[Recently, I’ve posted articles on the plight of America’s regional repertory theaters and some of the measures those companies have devised to combat their existential problems. (See “A Crisis In America’s Theaters,” posted on 13 September 2023, and “The Regional Theater: Change or Die,” 3 October 2023.) ROTters who make their living from the theater or are devoted to the art form will easily understand why this is a concern, not just of mine but of many others like you. Others may need a little explanation of why this is so.
[At the end of my introduction to the second posting referenced above, I wrote: “This is a serious enough problem in the arts and, specifically, theater, that I may continue to post on it from various perspectives . . . .” This is my first effort to follow through on that promise.
[I’m posting a 2015 article from American Theatre, the Theatre Communications Group’s monthly theater magazine, on the history and development of today’s regional theater in the United States. I will fill in some additional information such as the economic impact of regional theater troupes on their cities and regions—the benefits, in other words, of having a thriving resident theater near you.
[Let me define the main term in this examination: ‘regional theater.” A regional theater in the U.S. is most often a professional or, sometimes, semi-professional theater outside New York City. The term ‘resident theater’ is often used interchangeably with ‘regional theater” and readers may assume that in this discussion, both names mean the same group of theaters.
[A regional theater may be a for-profit or not-for-profit enterprise, and it may be unionized or non-union—meaning, the artists and technicians who work there may or may not belong to the requisite union such as Actors’ Equity for actors and stage managers, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, United Scenic Artists, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and so on.
[Regional theaters produce both new (that is, original) plays, often challenging works that do not necessarily have the commercial appeal required of a Broadway production, as wall as classics and standards, including musicals. Some regional theaters serve as a “tryout" house for Broadway-bound shows, and some even develop new plays that move to Broadway and/or tour the country and even abroad.
[Many regional theaters are small houses and produce three, four, or perhaps five plays a season; some don’t operate during the summer months and some have special programs for that time when school is out and families look for activities to enjoy together. In larger communities, there may be several companies, including large theaters with multiple stages that house two or more shows running at the same time or overlapping.
[Regional theater shouldn’t be confused with community theater, with which it has some crossover. Community theater refers to a theatrical performance mounted in relation to a particular community. It includes theater produced by, with, and for members of the community in which it exists and from which it draws its participants and its audience.
[Regional theaters can and often do reach beyond, sometimes far beyond, their home bases for both talent—many have auditions in New York City or other large theater centers—and can draw audiences from far beyond their immediate regions.
[Even artistic directors can be imported from far away: Molly Smith, artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage from 1998 to 2023, had been the founder and artistic director of the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, from 1979 until taking the post in Washington. Romanian Liviu Ciulei (1923-2011), who came to the U.S. in 1974, had had a career working all over Europe and then directed and taught in New York before he was hired by Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater as its artistic director from 1980 to 1985.
[One example of both kinds of local theaters existing side by side occurred in the Montclair, New Jersey, area, where my friend Kirk Woodward lives. Kirk works often with some of the many community theaters in his neighborhood, and there are quite a lot of them as Montclair has a very theater-savvy and -dedicated population.
[At the same time, from 1973 to 1990, the Whole Theatre Company produced professional theater in Montclair under the artistic direction of Olympia Dukakis (1931-2021), founder with her husband, actor Louis Zorich (1924-2018). Well-known actors such as José Ferrer, Colleen Dewhurst, Blythe Danner, and Samuel L. Jackson came to Montclair, 17 miles northwest of Times Square.]
by Jim O’Quinn
[The following article was originally published in American Theatre as a “Theatre History” feature. Written by the late Jim O’Quinn (1947-2021), the founding editor of the magazine, “Going National” was posted on AT’s website on 16 June 2015 (AMERICAN THEATRE | Going National: How America’s Regional Theatre Movement Changed the Game).]
The American theatre as we know it didn’t just evolve organically, inevitably; it was conjured by visionaries who dreamt of a national theatre outside New York, then built it.
When the American regional theatre movement took off in earnest in the early 1960s, it was traveling alongside some heady companion movements: Civil Rights, feminism, environmentalism, sexual liberation. The upstart effort to foster resident professional theatre companies in cities, towns, and communities across the nation hardly rates, on the Richter scale of social and political consequence, with those broader categories of revolutionary impulse. But a revolution it was—one more finite and focused than those larger societal movements, and with consequences that can be documented and quantified as well as debated for their impact on the art form itself.
