NEW YORK CITY: The Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./NY), scaling up to meet a moment of seismic change for the American theatre, announced last week that Talia Corren will join co-executive director Risa Shoup as fellow co-executive director. This shared executive leadership model follows a seven-month nationwide search run collaboratively by A.R.T./NY’s staff, board, and stakeholders, and aligned with the 50-year-old organization’s stated values. With Shoup, Corren leads a full-time staff of 17 and a part-time staff of 31, with the support of an active board of 18, offering varied modes of support to 520-plus member theatres.
Talia Corren previously held positions at Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, and Soho Rep before leading strategic and fundraising engagements at the fundraising and event planning organization Advance NYC for six years. Shoup, for their part, was first elevated to interim executive director in 2020, when longtime leader Virginia Louloudes was placed on leave while complaints from staff about her leadership were investigated. Shoup was made full executive director earlier this year, as the search for a co-leader began.
I spoke to them earlier this week about the services A.R.T./New York offers with its approximately $7 million budget, and how it’s positioning itself to respond to a rapidly changing field. The following conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
ROB WEINERT-KENDT: Congratulations to you both. I think we are all in the same building in midtown Manhattan, and when I look at the model of A.R.T./NY—a theatre service organization with both individual and institutional members—I of course think of the model of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), which publishes this magazine. Is that a fair comparison?
RISA SHOUP: Yes, and this past summer, we built out far more robust infrastructure for individual members to access specific services, including our micro-grants. But as is my prerogative, I will kindly push back a bit and say that, of course, in that we are service organization that works with member theatres, we are similar to TCG. But I think the similarities end there, because we’re so focused on New York City and New York state, and the services we provide are very different. Which makes for a great complement in the field.
Got it. So tell me a bit more about those services.
RISA: The services that we provide are, I think, broadly summarized as educational services. We have expert-led trainings and workshops; we have convenings focused on peer learning that we call roundtables, where staff from member theatres come together across common role types, or those who are experiencing common challenges, and share best practices and techniques and questions with one another. Our expert-led workshops and trainings range from everything from the most practical, like how to read a 990, to the broadest and the deepest training around disability justice and antiracism in the theatre. And all of our educational work is specifically geared to folks in the theatre. So our sexual harassment prevention trainings accord with state standards, but they are designed for people who work in the theatre. As one of our colleagues likes to say, when you work in theatre, you might have to kiss your colleague for work, so you need a really specific type of sexual harassment prevention training.
We also provide advocacy and other convening opportunities for members that typically respond to challenges of the moment; we’re doing a lot of work right now around the response to the most recent New York City Cultural Affairs (DCLA) Cultural Development Fund (CDF) allocations. And we provide subsidized workspace to our members, and that takes the form of offices, rehearsal studios, and then our actual theatres on the far West Side; we operate three facilities. We also own a building in Fort Greene in Brooklyn.
And then we’re a grant maker; we provide cash grants to member theatres. Some of our grants are re-grants, where we work with the Mellon Foundation, with the Howard Gilman Foundation, with New York State Council on the Arts, to re-grant funds that they provide to us as a partner. That allows us to provide critical funds to the field that wouldn’t necessarily get there. And we have a couple of funds that we run out of our own coffers—notably, the micro-grants that I mentioned before, where individual theatremakers and member companies come to us, kind of broadly under the label of anti-oppression, when they have a challenge, like they want to print a large-format program or they want to hire an intimacy coordinator, and we will match that expense up to $2,500.
The final service that I didn’t mention, which we put under education but is so unique that it really kind of gets its own bucket, is a program called the Theatre Administration Consulting Program. It’s a terrible name, but it is accurate. It’s a consulting program where members come to us when they have challenges, from the most practical, like, “I want to move from cash-based accounting to accrual,” to the most esoteric, like, “I need to redo board governance for my 30-year-old institution, and I have no idea where to begin.” We will match them with a consultant, they’ll work with the consultant to establish a scope of work, and then we foot the bill for up to 30 hours of work. Talia, is there anything you want to add?
TALIA CORREN: Risa, you obviously have such a more intimate and practical experience of what our services are.
RISA: I should mention that this is Talia’s first day on the job.
