open Stage says it’s doing great—subscriptions are up 296 percent since 2019). Omaha Theater Company has a new rolling membership “similar to museums” that allows patrons to jump in at any point in the calendar year. To add to the variety of the picture, Local Theater Company in Boulder, Colo., produces three shows in a season, while Sierra Rep in Sonora, Calif., produces nine, and both offer subscriptions. You’re hardly comparing apples to apples the way you can with single-ticket purchases.

So broadly speaking—if we can speak broadly at all—what are the trends? Are subscriptions in free fall, and if so, what does that mean for the continuing health of theatres? Are subscriptions still a viable model, for either audiences or companies?

On their face, the numbers aren’t great. Of the 66 companies responding to the survey that offer subscriptions and provided complete data, 42 percent said the numbers are way down, with 30 percent or more of their subscribers gone since the pandemic, and 21 percent of companies said they are somewhat down (between 11 and 29 percent subscriber attrition). This is almost a photonegative of numbers for audience attendance in general: As measured in a previous AT survey, many more companies are down moderately in overall attendance than are down significantly.

But the bright spots are brighter too. More companies are doing well with subscribers than are doing well with overall ticket sales: 20 percent of companies report more than a 10 percent subscriber increase since 2019, and 17 percent have held steady (which we’re defining here as staying within a 10 percent increase or decrease). Comparatively, only 26 percent of companies report steady or increased attendance numbers overall.

So more than a third of companies in our survey said they’ve weathered the pandemic lockdown and are in stable or better shape, subscriber-wise, since reopening. Burning Coal Theatre Company in Raleigh, N.C., for instance, reported subscription growth of 60 percent over the past five years.

“The subscription model is just fine,” said Burning Coal artistic director Jerome Davis. “Young people aren’t crazy about it, but the nice thing about young people is, they don’t stay young for long.”

At Actor’s Express in Atlanta, managing director Alex Scollon said he wonders if the media bias toward well-resourced institutions is the reason there’s been such one-note, sad-sack media coverage about the state of the theatre field. “Often midsize and smaller organizations are left out of these conversations in favor of doom and gloom stories from LORT [League of Resident Theatres, a professional theater association for regional, non-profit companies],” said Scollon, who said that Actor’s Express’s subscription numbers have held steady. “There is a lot that keeps me up these days, but subscription plans are not one of them.”

Added Jen Uphoff Gray, artistic director of Forward Theatre in Madison, Wisc., “Overall, I am feeling exhausted by the messaging that ‘the subscription model is dead,’ which long predated the pandemic. Any such proclamations ignore the wide differences in theatre companies across the country, and the wide variety of audiences we serve.”

Indeed, the notion that the subscription model has been on the wane isn’t supported by the data we gathered. While none of the nine LORT member theatres [of a total of 75 members] that completed our survey have grown their base significantly, and only two have held steady (both in Florida, with its never-ending stream of retirees), half of the surveyed companies said their subscriptions were on the rise in the decade preceding the pandemic, with another quarter holding steady. Though the survey didn’t directly probe whether numbers had rebounded since the slump most companies experienced in 2020 or 2021, several volunteered the news that they are now trending in the right direction.

In sum, it feels premature to make any pronouncements about whether the contraction in audiences post-pandemic-lockdown is also a death knell for the subscription model. The longer-term data doesn’t indicate a gradual or inevitable trend in that direction for the majority of companies.

Still, if you factor in theatres who consider themselves “holding steady” with subscription losses of under 10 percent, nearly two-thirds of our respondents say they’ve lost subscribers in the past five years. Kaissar’s company, Bristol Riverside, is part of this larger group, with subscriptions down 31 percent since the pre-pandemic idyll of 2019. Though they have regained some subscribers from their lowest point over the last few years, Kaissar said she “wouldn’t call it a recovery at all. The diehards are still here, and we have not succeeded in getting new people in.”

Sheldon Post is one of those diehards. He said via email that he’s stuck with BRT for 35 years because of the variety of programming, “a mix of relatively unknown plays, very well-known plays, and ‘different’ takes on familiar plays,” as well as the perks, including “the ability to change our performance date on the rare occasions that we need to,” and a benefit that “enables subscribers to return on another night to see a play again—no charge.”

That seems like a good deal (though the ability to exchange tickets has recently been extended to single-ticket buyers at several companies for free or a nominal fee). So why have so many at BRT flown the coop, and so precipitously? Kaissar was hesitant to make big pronouncements on the subject. “I worry about anyone who claims to understand the actual causes, given the lack of available high-quality research,” she said, but did recall that in conversations with subscribers, “What we hear most consistently is either age-related things, or they moved, or they didn’t like the work we’re doing anymore. They want the work of the previous generation.” She added that, for the record, her company hasn’t pivoted from feel-good musicals to the work of Sarah Kane, but that it has been more focused on attracting Gen X patrons and other recent empty nesters with titles they might recognize, like their upcoming Big The Musical. Viewed through one lens, that may seem like crowd-pleasing programming, but it all depends which crowd you mean: Baby boomers and above were not that movie’s target audience when it came out in 1988.

[According to Wikipedia: “Sarah Kane [1972-99] was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action.”  Kane died by suicide at the age of 28.]

Other artistic leaders are in agreement with Kaissar, with many citing a greying of their subscriber base as a reason for declining subscription rates. The near-universal agreement is that subscribers, especially to the “standard” models, tend to be older. In the four years since Covid hit, these audience members are more likely to have passed, moved away, become infirm, or simply gotten more cautious about their health. And for whatever reason, Gen Xers and millennials tend not to make plans far in advance. Said Lauren Halvorsen [dramaturg and writer based in Washington, D.C.] of the popular theatre Substack newsletter Nothing for the Group [newsletter devoted to a conversation about pay equity in the theater], “Theatres do not embrace the spontaneity of younger generations.”

So between the thinning older audience and the last-minute-planning younger audience, it’s no wonder that traditional subscription numbers are not rising. “The word subscription scares people off post-Covid,” said Tracy Mitchell, executive director of Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y. “The current trend of late purchasing has become a habit. As long as there is a seat available, this is going to plague theatres for quite some time.”

