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.”]