TALIA: In my understanding, the way I have seen A.R.T/New York’s impact play out in the field falls into loosely organized pillars of service, support, access, and accountability. Space is a massive challenge in New York City, and A.R.T./New York was really in the vanguard of helping solve that problem for a lot of small and mid-sized organizations. But especially at this moment, part of what I’m most excited about in joining A.R.T./New York right now is around the accessibility and accountability conversations, and leveraging the collective both in terms of opportunities and challenges that are faced by member theatres and finding fieldwide solutions to them. My background has mostly been in consulting, so for the past six years, I’ve worked with over two dozen arts, cultural, and social service organizations based in New York City, and so I’ve had a real front-seat picture of how much things have changed, in terms of art-making practices, in terms of audience behavior, in terms of funding dynamics.
And my prior experience working at Soho Rep, Signature, and Playwrights Horizons—I’ve been inside our New York member theatres for a lot of my career, and so my inside familiarity with a lot of the programs that A.R.T./New York has already been strong in is a way I feel I can add value.
Picking up on that, can you give an example of an A.R.T./NY program that you availed yourself of when you were at one of those member theatres?
TALIA: One of my very first experiences as an intern at Playwrights Horizons was somebody being like, “Go to the A.R.T./New York roundtable and figure out what everybody’s doing about their galas this year.” That’s a very concrete and early-career example. Then, four years later, when I was running development at Soho Rep, I was a one-person development department, writing the NYSCA grant and trying to develop a mid-level donor program and plan a gala at the same time—it was really lonely and really hard. I had great colleagues at Soho Rep and a super smart and engaged board, but you miss peers. For so many, A.R.T./New York is a place where people really develop those peer-to-peer relationships around both very practical things, like, “What does this question mean on this application?”, but also this social and emotional support that I think at a lot of member theatres is very hard to come by, when everybody’s so hyper focused on their lane and their lens. I think one of the great, sometimes maybe invisible values of A.R.T./New York is finding much more community in a space where otherwise it can feel competitive or more rife with scarcity. A.R.T./New York is sort of an antidote to that feeling.
RISA: And if I could just jump off of that, I think our approach to developing services is that we create infrastructure through which services are provided that we don’t change regularly—the infrastructure is meant to be pretty evergreen—and then we allow ourselves the freedom to change the content to meet the moment. That happens on an annual basis in terms of organizational planning, so that we can also do that very nimbly throughout the course of a year.
Something that’s coming up for me right now is this Theatre Admin Consulting Program. We don’t put a lot of designs on how this is meant to be used: We consistently look for consultants, and we try to align the hiring of our consultants with our values, which is to say we seek to have a consultant pool that is reflective of the demographics of the city; other than that, we’re just always looking for consultants that have expertise that we that we think will be useful to the members, and then the members bring the issues to us and we match them. Right now something we’re seeing is that a lot of our members are experiencing funding cuts from DCLA, and as members are coming to us to take advantage of this program, just as they should, this is allowing us to meet them in their moment of need to provide them with services they can’t otherwise afford. And while I wish the circumstances were different—I don’t wish hardship on anyone—obviously I am grateful that we are in a position to support members through our programming. And this, again, is this approach of having infrastructure that is consistent and clear and evergreen that allows us the flexibility to otherwise shift the content to meet people that that works.
Obviously the last few years have been uniquely challenging for theatre, including New York theatre. It’s a big question, but could you talk about how the needs of these past few years have changed what you do, and what that means for what you’ll do in the future?
RISA: One of the biggest concerns in the field right now is certainly labor shortages and high rates of attrition among staff. Parallel to that, we’re seeing, I think, an entirely reasonable and just demand for higher wages and more benefits, and a more compassionate organizational culture. I say that with no institution in mind, or even no single challenge in mind; this is just what we are all experiencing right now. And so I think that A.R.T./New York has, from our roundtables to our expert-led workshops and trainings to how we have streamlined our grant-making programs so that you can use that money more for what you want to use it for—we’ve tried to meet theatres where they are to help them pay their workers more. This is a huge, huge issue. It’s why people move on; it’s why people don’t even start to work in this industry anymore. It is a financial challenge for theatres that, in good faith, want to meet this challenge. They want to pay their workers more, but I think it’s undeniable that most folks in this field are not making what they could in other industries. So we’re really trying to meet folks on a number of levels to both increase funds so they can do this, and also to provide them with best practices and techniques so they can figure out how to plan for it sustainably. And at the roundtables, they can talk to each other about what they’re experiencing, and to the point Talia was making before, feel less alone in the face of a challenge that can feel quite overwhelming.