Several survey respondents, like Kaissar, did say that a perceived distaste for “newer” programming contributed to the decline in numbers. Still, for all the right-wing media’s eagerness to blame “woke theatre” for this phenomenon, no respondent reported that this audience aversion had an especially political bent. Joe Miller, a one-time Bristol Riverside subscriber, said he cut the cord because he and his wife were “seeing plays that we’re just not that interested in. We like comedies, we like musicals, and some of these are plays we’ve never heard of before,” adding that he found the theatre’s programming overly heavy on drama of late.

There are countless soft or unique factors at play for subscribers who call it quits. For Lori Boswell in Portland, Ore., it wasn’t about programming but parking. She traded in her subscription to a LORT theatre for one at a non-union company in the suburbs; both make “okay” work, she said, but she was done with what she considers the inconvenience of coming downtown.

One area where there is little agreement: money. On its face, it would seem like an obvious driving factor in subscription trends, because younger people who might replace older subscribers are less likely to have the disposable income necessary for a lump sum upfront payment. Indeed, when we asked for comments on Facebook, the floodgates opened, with reflection after reflection from younger industry folks stating in one way or another that they cannot afford to subscribe. One was Kathryn Huey, former business manager for the Blue Man Group, current general manager of D.C.’s Studio Theatre, who said that subscriptions “are expensive, very true. They were nothing I could dream to do when I was younger.” Perhaps driven by necessity, the current crop of theatregoers “more than ever are looking for a deal, or a way to save,” argued Eric Pugh, director of marketing and communications of Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida.

[Frequent theatergoers may know the name Blue Man Group, but for others: it’s a performance-art troupe, formed in 1987, known for productions incorporating many varieties of music and art. The performers, known as Blue Men, paint their skin blue, always appear in groups of three, and are mute during shows.

[Washington’s Studio Theatre is a company many of whose productions I’ve seen over the years.  See my many reports on this blog for an impression of their work.]

Chad Bauman, executive director of Milwaukee Rep, maintained that his company has retained its substantial subscriber base during the pandemic in part because they offer cheap subscription packages and avoid last-minute deals for single-ticket buyers that “undermine the value proposition of subscriptions.” Milwaukee Rep is in the minority on this point; at most companies, paying upfront doesn’t save subscribers much money in the long run. A recent AT survey found that subscribers save just $1 per ticket vs. single-ticket buyers, on average.

Even theatres where subscriptions offer real savings, like Bristol Riverside, haven’t seen a boost because of it, making it unclear whether cost is really a meaningful signal or barrier. According to Kaissar, it hasn’t been “a winning message when we’ve gone hard on how cheap it is.” At Amphibian Stage in Fort Worth, Texas, said outgoing artistic director Kathleen Culebro, “Our most popular subscription package is actually not our cheapest.” Numbers would seem to side with Kaissar and Culebro, at least on a macro level; our earlier survey found no clear link between trends in audience attendance and trends in ticket pricing over the past five years.

Whatever the driving force, Kaissar understandably views Bristol Riverside’s decline in subscribers as a big problem. Fewer subscribers means that her marketing budget has ballooned; loyal subscribers need only a single email every year to remind them to re-up, but “my single ticket buyer, I need to advertise to.” Articulating a version of the reasoning that, in the decades since Danny Newman’s groundbreaking book Subscribe Now! [1977 (3rd ed., 1981)‎, Theatre Communications Group] made subscription the dominant model for many performing arts organizations, Kaissar noted that without a significant subscriber bloc ponying up for a whole season in advance, each lesser-known title becomes a massive risk. Without a strong base of subscribers, “I don’t know how we make new work. I don’t know how we push the art form forward. I don’t know how we introduce people to things they don’t know. I don’t know how we support playwrights.”

At Theater Mu in the Twin Cities [located specifically in Saint Paul, Minnesota], the subscription numbers aren’t so hot either, but Lianna McLernon, Mu’s marketing and communications director, and Wesley Mouri, the theatre’s development director, don’t see it as a problem. Mu has lost about half of their subscribers since 2019, but single tickets are up twofold. While McLernon is quick to emphasize that the theatre still does offer subscriptions and “they are important to us and we love our subscribers,” Mouri explained that “being an Asian American theatre company is unique in the sense that the Asian diaspora is the most diverse diaspora that exists.” In practical terms that means that Mu audiences are “very specifically keyed into the specific culture of each show. The Hmong audience is not necessarily going to come see the Kung Fu Zombie show [The Kung Fu Zombies Saga by Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay; 22 July-13 August 2023], which was about Lao experiences.”

There are many ways to measure growth, and Mu’s recent efforts to diversify their offerings outside the East Asian community have meant a massive influx of new audiences. Their audiences tend to be younger and more economically diverse than the typical theatregoer too; Mu offers a Pay As You Are program to every performance of every play, allowing patrons to purchase tickets for as little as $10. Institutional giving to the theatre has also doubled, a rarity in recent years, which helps release the pressure on ticket revenue to foot the bills.

While a theatre like Bristol Riverside sees subscriptions as a way to subsidize risk taking, at a theatre like Mu, the opposite is true. As Mouri and McLernon put it, Mu’s “focus on the diversifying of stories and representation” wouldn’t be possible if they were catering to “the same 200 people.” As Bay Street’s Tracy Mitchell put it, “Subscriptions are valuable for some of us, and not for others.”

While some survey respondents, like Mu, still offer subscriptions but have begun to direct their marketing strategies away from retaining and gaining subscribers, Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre “shifted away from subscriptions completely” to focus on “a radical generosity model to combat high costs associated with theatre,” as artistic director Ericka Ratcliff put it. People’s Light in Malvern, Pa., has focused its efforts on engaging regular attendees who are not subscribers. Though subscribers “can be terrific brand ambassadors for us,” as former managing director Erica Ezold put it, “our overall marketing strategy has shifted from subscribers as the first priority.”

But even most theatres who have lost subscribers have not abandoned the model, at least not for now. Many companies are offering perks, like drink tickets, subscriber-only events, and parking passes, to entice people to subscribe. City Lights Theater Company in San Jose, Calif., is emphasizing the value of community and belonging as a primary benefit to subscriptions, writing tailored welcome emails to each new subscriber.