Numbers tell part of the story.
In December 1961, when the Ford Foundation approved an initial grant of $9 million to begin “strengthening the position of resident theatre in the United States,” the term itself was newfangled and obscure; foundation staff helpfully referred in early grant documents to “what Europe knows as ‘repertory theatres.’” While an array of educational and amateur theatres kept stage activity alive outside New York City, the professional theatre landscape at the time was limited (with rare exceptions) to the Broadway commercial theatre, New York–based touring companies, and a smattering of summer stock companies. As Zelda Fichandler [1924-2016] capsulized it: “There was Broadway and the Road.”
Fichandler was only slightly exaggerating. A few significant theatre companies with professional aspirations had put down roots in the early part of the century—the venerable Cleveland Play House opened in 1915, and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre was founded as a school in 1925—and others predated the Ford initiative by little more than a decade: most notably, Nina Vance’s Alley Theatre in Houston, founded in 1947; Margo Jones’s Theatre 47 in Dallas, launched in the same year; and Fichandler’s own Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., initially organized in 1950 as a commercial venture [see “Washington’s Arena Stage: Under Construction,” 26 November 2011]. A number of festival theatres (usually meaning summer seasons only) devoted to Shakespeare were also in operation, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (founded in 1935), Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (founded in 1954 [now the Public Theater]) and the Old Globe in San Diego (founded in 1957). These and a handful of other professionally oriented companies were poised—alongside those hundreds of others about to be kindled into existence—to benefit from what turned out to be Ford’s visionary largesse.
The growth came fast and furious, in a kind of perfect storm—a convergence of money and legitimacy with passionate interest on the part of young theatre artists (fueled in no small part by daredevil work being done Off Broadway and the anti-establishment tenor of the times) in alternatives to the economics and aesthetics of the commercial theatre, and in new repertoires the commercial sector had ignored (the classics, cutting-edge new work, forgotten masterpieces).
The money and legitimacy were to come from Ford’s philanthropy to theatre companies, which would eventually total an astonishing $287 million. Then, to seal the case for an unprecedented national expansion of theatre art, came the establishment of a national membership support organization, Theatre Communications Group, and the founding in 1965 of the National Endowment for the Arts, the first program of designated federal subsidy for arts institutions in U.S. history.
Why was this expansion of theatre in the U.S. so essential to the viability of the art form in American cultural life? The question has any number of answers, depending on your perspective.
“The idea that artists could create a life in the theatre in Providence or Louisville was inconceivable in 1961,” pointed out Peter Zeisler [1924-2005], a cofounder of the movement’s exemplary institution, the landmark Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis, speaking, as he often did, as an advocate for individual artists and their creative independence. Building a theatre career before the ’60s was indeed synonymous with living in New York City; and, to the detriment of artists and audiences alike, Broadway had devolved after World War II into an upscale retailer of popular musicals and boulevard comedies, virtually devoid of the classics and equally shy of risky new plays (the occasional Miller or Williams or O’Neill excepted). From the perspective of the larger American public, theatre was geographically and economically inaccessible—and essentially off the radar.
All that was to change significantly in the first five years after Ford’s initiative was announced, as some 26 major new theatre companies (not counting burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway groups) were established in far-flung U.S. cities, large and small. Suddenly, for millions who thought of theatre as a distant and esoteric experience, live performance was becoming a local affair, an alternative to movies or television, even a bonding community experience (when theatres played their cards right). Within the same period, more Equity actors began working in not-for-profit companies than on Broadway and the road combined.
In 2005, 44 years later, the numbers are off the charts: More than 1,200 U.S. not-for-profit theatres are currently alive and more-or-less well (the number is based on TCG’s annual fiscal research, though neither TCG nor the Endowment ventures an exact count), mounting some 13,000 productions a year and having an estimated economic impact on the U.S. economy of more than $1.4 billion.
