[Last 13 September, Rick On Theater ran a post called “A Crisis In America’s Theaters” which comprised a pair of New York Times reports on the declining prospects of the regional theater in the United States. Since those articles came out, and even before, the news media have issued reports and warnings about the problems faced by this country’s resident theater companies.
[I’ve selected two pieces, one from a television news show and one from a print outlet, covering this issue. This is a serious enough problem in the arts and, specifically, theater, that I may continue to post on it from various perspectives to explain the situation that put U.S. theater, as it’s now constituted, in peril and to demonstrate the history and importance of the American regional theater system.]
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport
[The very day after the post was published on ROT, 14 September 2023, PBS NewsHour aired a segment that covered the same issue. The NewsHour report, transcribed below, focused on New Haven, Connecticut’s venerable Long Wharf Theatre, which has an innovative approach to combating the problems rising in the regional theater. So far, under the company’s newly appointed artistic director, those tactics seem to be succeeding.]
Amna Nawaz: Regional theater has been a glory of the American cultural scene for decades, bringing plays and musicals to audiences in cities across the country.
But the pandemic and a host of other social shifts have led to cutbacks, cancellations, even closures of theaters.
What if, to tweak “Hamlet” a bit, the play is no longer the thing?
Jeffrey Brown has a look for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Jeffrey Brown: Somehow, some way, the show must go on. It’s the abiding mantra of theater. And for nearly 60 years, it’s been true at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, a company renowned for championing leading American playwrights and showcasing a who’s-who of actors.
Now the show will go on, but with a very different look.
Jacob Padron, Artistic Director, Long Wharf Theatre: Welcome to the theater. No, exactly. Exactly. This will be transformed.
Jeffrey Brown: Rather than in one traditional theater space, says artistic director Jacob Padron, it might be here at the Canal Dock Boathouse.
You’re looking all around New Haven for what?
Jacob Padron: I think about it as that our city and our region has many stages, and our model allows us to activate all these different stages across the city and region.
So, yes, maybe it’s a library. Maybe it’s a high school auditorium. Maybe it’s a boathouse. It’s about, what’s the right container, what’s the right space for the story that our artists want to tell?
Jeffrey Brown: It’s a bold experiment, but one born of dire need. Finding its audience dwindling, its budget in deficit, last year, Long Wharf announced it was leaving the theater it had rented for decades in an old warehouse district to try something new and hope others come along.
Jacob Padron: The American theater across the country is challenged, right, that we need support from our corporations, from our foundations, from donors.
We need our communities to come together and support live theater.
Jeffrey Brown: Postponements of productions at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum and Chicago’s Lookingglass, fewer shows at Seattle’s ACT Contemporary and Philadelphia’s Arden, layoffs at New York’s Public Theater and elsewhere, closures of smaller theater companies, including Triad in North Carolina.
It’s happening all over. According to a recent study, regional theaters programmed about 40 percent fewer shows last year than in the season just before COVID. And the term crisis is in the air, though Kit Ingui, Long Wharf’s managing director, uses the word consciously. She and Padron spoke to us at another of the company’s new pop-up spaces, New Haven’s public Stetson Library.
Kit Ingui, Managing Director, Long Wharf Theatre: I think there is crisis happening. I don’t know that I would say the American theater is in crisis. Perhaps regional theater, the traditional model of subscriber-based, we’re going to sell all of our tickets ahead of time to a large group of people who’s going to support what we do . . .
Jeffrey Brown: That doesn’t work?
Kit Ingui: It can work in certain communities. It can work in certain places. Each organization right now, if they’re not looking at their communities and their relationship with their audience and what’s been working and what’s not been working, really taking your rose-colored glasses off and looking at where you have had success and where you’re not, then your organization might find itself in crisis.
Jeffrey Brown: In Long Wharf’s case, that means relying more on contributions and philanthropy, while also working to connect more to its larger New Haven community, especially communities of color that Padron thinks haven’t felt included in the past.
Jacob Padron: For so many years, I think our theater companies were not paying attention. So it’s not just about the programming. It’s not just about the shows that you’re doing on stage, but who’s the makeup of the staff? Who’s on your board? What’s the organizational culture? Who are the partners across your city that are supporting that work?