American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco is focused first on bringing in single-ticket buyers, then on converting them to subscribers; similarly, ZACH Theatre in Austin waits until the first show of each season has closed to roll out one of their packages. Cadence Theatre Company in Richmond, Va., is offering early-bird discounts; Amphibian Stage has launched an under-40 package. Weston Theater Company in Vermont said they’re “streamlining” the subscription process. Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor, Maine, is experimenting with a “three-tiered approach,” including a $20-per-seat package for first-time subscribers and a premium-level “true cost of the ticket” package. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley [Palo Alto, California] is seeing success with smaller packages. Main Street Theater in Houston is rebranding subscriptions as “season tickets,” because “subscriptions is what the monthly charge for streaming is called,” reasoned executive artistic director Rebecca Greene Udden.

Clive Worsley, executive director of Cal Shakes [California Shakespeare Theater] in Orinda, Calif., said he believes that the “days are numbered for the single-entity subscription model,” and thinks the answer lies in “offering membership packages that could get you in the door to multiple locations, like a passport.”

The sheer multiplicity of opinions and data trends is both exhausting and exhilarating. As there is no clear picture on the state of subscriptions, they are a bit of a black box: They can be a financial barrier or a democratic opportunity. They can be flexible or rigid. They can stifle or empower. They can be a massive financial engine, an ancillary benefit, or a distraction. And there is no clear crystal ball about where they’re headed: Many are up, twice as many are down, plenty are recovering. Amid the dizzying variety of approaches, one universal truth is that every company is moving somewhere on this issue; no one is meeting this extraordinary moment by standing still.

As she struggles to figure out what’s driving the drop in subscriptions, Kaissar said, “The model, whether subscriptions or anything else, is outmoded, and we’ve got to get it up to speed, fast. Long term, people clearly want to come together to hear stories; 10 years from now it will look better than it did before.” Pausing on that bit of hopeful thinking, she added, “In the short term, how we get there is terrifying.”

[Rosie Brownlow-Calkin is an Actors' Equity Association actor and assistant professor of theater at the University of Nevada, Reno.  She has written extensively about the economics of the theater industry.]

 

"If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?": Regional Theaters Struggle to Revive

by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Rob Weinert-Kendt’s report on the difficulties faced by America’s regional theaters to come back from the COVID shutdown was published on the American Theatre website on 20 March 2023 (AMERICAN THEATRE | If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?; nb: the online edition has hyperlinks to many of the topics and references in the article).  It’s the latest installment in Rick On Theater’s occasional series on the state of the non-profit theater sector in the United States.

[I’ve published several articles concerning the state and background of the regional theater in the United States, starting with “A Crisis In America’s Theaters” on ROT on 13 September 2023.  That post was followed by “The Regional Theater: Change or Die” on 3 October 2023 and “Regional Theater: History” on 8 October.  These articles reported on the declining prospects of the regional theater in the United States.

[I then posted a serialized history of the National Endowment for the Arts (in 11 parts, 5 November-10 December 2023) because the NEA was instrumental in the development of the modern non-profit theater in the U.S.  The plight of this segment of our theater is serious enough that I’ve continued to post on it from various perspectives to demonstrate the history and importance of the American regional theater system and to explain the situation that put U.S. theater, as it’s now constituted, in peril.  Below is my fifth post in this irregular series.]

3 years after shutdown, despite some encouraging signs, most U.S. theatres are struggling to get audiences to commit.

It is perhaps a dubious sign of progress that the third anniversary of the COVID shutdown—which in the theatre field is marked as beginning March 12, 2020, the night Broadway went dark, along with most live performance venues across the U.S.—passed fairly quietly a week ago. [ROT’s coverage of the COVID shutdown is catalogued in the afterword to “‘Audiences Are Back, More or Less’” (Rick On Theater: "Audiences Are Back, More or Less"), 18 March 2024.] While we can’t say we are in a post-pandemic world as long as the virus’s daily death count remains in the hundreds and COVID safety advisors remain on theatres’ payrolls, we are, for better or worse, in a post-pandemic posture as a society. Federal relief money, including the Payroll Protection Program (PPP [3 April 2020-31 May 2021]) and the Shuttered Venues Operating Grant (SVOG [1 March 2020-30 June 2021]), which helped theatres keep many employees on payroll and maintain their operations over more than two years, has evaporated, and nearly all theatres, commercial and nonprofit alike, have lifted mask mandates, let alone vaccine requirements.

Indeed, things seem almost . . . normal again at many theatres. But are they? For the vast majority of theatres, the 2022-23 season we’re currently in the midst of is as close to a full return to live, in-person programming as they’ve managed since the COVID shutdown. And that’s a step forward, after many theatres’ plans for the 2021-22 season were scotched by the deadly Omicron [a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19] wave of fall 2021 and winter 2022 (though Broadway got through a season of plays and musicals, and a fairly interesting one at that). But you don’t have to look far for signs of attrition: When, last fall [September 2022], American Theatre published its first full season preview of TCG member theatres’ programming since fall 2019, the overall quantity of shows submitted for our listings was down more than 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels. It might at least be considered a triumph that most of the shows announced in that issue did make it to the stage, with only a smattering of cancellations and reshufflings, but it’s also clearly an era of diminished expectations.

The more pressing question, now that theatres are back in some kind of business, is: How is business? Are audiences coming back at anything like pre-pandemic levels? And are theatres able to make ends meet? The evidence is mixed, and seems to vary by region, with reports from some theatres in Great Lakes states, including Milwaukee Rep and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, that subscription levels have held firm and may even be on the rise. Others have reported heartening bumps in single-ticket sales, particularly for last year’s holiday offerings, even as subscriptions have slumped. Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin [St. Martin retired in February 2024] recently reported that Main Stem houses are filling 88 percent of their seats.

Some see these bright spots as leading indicators, but it might [be] more accurate to view them as outliers. The theatre administrators and researchers I spoke to, many of whom shared both hard figures and anecdata with me, told me that audiences and income are down from pre-pandemic levels by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. That’s a wide chasm, over which the fortunes of America’s theatre industry may hang in the balance.

It’s not that trendlines are all heading in the wrong direction. According to Jill Robinson, CEO & owner of TRG Arts, which collects data on performing arts organizations in the U.S. and U.K., the gap is closing. Using 2019 as a pre-pandemic benchmark, TRG data shows June 2022 theatres reporting admissions down by 51 percent from 2019 levels, and income down by 50 percent. By December 2022, those numbers had shrunk to 33 and 35, respectively.

The issue is the pace of improvement.