Such tallies show the enormous scale of the regional theatre movement, but its impetus can only be understood in terms of the outsized personalities who led the charge. Along with Guthrie pioneer Zeisler, who continued to spur the movement on from his post as executive director of TCG from 1972 to 1995, and the trio of visionary women whose names are attached above to theatres they inaugurated (of the Alley, the indomitable Nina Vance [1914-80] was fond of saying, “I clawed this theatre out of the ground”), those personalities include the man who conceived the Ford Foundation initiative that started the ball rolling: W. McNeil Lowry [1913-93].
Lowry was only three-and-a-half years into what would become a distinguished 23-year career at the foundation when a new, national-scale philanthropic program in support of the arts was placed under his direction in 1957. Ford’s aim in nurturing the theatre was, in Lowry’s own words, “to offer American artists a clean slate, to encourage them to build companies devoted to process; in other words, to foster the coming together of American directors, actors, designers, playwrights and others beyond a single production and beyond commercial sanction.”
Lowry—soon to be known as “Mac” to the theatre people he advised—launched a series of field studies; staged a planning session in Cleveland in 1958 attended by such key movement personalities as stage director Alan Schneider [1917-84], impresario Joseph Papp [1921-91] and producer Roger L. Stevens [1910-98] (who was destined to become the first chairman of the NEA); followed up with a landmark 1959 conference in New York, where, Lowry said, “the first planks in the resident theatre movement were laid down”; and, a year later, drafted a grant for a four-year program to establish TCG. This essential groundwork, and the continuing flow of foundation support to theatres through the ’60s and ’70s, carefully overseen by Lowry—including backing for the seminal experimental work of such groups as Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre and Ellen Stewart’s [1919-2011] struggling La MaMa, E.T.C. [see “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s”], and the controversial underwriting of the creation of the Negro Ensemble Company (which led to charges from Civil Rights leaders that Ford had retreated from its integrationist policies)—gave the movement its backbone.
That backbone undergirded the network of professional resident theatres that came into being or solidified their identities during this era of proliferation—basically, the array of companies that today belong to, or aspire to the standards of, the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), the national association representing the interests of larger-budget organizations. The imprimatur of the newly formed arts endowment—and the important legislative provision that 20 percent of the NEA’s total budget was to “pass through” directly to the states, resulting in the establishment of state arts councils as well—put theatres, along with museums, symphonies and other arts organizations, on a new and more public footing.
The single event that became the most potent symbol of this simultaneous burgeoning and decentralization of the American theatre, and that defined both the movement’s dearest goals and some of its shortcomings, was the establishment of the Guthrie in Minneapolis.
While most regional theatres originated locally, carefully molded and tended by their organizers, the Guthrie (first known as the Minnesota Theater Company) sprang full-grown from its creators’ heads in 1963. Zeisler, who had been working as a Broadway stage manager, and his fellow New Yorker Oliver Rea [ca. 1923-95], a scenic designer, wanted to find a hospitable American city in which to begin a regional repertory theatre devoted to the classics. They enlisted the aid of the eminent British director Tyrone Guthrie [1900-71], who joined as a partner in the enterprise, and after four-and-a-half years of fundraising, planning, and meetings in seven U.S. cities, the triumvirate settled in the Twin Cities to bring forth what Guthrie called “an institution, something more permanent and more serious in aim than a commercial theatre can ever be.”
The Guthrie’s dazzling first season, with George Grizzard [1928-2007], Hume Cronyn [1911-2003], and Jessica Tandy [1909-94] as part of a 47-member company playing in rotating rep on designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s [1914-2003] distinctive thrust stage, was greeted with national fanfare. Life magazine called it “the miracle in Minneapolis.”
“Planting the Guthrie full-blown in a Midwest landscape, for many corporate and lay patrons, gave credibility to new efforts in other communities,” wrote Lowry, whose foundation provided funds to insure the theatre against loss in its first three years. Lowry was right: The advent of the nation’s most fully realized not-for-profit professional company, complete with its own brand of Equity acting contract negotiated by the newly formed LORT, stimulated popular support for both existing institutions and for the start-up of new ones.