TALIA: Yes to all of that. The other piece I’m thinking about a lot is a slightly more external math that I think has also really shifted, and that’s about artists and audiences and their expectations of institutions. Pre-COVID, a lot of this was already starting to shake loose—the change in subscription models, artists’ practices, asking institutions to have a different model around commissioning or other ways of developing art. But I think that the pandemic really laid bare how transactional so many of those relationships had gotten around artists feeling like a commodity, both from institutional lens and from an audience lens, and audiences too also sometimes feeling like a commodity. There was this sort of churn around how those relationships worked, or didn’t work. So I think that there is this real tension right now around bringing a lot more humanity to our artistic practices, but also around meeting audiences where they are. I think this is true around the country, but especially in New York, there has been such a shift around audience behavior, coming to the theatre or being out in New York in general. Finding a way to not just mend those relationships, but to build something new that is less of a transaction, a “buy this work” kind of feeling, is also really central. It’s connected to what Risa was saying. How can we make art in a capitalist society that is also full of humanity, and that really honors the humanity of our city, of our artists, of our audiences, and the administrators and board members and donors who make that work possible? Bringing a more human lens to that is like the center of the center.
You mentioned advocacy. Can you tell me about your sense of where support for the arts is right now, both at the city and the state level?
RISA: I think about who our members are—nonprofits and nonprofits in spirit, which is to say they are not commercial producers, not Broadway, although we all live in the same ecosystem, and the artists move freely between all of these entities. So part of what can be hard, I think, is that there is a perception on any side that another side may be getting more or different support than the other. But we’re all receiving impacts from wherever that support is landing.
That being said, you know, sometimes we have to have this very practical, instrumental conversation about the economic impact of our industry on the city or the state, because it doesn’t just impact us and our livelihoods; it impacts the dry cleaner who does the laundry for the theatre and the restaurant and the bar. This is a really crucial conversation. But it doesn’t get at all of the other kind of social, emotional, public health impacts. And I think this is where we need more support and understanding from our colleagues at the state, that theatre, yes, drives economic impacts across sectors, and we ourselves are consumers and our wages are critical. But also, at a time when our country and our state is experiencing extraordinary division, and we are dealing with moments of continued unprecedented mass violence in this country, theatre is a place where we can come together and think about somebody else’s way of being in the world, if only for the 90 minutes that we’re there together. And we can have that collective leap of faith. I know I’m getting a little out there with this, but I really believe this: that the 90 minutes that you take a collective breath together and you decide that the make-believe onstage is real together can increase your capacity for empathy. It gives you another perspective on the world, and in this moment, that’s not just invaluable, it’s essential, I think, to finding a better way forward together. And that’s where I’d love to see even more support from the city and the state—the recognition that theatre isn’t just a business, but that we are providing an outlet that I really believe is going to help us get through a really challenging moment in U.S., if not global history.
TALIA: Slightly more specifically to your question, Rob, everybody knows that New York state and New York City are funky places politically. And Risa and I have been in this game long enough to see several administrations. I think that the changes that we’re seeing now are less administration-driven; I think it’s a lot more an issue of everyone reorganizing around the principles of equity and access, but also sometimes struggling to do that. For a long time, the state was really trying to shoehorn arts into economic revitalization programs, and it’s like, all right, but that’s not a core value of art-making; it is a beautiful byproduct of art-making. We do treat the business of art-making seriously, but there is inherent value there. And so I think there’s always been a little bit of a push-pull from an advocacy and funding standpoint, of leading on the inherent value of art and creation and facilitating the kind of collective interrogation of who we are and why we are bothering to do this thing in the first place. That’s the piece that is never fully reflected in a government budget, right? You know, the NEA fought that fight for decades and decades; it’s not unique to this moment. So that’s also the work of A.R.T./ New York.
The piece that Risa said that I would most put a circle around is—and I think that it is one of the very powerful vantage points that A.R.T./New York has—is thinking of the ecosystem. Artists don’t have the same boundaries that an institution can have, like, we have a budget under a million or a budget over 10 million. There are a lot of these arbitrary divisions that are created in what is actually an ecosystem, and so really cultivating and caring for and advocating for that full ecosystem I think is our highest calling.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre. rwkendt@tcg.org