“It has been coming back since about May 2021 . . . slowly,” said Zannie Voss, director of SMU DataArts, which gathered data from 200-plus performing arts organizations through 2022. “The question mark now is when is it going to plateau, or is it going to continue to slowly rebuild to earlier levels? That remains to be seen.”

Another rising trend line that is more concerning, but which speaks to theatres’ preparation for the worst: Data collected by Theatre Communications Group, the publisher of American Theatre, shows a sharp increase in the number of theatres projecting deficits into their budgets: While for fiscal year 2021, just 10 percent of theatres projected deficits, for fiscal year 2023 that number is 60 percent.

“Overall, I think 99 percent of us are back now only because of the federal funds that we received, the extraordinary fundraising we did, the generosity of our communities, and decisions that are a bit of a slippery slope, like additional draws from an endowment,” said Jennifer Bielstein, executive director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, whose current budget is around $22 million. “The key thing to me is that we need more runway. It was assumed by all of us that federal funds would be what we needed to get back fully, but we’re seeing that it is a much slower return and rebuild with a lot of our theatres across the country.” That’s why, she said, ACT is planning with a longer recovery in mind. After a long practice of making mostly three-year contingency plans, she said, “Starting with next fiscal year ’24, we’re looking five years out, thinking that it could take that length of time to get back to where we were.”

Chandra Stephens-Albright, managing director at Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre, is also taking the long view.

“Everyone thought we were crazy when we did our strategic plan in 2020, but it has really helped us stay focused,” said Stephens-Albright, who like many theatre leaders reported a big drop in subscriptions, only partly offset by single-ticket spikes. A focus on the theatre’s mission—to support new work and education, as part of the larger aim of remaining a leading Black theatre in the U.S.—has provided a guiding light through a financially precarious time in which cash flow must be managed “very, very carefully” and seven-show performance weeks have been scaled back to five.

That strategic focus has also created some opportunities. “There’s been some spotlight on how small organizations, Black organizations, have been under-resourced,” she said. “That has got some attention, and it’s opened some doors for us to tell our story—doors that weren’t open before. That’s a positive; it isn’t enough to get us back to where we were pre-pandemic, but it certainly does make more people aware of our work and help advance our strategic objective.”

Greg Reiner, who heads the theatre and musical theatre programs for the National Endowment for the Arts [see the above-referenced 11-part ROT post], pointed to similarly encouraging signs of new participation. Though general relief funds for the field have dried up, the NEA, which just approved its highest level of appropriations ever, did pump $135 million of American Rescue Plan funding through state, regional, and local arts agencies, in addition to its direct grants to arts organizations, and that seed work is bearing fruit. As a result of what he called “a really broad engagement plan,” the endowment is “reaching folks that weren’t even applying to us before. We’ve brought in new, smaller organizations that are now applying through our regular granting programs.”

The NEA’s purview includes a lot of programming outside the realm of traditional, proscenium-based theatre, including work in correctional facilities and educational theatre. Another non-traditional area that has seen growth, according to Alan Brown of the WolfBrown arts consultancy firm, is immersive, virtual, and augmented theatre. But even when he shows theatres research showing that audiences are increasingly less willing to shell out for live, in-person theatre—a pre-pandemic trend that has only accelerated—he said he meets resistance.

“The public has embraced immersive experiences, and commercial producers are running away with millions of dollars in demand for them. That’s not only going to grow—it’s going to explode over the coming years,” Brown said, citing not only the aesthetic possibilities of this technology but also its utility in closed-captioning and enhanced accessibility. “What are nonprofit theatres going to do? Are they going to say, ‘We don’t do that; we’re about a live, authentic experience,’ or are they going to say, ‘Maybe we should figure out if we have a role to play in augmented, immersive, and virtual reality experience’? The theatre field is is pretty progressive compared to the other fields; there’s a good deal of innovative work going on. But you have artistic directors who still want to do important theatrical work on their mainstages for an audience of critics. When I start breathing fire about immersive experiences, I just get blank stares.”

For some theatres, doubling down on the live theatre experience still makes business sense, even after the stress of the pandemic. Milwaukee Rep, for instance, went into its cancelled 2020-21 season with a subscriber base of 16,000; that dropped off to [14,500] in the following year, according to managing director Chad Bauman, but has turned back around. When subscription numbers are tallied next fall, Bauman said he expects the count for the 2023-24 season to surpass pre-pandemic levels.

Milwaukee Rep has done all this without reducing the number of performances, opening last fall with a large-cast musical, Titanic [book by Peter Stone, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston; 20 September-23 October 2023], and running 11 productions since. Like many of its peers, the Rep had projected a deficit for this year, but, said Bauman, “It looks like we’re going to have a break-even budget, because our ticket sales have far outpaced our projections. Next year, we have a $15 million budget, and we don’t anticipate any extraordinary fundraising needs.”

His colleague at ACT, Jennifer Bielstein, told me she wondered if the success story in Milwaukee has something to do with how early in the pandemic that theatre was able to reopen—that is, comparatively earlier than theatres in the Bay Area or New York City. Bauman said that the Rep followed the advice of the Medical College of Wisconsin, and that a member of their board, who is the team doctor of the Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers, “had access to all the protocols that professional sports were going through, and if you remember, sports came back way ahead of everybody else. We were watching what they were doing and how it was working. They were basically testing a lot, creating bubbles, creating all these different protocols.”

Ultimately, though, Equity protocols won out, leading Milwaukee Rep, like many large U.S. theatres, including ACT, to cancel some or all of its 2021-22 season. Perhaps more importantly, Bauman noted that Milwaukee Rep was fully ready to reopen when they had the greenlight. They’d kept 80 percent of their staff on payroll, Bauman said, figuring that if they’d laid off staff, they “would leave Wisconsin, and we would never be able to attract that talent back.”

Bauman gives some credence to the early-reopening theory, noting that many performing arts organizations in the South never really shut down at all, and many in the Midwest were similarly unfazed. “Those that reopened faster, and were allowed to do so by their communities, which historically were in the Midwest and the South, are in a much healthier spot today,” he concluded. “I believe that’s because the longer we were closed down, the more out of sight, out of mind we were, people forgot about us and got addicted to Netflix, and it’s harder to get them off their couch.”

Danny Williams, managing director at Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, seconded the sense that the pandemic shattered some folks’ longtime consumption habits.