The Guthrie was an enduring success (as this book is being written, an expansive new $125-million complex to house the much celebrated company is under construction), but its operations over the years serve as a textbook case for the regional theatre’s thwarted ambitions as well as its accomplishments. Size matters, and the Guthrie’s vast, 1,437-seat auditorium was often hard to fill. The ideal of a permanent acting company playing in rotating repertory (one of director Guthrie’s key principles) got a great run in the company’s early years, but was unable to take permanent hold there—or, indeed, anywhere in the American theatre system, despite the best efforts of such determined rep-company advocates as William Ball [1931-91], at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater; Robert Brustein [b. 1927], at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn., and later at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.; and Ellis Rabb [1930-98], at his short-lived APA Phoenix in New York.
Similarly, the frequently articulated aim of developing an original, genuinely American classical acting style, free of the stiffness and histrionics of English traditions (at one extreme) and the mumbly hyper-naturalism attributed to the Method (on the other) [see “The Method – a Review” by Kirk Woodward; 12 March 2022], got lost in the shuffle of artistic leadership after Tyrone Guthrie’s departure, and was pursued elsewhere only in fits and starts.
On the plus side, as Zeisler has written, “Once the Guthrie and a few other theatres started to examine the classic repertoire, actor training changed radically in this country. Suddenly, enormous physical demands were being made on actors. It became necessary to have voice work and movement work in the training programs that there’d never been before.”
Many other changes were afoot, including a concurrent and equally vital wave of theatre activity only tangentially affected by the economics and mechanics of Ford and TCG. This initiative came from artist-activists, a rich array of politicos, experimentalists, collectives, and rebels of various stripes who were less interested in theatre per se than in the proud traditions of social organizing, labor issues, and identity movements. They seized the historical moment—its freewheeling ethos, its radical sense of possibility—to put theatre to work in passionate service to their causes: racial or ethnic equality, the antiwar and antipoverty movements, gay liberation.
On this front, the San Francisco Mime Troupe redefined American street theatre with its sharp satires opposing the war in Vietnam; Luis Valdez [b. 1940], with the support of protest leader Cesar Chavez [1927-93], founded El Teatro Campesino as a company dedicated to the heritage and lives of Hispanic farm workers; Bread and Puppet Theater’s [see “The Bread and Puppet Theater,” 28 September 2023] peace pageants, with their craggy, monumental puppets, inspired thousands; budding experimentalists like Sam Shepard [1943-2017] and Lanford Wilson [see “Lanford Wilson (1937-2011),” 22 April 2011] plied their trade at Off-Off-Broadway’s Caffe Cino [see “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018, and “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011]; John O’Neal’s [1940-2019] Free Southern Theatre championed civil rights in the Deep South; acclaim for the Negro Ensemble Company enlivened the Black Arts movement and fostered the New Lafayette and New Federal theatres in New York City; some years later, Roadside Theater sprang up in Appalachia; and East West Players took up the cause of Asian American artists in Los Angeles. The list is as long as it is inspiring.
This mushrooming theatrical activity, grassroots and otherwise, was part of the larger arts renaissance of the era, and it fed variously upon the new energies being unleashed in the worlds of dance, literature, and the visual arts (via “happenings,” for example, and, more generally, the minimalist impulse that gave rise to what we know today as performance or performance art). Another important outgrowth of this general artistic ferment was the formation of collective theatres, alternative troupes, or, in National Endowment for the Arts parlance, circa 1984, “ongoing ensembles,” dozens of which burst onto the scene in the ’60s and ’70s, and many of which continue to endure today despite the odds against them. Such artistically original groups as New York City’s Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, northern California’s Dell’Arte International, Milwaukee’s Theatre X and the traveling Cornerstone Theater Company based their work on longstanding partnerships, democratic decision-making, and collective creation by communities of artists whose bonds were deepened by time. The NEA’s eventual addition of its IntraArts and Expansion Arts programs bolstered those who did not recognize themselves in the more traditional trappings of the theatre establishment.
The decentralization and diversification of the American theatre did change university and conservatory training for designers and directors as well as actors, much as it reconfigured the economics and the locus of the theatre business in America. The stage became tempting again to writers, as playwriting shed its esoteric status and gained prestige as a literary form; new plays, freed of the hit-or-miss constraints of the commercial system, were touted by many theatres as leading attractions.
