I wonder whether our theatre is sliding into a profound malaise. Once you’ve read Robert Holley’s meticulously researched special report, Theatre Facts 84, in this issue, you’ll see why I wonder. True, there was no mass closing of theatres last year, but more than 120 theatres posted deficits despite record attendance. My fear is that the rapidly escalating number of theatres with serious negative fund balances will almost certainly be followed by the wide deployment of risk-containing measures and expanded efforts to maximize income.
Lack of income-producing endowment funds, overemphasis on box office success and an increasingly erratic pattern of contributed support are continually forcing theatres to retrench. While this year’s report does reflect substantial growth in local private support from business and individual donors, unfortunately these gains were outweighed by the negative impact of dwindling support from the federal government and private foundations.
Theatres may be surviving, but there’s not much joy in Mudville or anyplace else. While theatre personnel direct more energy toward income development in order to stay alive, too often artistic planning has to be shunted to the back burner. The theatre is frantically running to stay in place; a no-growth situation for the artists, the administrators, the trustees and the institutions. We’re all in it together, and for better or worse, we depend on one another to collaborate in this art form. Yet our frustrations threaten to create a chilling new context for several upcoming labor negotiations, with potentially debilitating effects on the overall collegiality of the field.
This growing sense of chaos within the field is even more disturbing than the obvious financial impact of the current economic climate, as the various players desperately try to maintain a tenuous foothold. What has always been a healthy tension, a nipping-at-the-heels between actors and playwrights, between artistic directors and marketing staffs, between managers and trustees, today threatens to turn into a series of lunges at the jugular. The resulting factionalism is beginning to produce ludicrous charges and counter-charges, because the system is seriously, though not (one hopes) terminally, ill.
Signs of frustration are everywhere. An Off Off Broadway theatre is informed by the actors’ union that it can’t produce a play written in the 16th century without signing a subsidiary rights agreement. Budget preparation is so stringent that theatre managements balk at providing specific payment to directors for preproduction conferences, research and casting. Rehearsal time is inadequate for proper collaborative exploration, eroding just about everyone’s confidence.
The inexorable costs associated with raising funds and selling tickets are ignored only at risk to survival. It takes money to make money. Concerned trustees draw up formulas for earnings that make popular, risk-free repertoire choices inevitable. Freelance artists feel isolated, “outside” the concerns and problems of their institutionally based colleagues. Artists grow hostile, resenting the managers who work to support them. Unemployment and undercompensation continue to be a way of life—for everyone involved. The talent drain to film, television and other fields goes on…
This national malaise hurts small theatres most. They are the ones that will never have substantial cash reserves and, by the very nature of their size and lack of visibility, simply do not have access to the more substantial funding sources, or the resources to mobilize large numbers of small-gift donors. Yet it is some of these smaller theatres that take the most artistic risks. And it is at these smaller theatres that young artists are most likely to find employment and to gain experience. These theatres are not so much a “farm system,” as an important part of a professional maturation process.
Until the late ’50s, there was a multitude of summer stock companies which provided continual opportunities for artists. The level of work often left a lot to be desired, but the constant activity was extraordinarily beneficial. A few years later many resident theatres were producing in repertory, which also gave the artist a breadth of experience now no longer possible. In the ’60s and ’70s, the Off Off Broadway movement in New York and its counterparts in other cities blossomed. Today, all these types of activity are either lost or severely threatened.
We devised institutional theatres and spread them throughout the country to counteract the make-hay-while-the-sun-shines mentality of the commercial theatre. We built habitats where artists could come together and explore their art cooperatively. Compounding tensions caused by the growing lack of financial resources threaten the ecology of the theatre.
If the theatre is to survive as both a national and community resource, and move forward as an art form, every sector comprising the fragile funding partnership will have to assume more responsibility. Within the profession, if we want to preserve the essential collegiality that makes our art form worth preserving, we cannot allow adversity to set us against one another.