“Since we’ve come back, we have seen a decline in subscriptions of around 60 percent,” said Williams, who added that single-ticket sales have been strong for such recent production as Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates [11 February-5 March 2023] and A Christmas Carol [adapted by stage and artistic director (Hartford Stage, 1998-2011) Michael Wilson; 20 November-30 December 2022]. He attributed the drop-off to a number of factors: “One is the pandemic breaking the cycle of people just renewing; it just was something that you did—you got your letter in the mail and you sent in your money and you picked your dates. I think the other is that the demographics have changed; there are folks who are aging out of going to the theatre, and the new folks who are joining us aren’t necessarily the ones looking for a subscription. Folks younger than 50 or so definitely are not looking to drop a couple of $100 at once to commit to a season worth of plays. They want to see what they want when they want to see it.”

This change has been a major focus of WolfBrown’s research. Said Alan Brown, “I think COVID accelerated macro trends that existed well before the pandemic—shifts in public tastes and in consumer behavior, like late planning behavior. People can’t make up their minds that they’re gonna go out, often until the last minute now, and that’s wreaking havoc on marketing. People’s lives are more complicated. I don’t think that’s changing. I think that’s more or less a permanent condition. So do we fight that and keep trying to get people to buy in advance, or do we offer a late buyers’ club?”

Jamie Alexander, director of the consulting team at the firm JCA Arts Marketing, has tracked a similar crash in subscriptions, noting that among all performing arts organizations, theatres have been both hardest hit by the dropoff and the most adventurous in trying new substitutes. She pointed to membership options like Steppenwolf’s [Chicago] Black Card, Woolly Mammoth’s [Washington, D.C.] Golden Ticket, and ZACH Theatre’s [Austin, Texas] Zach XP, as well as tech-enabled opportunities for “cross-media loyalty programs.”

“Our study shows that there’s definitely growth in the people and number of organizations that are doing those sorts of programs, and there’s growth in those programs,” said Alexander. “I mean, it’s tepid—it’s not the runaway hit that subscriptions once were. But it’s something that’s growing as opposed to shrinking.”

SMU DataArts’s Zannie Voss, whose studies have shown, among other things, a troubling drop-off in corporate support for the arts, also sounded a cautionary note about plans to simply refill theatre seats. The urgency around getting people to return defines the problem the wrong way; in that framing, she said, “The organization is meeting its own need, its own desire to produce work they need people to come see, rather than thinking about, is the work that you’re doing super relevant to the community you’re serving? If it’s a community of artists you’re serving, if that’s your reason for being—great. But a profound sense of relevance is critical at a time like this.”

JCA’s Alexander concurred. “The thing I always say is, just talk to the community. What do they want, not just artistically—what do they want? What is going to speak to them? What will they pay for? Doing the research is really important. I feel like often people will just be like, ‘Oh, let’s just do a new flex package,’ and they haven’t figured out if there’s good evidence or data to promote that, and then they just waste money on promoting it.”

The challenge of marketing individual shows while also creating loyalty and awareness among theatregoers takes constant, even granular attention. Said Stephens-Albright, “We had stopped doing direct mail, but we started doing direct mail again—but very targeted. Now we do direct mail within a two-mile radius of the theatre, because heat maps tell us that people come from a certain set of zip codes.” She said she also focuses on “identifying people that are specific ambassadors, like, ‘I need you to go after these: These are your folks, go get them.’”

Zooming out, the theatres that have fared best, according to TRG’s Jill Robinson, are the ones that were not only aggressive about fundraising but about programming, despite the pandemic—the ones who said, as she put it, “‘We’re going to get back to business as soon as we can—we’re going to be outdoors, we’re going to do it digitally. We’re going to do everything we can to get back going.’ The companies that did that are in the strongest position, because they have databases that are more active, they have staff teams that have not lost momentum and skill. They have the best likelihood of heading into 2024 and ’25 feeling like they’ve got the furnace and the fuel.” Those organizations also were more likely to do what she calls “both-and programming—both programming in ways they know audiences will come back to in volume, as well as things they know that people who really love theatre will show up for, and that they know missionally they want to do for their community.”

Alan Brown is less sanguine.

“It’s curious—what made us so resilient is also what’s making us slow to change,” he said. Looking back on past three years, he marveled, “People doubled down and worked unbelievably long hours, boards of directors came together and worked together like never before, and people homed in on their core work. They didn’t have to think about innovation and new products. They could just focus in—and nearly everyone survived.” But with relief money dried up, the reality of producing again in a changed world is bringing some theatres up short. Brown offered this analogy, “What do you call it when you’re driving on the highway, on mountainous terrain, and they have those escape routes for trucks that can’t go up? We’re on one of those.” Now that the rubber is hitting the road, so to speak, Brown warned, “I think the other shoe has not yet dropped, and it’s about to. There’s going to be a lot of painful downsizing and potentially more paradigmatic change.”

The pain may be unwelcome, but change is not. The NEA’s Reiner, citing the endowment’s current chair, Maria Rosario Jackson, said, “Dr. Jackson has been talking about resisting the instinct to just snap back to the way it was before. There’s an opportunity here for a new reality. The arts ecosystem is demanding new ways of working, new ways of gauging success and progress. So there’s an opportunity here to take stock and figure out what we’ve learned, and to reimagine how we work, to move on from past practices, because a lot of those practices weren’t working before the pandemic. What are the opportunities to make arts participation more relevant and accessible and equitable?”

I asked most of my interviewees about their level of optimism for the field; most were upbeat, relatively speaking, and seemed as eager to face current challenges as they were clear-eyed about the scale of them. True Colors’ Stephens-Albright put it best.

“I’m not nervous and panicked,” she said. “You can’t be nervous and panicked and work in theatre, especially if you got through 2020.” But, succinctly summing up the field’s next mandate, she concluded, “We’re gonna have to change our tactics.”

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.

[In the American Theatre issue for Spring 2024, there are two articles pertinent to this examination: “Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,” moderated by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho, in which access consultants and artists discuss how they create sensory-conscious shows for disabled folks and their families, as well as how radical inclusivity enhances theater for everyone, and “Subscriptions Are Dead. Long Live Subscriptions!” by Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, where theater leaders talk about what’s working and what’s not in their efforts to change theatergoers’ ticket-buying habits. 