Jeffrey Brown: The pandemic was a major blow to theaters around the country, and many have yet to recover from the extended closures.
Government support helped, but has largely been spent. But it’s also clear the pandemic only exacerbated longstanding trends. Less than an hour south, we visited another regional theater with a grand tradition, Westport Country Playhouse, and met Mark Shanahan, who’s been involved here for years, and will take over as artistic director in 2024.
Mark Shanahan, Incoming Artistic Director, Westport Country Playhouse: Listen, there are a variety of reasons. As we struggle to get audiences all around the country back into the theater, it’s hard to compete with so much new media. It is hard to compete with a soft economy, where you’re asking people to give money who might not be as comfortable doing it as they have in the past.
And it is also hard to ask people who are used to sitting at home during the pandemic to say, remember how great it was to come back to the theater, to make that a practice again. All of those things are challenges. The only thing we can do, the only path forward is to keep trying to make great work and getting word out there and then reminding people how much they love coming here.
Jeffrey Brown: Here, the posters on the walls and photos in the halls attest to some serious theater history, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, James Earl Jones, a young Jane Fonda, contemporary stars, including Paul Rudd and Leslie Odom Jr.
Westport began in an old barn in 1931. The early 2000s saw an extensive renovation and expansion following a $30 million funding campaign under the leadership of famed actress and then artistic director Joanne Woodward, whose husband, Paul Newman, joined in to help raise money.
But, this year, Westport announced cuts in production and layoffs of 75 percent of staff, and issued an emergency $2 million public campaign to — quote — “Save your playhouse.”
Beth Huisking is acting managing director.
Beth Huisking, Acting Managing Director, Westport Country Playhouse: And it wasn’t something we did lightly. There was a lot of thought that went into it.
But we believed that our community would rally, and it was a way to let them know that we were worse off than maybe we had let them know in the past. At the same time, I was confident that our community would come together and help us in our time of need and would show us how important we are to them.
Jeffrey Brown: A major advantage, this is a very well-off town. The $2 million target has just about been reached, and philanthropy will remain a key to survival.
But theater leaders are counting on another strategy, using their space more days of the year, as with their Script in Hand series, a stage reading of a play, here Audrey Cefaly’s “Maytag Virgin,” which nearly filled the theater, bringing in people, dollars and a sense of excitement.
And Westport is also becoming a presenting theater with acts beyond its own productions, including just recently musical theater star Patti LuPone.
Beth Huisking: We have realized that was really a wise model, and it allows us to do theater, which is at our heart who we are. And it allows us to bring in the community and to work with community partnerships.
And so I think with those added into the calendar, it’s really going to help. Those will help new funders come in, and those will help new audiences come in.
Jeffrey Brown: As to theater programming itself, Mark Shanahan points to a recent production of “Dial M For Murder,” an old classic given some new twists, as something that works well here.
Mark Shanahan: The theater is all about problems and problem-solving. It always is. What play are we going to do? Who’s going to be in it? Who’s going to light it? Who’s going to do the set? How are we going to tell people it’s out there? Who’s going to pay for it? What time of year are we doing it?
How are we going to make any of this happen? Why are we ever surprised that there are problems? We just have a new set of problems, and sometimes a growing set of problems, and we have to figure out how to solve them.
Jeffrey Brown: That, of course, is the old can-do spirit of theater. The show must go on, even as the future of American regional theater hangs in the balance.
For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Westport and New Haven, Connecticut.
[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.
[Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.
[As Senior Coordinating Producer of Canvas, Anne Davenport is the primary field producer of arts and culture pieces and all oversees coverage at the NewsHour. She’s been leading Canvas since its beginning, collaborating with Chief Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown for most of her tenure at the NewsHour as well as with others.
[The Long Wharf Theatre was established by Jon Jory, Harlan Kleiman, Ruth Lord, Betty Kubler, and Newt Schenck in 1965 at the start of the regional theater movement. It was formed on the notion that New Haven should have a locally created arts culture that included a professional theater company built in collaboration with community leaders and supporters of the arts.
[The theater was named for the Long Wharf in New Haven Harbor, where it was built in a vacant warehouse in a food terminal and a chicken processing plant. It remained there for 57 years, until its move last December (see “‘The Reformation’ – Article 4: ‘Racism Erodes the American Theater’” by Jesse Green, posted on ROT on 2 October 2022).