Audiences, it goes without saying, changed and grew, as well (today’s arts advocates are fond of citing the statistic that more people now attend live performances than sporting events in the U.S.). Zeisler again: “Perhaps the most stunning thing of all—and one of which we need to constantly remind ourselves—is that the not-for-profit professional theatre was created with no precedents, no role models. It was learning to fly by the seats of many pairs of pants; textbooks didn’t exist. Has there ever been such a radical change in the form and structure of the theatre in so short a period of time?”
That rhetorical question’s answer—undoubtedly not—may be taken as both admonition and affirmation. The speed with which changes in the system occurred meant that expectations and reality were sometimes out of sync. The aforementioned ideal of permanent acting companies, for example, was abandoned for a host of reasons, artistic and economic. Such an arrangement put limitations on casting; actors were not willing to commit themselves long-term, especially in geographically isolated areas of the country; and the maintenance of full companies proved prohibitively costly.
Still, other manifestations of the company model emerged in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., where clusters of not-for-profit theatres offered regular employment to a local talent pool, and it became possible for designers and directors to engineer satisfactory, regionally based careers as well. In the same spirit, a great success of the movement has been the affirmation and nurturing of the American playwright, not only in terms of production but of writer development.
Recent decades have seen playwriting in this country advance from the status of an adjunct literary genre to that of a viable career. Theatres in the regions have become the showcase of America’s best theatrical writing—of the past 34 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 32 have premiered at not-for-profit companies.
As the years passed and founders of theatres inevitably turned leadership over to a new generation, the character of the work on some regional stages underwent changes. In the less charitable view, many once-vital wellsprings of theatre art grew into management-heavy institutions, supporting a vast array of artists but missing the spark of visionary intensity that was the movement’s animating impulse. While such criticism may have been valid in some places and at some times, the fact remains that the movement’s larger goal of making it possible for theatre professionals to make a living in communities throughout the nation has been by and large achieved; the regional theatre movement has provided America’s theatre workers with an “artistic home.”
Once upon a time, professional theatre in America operated centrifugally: From the creative crucible of New York City, theatre spun out, via the touring circuit or the scattered outposts of resident stages, to the nation at large. Today that dynamic is precisely reversed. Theatre in America is centripetal: Its creative fires burn in hundreds of cities and communities, and that energy flows from the regions to New York City, where the commercial sector has grown dependent upon its sprawling not-for-profit counterpart for virtually every aspect of its well-being. Broadway is still the place where talents are validated and economic prospects escalated, but it is no longer the singular, or even the primary, font of the nation’s theatrical creativity.
That distinction belongs to the array of not-for-profit professional theatres that has blossomed into being over the past 45 years in every nook and cranny of this country: the diverse, still-evolving network that must be acknowledged for what it is—America’s national theatre.
[Jim O’Quinn was the founding editor of American Theatre magazine, and served as its editor-in-chief from 1984 to 2015.
[According to a report released in February 2023 by the Theatre Communications Group, not-for-profit theaters contributed $1.37 billion to the U.S. economy in 2021. (TCG includes in its calculations the non-profit theaters of New York City, which aren’t strictly speaking “regional” theaters.) This was a reduction from the pre-pandemic figure of nearly $2.1 billion in 2019. The theaters attracted 2.9 million audience members in 2021, down from 23 million two year earlier, before the theaters closed because of COVID.
[According to a 2022 report by National Public Radio, as of 2020, the U.S. regional theater comprises “more than 1,800 professional, not-for-profit resident stages.“ Those theaters presented from 14,000 to 25,000 productions each year and brought in an average of over 35 million spectators annually. The NPR reporter pointed out that the NFL counts less than half that number attend pro football games in the U.S.
[Resident theater productions stimulate the local economy by bringing business to restaurants and other nearby businesses, like parking lots and garages. Theater patrons who don’t drive to the theater ride the buses and subways or hire cabs and Ubers. Parents who take in a show pay babysitters. The salaries the theaters pay the actors, directors, and staff also flows back into the economy.
[The NPR report noted that in the second decade of this century, before COVID shut everything down, regional theaters “helped nurture and develop eight of the 10 shows that went on to win Broadway’s Best Musical Tony.” And that doesn’t even include the Pulitzer Prize-winners, which used to all come out of the commercial theater, that premièred at a regional company.
[In fact, over the last three decades, regional
theaters have become the incubators of almost all new American plays. That used to be Broadway’s role. Now Broadway takes what the regionals make.]
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