[The contents of these AT articles are very pertinent to the thrust of my Regional Theater Series.  I may, therefore, republish them on Rick On Theater in the coming weeks or months.  (The issue isn’t currently available online.)]

A Crisis In America's Theaters

 

[Some time ago, I started to compile a list of theaters that had closed in the previous decade or so.  I was working from memory, with the idea that I’d move on to research, both to check my recollection and to expand the list.  I didn’t really have any idea what I’d do with the list; maybe I’d create a report for Rick On Theater from it, but I hadn’t figured that far ahead.

[I never got further than a dozen or so companies that I thought had ceased operating, then I let the idea lapse.  Now and then, I’d consider returning to the idea and see if there was anything in it, but I never did.  Then this summer, I read two articles in the New York Times that discussed pretty much the idea that I’d had years ago. 

[Both articles are by the same reporter, Michael Paulson, a native Bostonian who, since April 2015, has covered theater at the Times.  In essence, they make a two-part series, and I’ve chosen to post them together on ROT to make what had been my original point that we in the United States are facing a crisis on our regional non-profit theaters.] 

“THEATER IN AMERICA IS FACING A CRISIS 
AS MANY STAGES GO DARK”
by Michael Paulson 

[Michael Paulson’s first article was published on 24 July 2023 in Section A (the news section) of the New York Times.  It essentially sets up the second report, posted below.]

As they struggle to recover after the pandemic, regional theaters are staging fewer shows, giving fewer performances, laying off staff and, in some cases, closing.

There is less theater in America these days. Fewer venues. Fewer productions. Fewer performances.

Cal Shakes [California Shakespeare Theater – performance space: Orinda; administration: Berkeley], a Bay Area favorite that staged Shakespeare in an outdoor amphitheater, is producing no shows this year. Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater, where Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses” had its premiere [1996] before coming to Broadway [2002], has halted programming until next spring. The Williamstown Theater Festival, known for its star-studded summer shows, has no fully staged productions at its Western Massachusetts home this season.

The coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath have left the industry in crisis. Interviews with 72 top-tier regional theaters located outside New York City reveal that they expect, in aggregate, to produce 20 percent fewer productions next season than they did in the last full season before the pandemic, which shuttered theaters across the country, in many cases for 18 months or more. And many of the shows that they are programming will have shorter runs, smaller casts and simpler sets.

Seattle’s ACT Contemporary Theater has reduced the length of each show’s run by a week. In Los Angeles, the Geffen Playhouse will no longer schedule performances on Tuesdays, its slowest night. Philadelphia’s Arden Theater Company expects to give 363 performances next season, down from 503 performances the season before the pandemic.

Why is this happening? Costs are up, the government assistance that kept many theaters afloat at the height of the pandemic has mostly been spent, and audiences are smaller than they were before the pandemic, a byproduct of shifting lifestyles (less commuting, more streaming), some concern about the downtown neighborhoods in which many large nonprofit theaters are situated (worries about public safety), and broken habits (many former patrons, particularly older people, have not returned).

“It’s impossible not to be distraught about the state of the field,” said Christopher Moses, an artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. “It’s clear this is the hardest time to be producing nonprofit theater, maybe in the history of the nonprofit movement.”

The number of nonprofit theaters in America had grown significantly in the two decades before the pandemic, but many small and midsize companies are now closing. Just last month, Book-It Repertory Theater in Seattle, Triad Stage in Greensboro, N.C., and Unexpected Stage Company in Maryland announced they were closing. Chicago, a city proud of its vibrant storefront theater scene, has lost at least a half-dozen companies.

“We’re seeing two to three organizations closing a month right now,” said Greg Reiner, the director of theater and musical theater at the National Endowment for the Arts.

There are substantial layoffs and cuts taking place at some of the field’s biggest institutions: This month New York’s prestigious Public Theater cut 19 percent of its jobs; just before that the powerhouse Brooklyn Academy of Music cut 13 percent and the sprawling Center Theater Group of Los Angeles cut 10 percent. The Dallas Theater Center has cut its full-time staff nearly in half, to 38 from 70, since last fall.

The pandemic exacerbated many trends that had long challenged nonprofit theaters, including the steady erosions of subscribers [see following article] — the loyal audience members who sign up in advance to see most or all of a season’s shows. Hartford Stage [Connecticut] and Kansas City Repertory Theater have each lost half of their subscribers since the pandemic, leaving them far more reliant on single-ticket buyers, whose purchase patterns are unpredictable and who tend to be less interested in unfamiliar work.

A new survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Census Bureau found that 10.3 percent of American adults attended a musical last year, down from 16.5 percent in 2017; just 4.5 percent attended a play, down from 9.4 percent.

At the same time the costs of making theater have risen significantly because of inflation, labor market issues (the Great Resignation [see Great Resignation - Wikipedia] led to significant staff turnover, so both recruitment and retention costs have risen), and social justice concerns (many theater workers have successfully argued that they were undercompensated). “As we work toward a more equitable work force, the cost of producing theater goes up,” said Ross Egan, managing director of Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota, Fla.

Even as they cut staff positions and hire fewer actors and freelance artists, many theaters are awash in red ink after running through the government aid that helped sustain them during the height of the pandemic. “I’ve been here 20 years, and at some point in the spring I started to realize this would be the greatest and largest deficit in my history,” said Paul R. Tetreault, the director of Ford’s Theater Society in Washington, D.C.

Why cut back on shows? “We don’t have the demand for it, so why would we try to act like we do?” said Ken-Matt Martin, the interim artistic director at Baltimore Center Stage and the Arkansas Repertory Theater [Little Rock]. And many nonprofits run shows at a loss, with even strong ticket sales unable to cover production costs, leaving them reliant on philanthropy to make up the difference. “We all lose money by doing productions,” said Angel Ysaguirre, the executive director of Court Theater in Chicago. “We’ll be losing less money by cutting one production.”

The crisis has led to a new spirit of collaboration, and an enormous increase in coproductions in which several theaters come together to produce shows and share the costs of sets, costumes and creative teams. In the season before the pandemic only one of the six shows at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C., was a coproduction; next season at least five of its six shows will be coproductions.

“It’s a sea change,” said Simon Godwin, the theater’s artistic director. “There’s an economic imperative, but also a sense of sharing the challenge of making theater now.”