[Over its history, the Long Wharf has staged world premières from Samuel D. Hunter, Craig Lucas, Steve Martin, Paula Vogel, Athol Fugard, and Anna Deavere Smith, among others. In addition, some of the nation’s leading actors, including Sam Waterston, Stacy Keach, Brian Dennehy, Al Pacino, Karen Allen, Colleen Dewhurst, Judith Ivey, Jane Alexander, Reg E. Cathey, Mary McDonnell, and Anna Deavere Smith, have performed on one of the troupe’s stages. In 1978, the company won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.]
“THEATER IS IN FREEFALL,
by Peter Marks
[The following article was originally published in the Washington Post; it was posted on the paper’s website on 6 July 2023.]
Companies are closing, seasons have been truncated and in New Haven, a revered company is pivoting after giving up its own stage
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — For more than 55 years, the highly regarded Long Wharf Theatre made its home in a converted warehouse in an old food terminal near New Haven Harbor. Then one day last year, with rent payments an escalating burden, the company became homeless.
Is a legacy theater company without its theater still a company? It’s a proposition that Long Wharf’s artistic director, Jacob G. Padrón, has been testing — an “itinerant” theater model — and the rest of the anxiety-ridden theater world is watching closely. Still reeling from the pandemic, many of the country’s nonprofit theaters of various sizes are in deep financial trouble, in what is rapidly turning into the most severe crisis in the 70-year history of the regional theater movement.
“It’s happening more and more and more, and it’s going to be an epidemic,” said Michael M. Kaiser, former president of the Kennedy Center and now chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. [Kaiser and the DeVos Institute are covered in two Rick On Theater posts: “The Kennedy Center Expands (5 December 2014), “Michael Kaiser: Man of the Arts” (21 December 2016).] “I’ve always believed that we were heading for a time that we were going to lose a whole lot of midsized cultural organizations. And I still believe that’s true.”
Evidence of the turmoil mounts day by day, as companies from California to New York announce major cutbacks in their offerings — or shut down altogether. The theater world was further rocked recently when one of the nation’s largest companies, the Los Angeles-based Center Theatre Group, said it would “pause” programming in one of its theaters, the Mark Taper Forum. That followed the upheaval at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, another industry mainstay, which said last month it needed an emergency infusion of $7.5 million or its 2023 season could not go on. The urgent effort came after a similar plea, in April, for which OSF raised $2.5 million.
The cutbacks and closings have been so regular of late that a document circulates among leaders of the field, listing recent “permanent closures” — such as Triad Stage in North Carolina, Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, New Ohio Theatre in New York — and staff and program downsizings. In June, off-Broadway’s Public Theater eliminated its Under the Radar Festival, which set an industry standard for avant-garde and international plays. To save money, even august companies such as Arena Stage — working with what its leaders call “deficit planning” — are reducing the number of plays they produce.
And just last week, Chicago’s 35-year-old Lookingglass Theatre Company, debut theater for Tony-winning director Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” declared that it was ceasing operations until late next spring. As regional theaters often are the seeding ground for both new-play development and work that eventually goes to Broadway, every “pause” can have consequences down the road.
The crisis is a perfect storm of bad economic and demographic trends, exacerbated by a change in cultural habits during the pandemic. Experts in theater management say that 25 percent to 30 percent of theater audiences have not returned since the pandemic shutdown of March 2020 that lasted until late 2021. Retrenchment has continued, they say, not so much out of lingering fears of getting sick, but because theater simply receded as a priority as other pastimes filled the gap. Streaming entertainment at home, for example, has proved a durable substitute for the time and expense of theater.
No one cause completely explains the situation, but many theaters have been slow to respond to changes in the marketplace. Billions in federal aid — including the $15 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program approved in 2020 — kept theaters afloat during the shutdown. But that cushion was temporary. The money was largely spent, observers say, but problems from before the pandemic, such as a continual decline in season subscriptions, have not been adequately addressed.
The confluence has theater business professionals issuing dire warnings.
“By this time next year, I think the industry will shrink by half,” said Amy Wratchford, who has been managing director of theaters in Virginia and is now president of the Wratchford Group, an arts management consultancy.