Theaters are looking for other ways to share costs. Several in Connecticut are exploring whether they could consolidate their set-building operations, and a group in Chicago is discussing whether it’s possible to share back-office functions like human resources, finance and marketing.

Many theaters are trying to make money by renting out their buildings. Some are finding other ways to raise funds. Northern Stage, in White River Junction, Vt., decided to get a liquor license. “While this is certainly auxiliary to our mission,” said Jason Smoller, the theater’s managing director, “it will represent a not insignificant revenue stream, and it undoubtedly improves the experience for our patrons.”

There are varying reports about how well philanthropy is holding up, but many theater leaders express concern about donor fatigue after the pandemic, and some say foundations are shifting away from support for the arts toward health, human services and social justice. “What’s happening now, just in the last few months, is that really large, steadfast, institutional donors are reprioritizing and moving away from arts funding,” said Nora DeVeau-Rosen, managing director of Two River Theater in Red Bank, N.J. “We’ve lost 11 percent of our institutional support in the last three months, and we anticipate that continuing.”

Nonprofit theaters, many of which strive to produce new work and artistically adventurous fare, are doing far less well than touring Broadway productions, which are often juggernauts and jukebox musicals. Nonprofit theaters are also lagging behind Broadway itself, where attendance levels are now 91 percent of where they were at the same time before the pandemic.

There are a handful of nonprofits that say they are doing just fine, with a variety of theories about why: Some minimized the length of time they were closed during the pandemic; others cite populist programming choices; and some are in midsize cities with a less competitive performing arts market and strong civic support.

But far more say they are facing serious challenges. “Clearly the financial model for most regional theaters is profoundly in trouble,” said Stuart Carden, the artistic director of Kansas City Repertory Theater.

Some artistic directors believe that programming is partly at fault — that some theaters have turned off audiences by choosing shows that are too downbeat or preachily political. “Some theaters have forgotten what audiences want — they want to laugh and to be joyful and to cry, but sometimes we push them too far,” said Timothy J. Evans, executive director of Northlight Theater in Skokie, Ill. But numerous theaters say they are still finding at least occasional success with edgy or challenging titles.

In Kansas City, Carden said audience behavior has been volatile: A new Sherlock Holmes-themed comedy by Kate Hamill called “Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson — Apt. 2B” vastly outsold expectations, but a production of Marco Ramirez’s acclaimed play “The Royale,” about a champion boxer who confronted racism, “barely sold.”

“There’s been so much heartache and pain, a lot of people are looking for a joyous experience and a guaranteed good time,” Carden said.

In California, Pasadena Playhouse saw big demand for a series of Sondheim-related shows, but then struggled with Martyna Majok’s immigration-themed “Sanctuary City.” “It was an artistic high point by every metric possible, but we could not get people to pay attention,” said Danny Feldman, the theater’s producing artistic director.

Meanwhile, theater leaders are grasping for signs of hope, or at least faith.

“I’ve had many dark nights of the soul — who is going to survive, and how is the field going to survive?” said Taibi Magar, one of two artistic directors at Philadelphia Theater Company. “But then some days I wake up and remember that this art form is thousands of years old, and it has survived so many terrible moments. It will move and morph into its next phase.”

[Michael Paulson is the theater reporter of the New York Times.  He previously covered religion at the Times and at the Boston Globe, and was part of the Globe team whose coverage of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.]

*  *  *  *
“THEATERS THRIVED ON SUBSCRIBERS, TILL THEY QUIT”
by Michael Paulson 

[Paulson’s second article, reported from Knoxville, Tennessee, appeared on 30 August 2023 in Section A of the Times.]

The subscription model, in which theatergoers buy a season’s worth of shows at a time, had long been waning, but it fell off a cliff during the pandemic.

As a group of stagehands assembled train cars for the set of “Murder on the Orient Express,” Ken Martin looked grimly at his email. His first year as artistic director at the Clarence Brown Theater in Knoxville, Tenn., was coming to an end, and the theater had missed its income goals by several hundred thousand dollars, largely because it had lost about half its subscribers since the start of the pandemic.

“I’ve already had to tear up one show, because of a combination of cost and I don’t think it’s going to sell,” he said. “I’m in the same boat as a lot of theater companies: How do I get the audience back, and once I get them in the door, how do I keep them for the next show?”

The nonprofit theater world’s industrywide crisis [see above article], which has led to closings, layoffs and a reduction in the number of shows being staged, is being exacerbated by a steep drop in the number of people who buy theater subscriptions, in which they pay upfront to see most or all of a season’s shows. The once-lucrative subscription model had been waning for years, but it has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic struck.

It is happening across the nation. Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater had 13,566 subscribers last season, down from 19,770 before the pandemic. In Atlanta, the Alliance Theater ended last season with 3,208, down from a prepandemic 5,086, while Northlight Theater, in Skokie, Ill., is at about 3,200, down from 5,700.

Theaters are losing people like Joanne Guerriero, 61, who dropped her subscription to Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., after realizing she only liked some of the productions there, and would rather be more selective about when and where she saw shows.

“We haven’t missed it,” she said, “which is unfortunate, I suppose, for them.”

Subscribers were long the lifeblood of many performing arts organizations — a reliable income stream, and a guarantee that many seats would be filled. The pandemic hastened their disappearance for a number of reasons, according to interviews with theater executives around the country and theatergoers who let their subscriptions lapse. Many longtime subscribers simply got out of the habit while theaters were closed. Others grew to appreciate the ease and flexibility of streamed entertainment at home. Some found the recent programming too didactic. And the slow return to offices meant fewer people were commuting into the downtown areas where regional theaters are often located.

Many artistic leaders believe the change is permanent.

“The strategic conversation is no longer ‘What version of a membership brochure is going to bring in more members,’ but how do we replace that revenue, and replenish the relationship with audiences,” said Jeremy Blocker, the executive director of New York Theater Workshop, an Off Broadway nonprofit that has seen its average number of members (its term for subscribers) drop by 50 percent since before the pandemic.

Why do subscribers matter?

“No. 1, it reduces your cost of marketing hugely — you’re selling three or five tickets for the cost of one,” said Michael M. Kaiser, the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. “No. 2, you get the cash up front, which helps fund the rehearsal period and the producing period. And No. 3, subscriptions give you artistic flexibility — if people are willing to buy all the shows, some subset of the total can be less familiar and more challenging, but if you don’t have subscribers, every production is sold on its own merits, and that makes taking artistic risk much more difficult.”

There’s also a strong connection between subscriptions and contributions. “Most donors are subscribers,” said Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill, the producing artistic director of Capital Repertory Theater in Albany, N.Y., “so there’s a cycle here.”

Theaters are simultaneously trying to retain — or reclaim — subscribers, and also reduce their dependence on them. Many are experimenting with ways to make subscriptions more flexible, or more attractive, but also seeing an upside in the need to find new patrons.

“For some theaters, a reliance on an existing homogeneous group of patrons has really shaped the work they’re doing,” said Erica Ezold, managing director of People’s Light, a nonprofit theater in Malvern, Pa. “Ultimately it’s going to be really positive to be not as reliant on subscriber income and have greater diversity in our audiences.”

Programming is clearly on the mind of lapsed subscribers around the country. Even as subscriptions have fallen sharply at regional nonprofits whose mission is to develop new voices and present noncommercial work, they have remained steadier at venues that present touring Broadway shows with highly recognizable titles.

“There’s so much going on with the ‘ought-to-see-this-because-you’re-going-to-be-taught-a-lesson’ stuff, and I’m OK with that, but part of me thinks we’re going a little overboard, and I need to have some fun,” said Melissa Ortuno, 61, of Queens. She describes herself as a frequent theatergoer — she has already seen 17 shows this year — but finds herself now preferring to purchase tickets for individual shows, rather than subscriptions. “I want to take a shot, but I don’t want to be dictated to. And this way I can buy what I want.”

But there are other reasons subscribers have stepped away, including age. “We’re all old, that’s the problem,” said Happy Shipley, 77, of Erwinna, Pa., who decided to renew her subscription at the Bucks County Playhouse [New Hope], but sees others making a different choice. “Many of them don’t stay up late anymore; they’re anxious about parking, walking, crime, public transportation, increased need of restrooms, you name it.”

Arts administrators say that many people who were previously frequent theatergoers remain fans of the art form, but now attend less frequently, a phenomenon confirmed in interviews with supersubscribers — culture vultures who had multiple subscriptions — who say they are scaling back.

Lisa-Karyn Davidoff, 63, of Manhattan, subscribed to 10 theaters before the pandemic; now she is far more choosy, citing a combination of health concerns and reassessed priorities. “If there’s a great cast or something I can’t miss,” she said, “I will go.” Rena Tobey, a 64-year-old New Yorker, had at least 12 theater subscriptions before the pandemic, and now has none, citing an ongoing concern about catching Covid in crowds, a new appreciation for television and streaming, and a sense that theaters are programming shows for people other than her. “For many years, I’ve pushed my boundaries, and I’m just at a point where I don’t want to do it anymore.”

And Jeanne Ryan Wolfson, a 67-year-old from Rockville, Md., who had four performing arts subscriptions prepandemic, is just finding she likes an à la carte approach to ticket purchasing; she kept two of her previous subscriptions, dropped two, and added a new one. “I was paying a lot of money for the subscriptions, and some of the productions within those packages were a bit disappointing or might not have the wow factor I was looking for,” she said. “I think what I want to do is pick and choose.”

Martin said the Knoxville theater’s staff has spent much of the summer discussing the drop in subscriber numbers — the theater had about 3,000 before the pandemic, but 1,500 last season — and hired a marketing firm to study the situation.

Now he is picking productions carefully. He has set aside his dream of staging William Congreve’s “The Way of the World,” worried that the Restoration comedy wouldn’t find an audience. This season he’s starting with “Murder on the Orient Express,” which should do well, followed by a war horse — the annual production of “A Christmas Carol” — and “The Giver” [Eric Coble; 2006], which Martin hopes will appeal to younger audiences because it was adapted from a popular young adult novel [Lois Lowry; 1993].

Then comes “Kinky Boots” [Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein; 2012], the kind of uplifting musical comedy many of today’s audiences seem to want. (“Kinky Boots,” with a plot that involves drag queens, also makes a statement for a theater in Tennessee, where lawmakers have attempted to restrict drag shows.) There will be more adventurous productions, but in a smaller theater: “The Moors” by Jen Silverman, and “Anon(ymous)” by Naomi Iizuka.

But selling tickets show by show, instead of as a package, is challenging and expensive.

“It takes three times as much money, time and effort to bring in someone new,” said Tom Cervone, the theater’s managing director. He said the theater is trying everything it can — print advertising, public radio sponsorships, social media posts, plus appearances at local street fairs and festivals where the theater’s staff will hand out brochures and swag (branded train whistles to promote “Murder on the Orient Express,” for example) while trying to persuade passers-by to come see a show.

The theater, which is on the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee, is less dependent than some on ticket revenue, because, like a number of other regional nonprofits, it is affiliated with a university that subsidizes its operations. Still, the money it earns from ticket sales is essential to balancing the budget.

“It’s been scary some days,” Cervone said, “like, where is everybody?”

[These two reports by Michael Paulson could be read as companion pieces to the series of articles that ran in the New York Times last year under the umbrella title “The Reformation,” which discussed some major changes underway in American theater practices.

[The series included four articles by Times drama reviewer Jesse Green and an introductory piece by Callie Holtermann.  I posted the series on ROT on 20, 23, 26, and 29 September, and 2 October 2022.

[Now, a brief comment on theaters like the Clarence Brown Theater that are subsidized by institutions like the University of Tennessee.  The relationship may stabilize the theater’s budget and make it financially more secure, but there’s almost always a trade-off, which Paulson doesn’t consider here.

[I’m thinking about the institution’s clout when it comes to a disagreement over some aspect of the theater’s functioning.  The most serious form of this problem arises if the parent institution objects to a production choice or, worse, the artistic director’s artistic philosophy. 

[I refer readers to “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” posted on ROT on 13 February 2015, especially the section regarding Theater J in Washington, D.C.  Theater J is a subsidiary of the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, which fired the troupe’s longtime artistic director, Ari Roth, in 2014 over just such an objection.

[The upshot is, the institution that dispenses the funds that keep the theater afloat can wield the authority to influence or, indeed, make even artistic decisions without recourse to appeal.  As I wrote in the 2015 post, “[G]etting a say in the policy decisions of an organization in exchange for money isn’t actually philanthropy—it’s a purchase.”]