Wratchford added that “donor fatigue” — a reluctance by some financial supporters to continue to shore up struggling institutions — has been settling in. (Unlike commercial Broadway shows, whose investors optimally expect a profit, the nation’s regional theaters operate on a nonprofit basis, deriving income from ticket sales, grants from philanthropies and donations from individuals.)
“What we’ve got,” she said, “is a disconnect between theater and the people who fund it.”
Kaiser, whose institute counsels hundreds of arts organizations across the country, believes that some theaters, motivated by honorable concerns about social and racial justice, pivoted in their programming too abruptly after the shutdown.
He called the move “a change of perspective in what stories they want to tell without necessarily bringing their audiences or their donors or their boards along with them, in a way that makes clear as to why this is important and how to participate and how to watch. And as a result, I think we’re seeing some serious loss of audience and board support and donor support.”
Although a few companies folded in the wake of the pandemic, it was Long Wharf’s announcement in February 2022 of a radical new direction that was the industry’s real wake-up call. A strong artistic force for decades, Long Wharf has championed such playwrights as David Rabe and Margaret Edson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Wit,” which got a crucial early boost at Long Wharf. But time and declining attendance caught up with the organization: By the point at which Padrón and Kit Ingui became artistic director and managing director in 2019, its 400-seat main stage theater was typically less than half filled, and the building was desperately in need of upgrades.
“When I got here, financial challenges were already in existence for Long Wharf over the course of more than a decade,” Ingui said in an interview in the downtown office suite that now serves as company headquarters. “There were severe deficits.”
With an operating budget of about $4 million, and facing increases that would put annual rent at about $500,000, something drastic had to be done. “The board recognized that the building and the expense and the operations were not sustainable,” Padrón said. “It just wasn’t good anymore.
“So we had to figure out a different way,” he added. “We know that it is such a risk. But we also know that great things don’t come without taking risks.”
The “great thing” Padrón had in mind was potentially exciting but also deeply upsetting to some longtime Long Wharf patrons: giving up the building and finding spaces for productions in and around New Haven. The Yale-trained Padrón, 43, a California native who grew up on shows at Luis Valdez’s storied El Teatro Campesino, founded for farmworkers, is part of a generation of younger theater leaders more committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. He envisioned Long Wharf expanding its reach to underserved communities.
That has meant offerings such as “Black Trans Women at the Center,” a multiyear digital festival of new work, and “I AM: Muslim/American,” a film by Aaliyah Miller and Halima Flynn that Long Wharf has taken for talkback sessions across Connecticut. The itinerant era also birthed a concert reading in September of the Broadway musical “Jelly’s Last Jam” in a space in the city’s Dixwell neighborhood.
There is no shortage of potential sites for the company’s projects — the staff has toured more than 60 in the area. This fall, actress Kathleen Chalfant will perform Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” in private homes in the New Haven area. And while the new team has been able to erase the company’s deficit, the unknown is whether Long Wharf can hold on to its position as a strong cultural influence and attract the new audiences it seeks.
The company’s board of directors is solidly behind the gamble.
“We had to make some kind of decision, were we going to stay or leave the financial model? That subscription model is absolutely failing,” said board chair Nancy Alexander, herself a consultant to nonprofit organizations. “And so the financial model, which was based largely on that, was starting to crumble. But the really positive and very important factor was our desire to make theater for everyone.”
The hope for some struggling companies is that reducing programming for a time — and thus the pressure on the budget — will allow them to re-energize. Meghan Pressman, Centre Theatre Group’s managing director and chief executive, said pausing work in the Mark Taper allows time for “a restructuring, a rebalancing,” as a new artistic director, Snehal Desai, takes over this summer. (The company is still presenting musicals in its larger Ahmanson Theatre.)
Pressman acknowledges that the industry came up short in the effort to lure audiences back after the pandemic. “We bet big on the past year and half,” she said, adding that perhaps a public airing of theater’s dire straits will let reluctant theatergoers know how desperately they are needed to return.
“That is one of the only positive outcomes out of this really distressing moment,” Pressman said. “If it throws a spotlight on the struggle over what is happening, then I am proud to be of service.”
[Peter Marks joined the Washington Post as its chief theater critic in 2002. Previously, he worked for nine years on the culture, metropolitan, and national desks at the New York Times, and spent about four years as its off-Broadway drama critic.]
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