Following interviews with 13 people who participate in teh leadership of some of the country’s most influential professional nonprofit organizations, I thought it wise to consult with a group of people who know quite a bit about all this, but are not currently themselves helping to run theatres. All are sharp observers of the field, as I believe this chapter demonstrates. I was curious to see what they thought of what artistic leaders had told me in my interviews, and how these different perspectives might help us draw some conclusions and perhaps come closer to answering the question I posed at the beginning: Are we going to make it?
Their creative journeys are not so different from those who are featured in the book. Three are former artistic directors; one was, like me, an associate artistic director at two LORT theatres. And it seems that all of them have had careers fueled by a passion for the art form—passion that has evolved over time but never wavered.
I was particularly glad to see one of their conclusions, as it was one not shared by many of the artistic directors: As Douglas Clayton put it, “We can find innovative ways to remove barriers to participation.We haven’t found them yet, but we can, and we will.”
I was also a bit surprised—but perhaps I shouldn’t have been—by their light admonishment of me for assuming that the nonprofit theatre as it is currently exists needs to be saved. Theatre comes in all shapes and sizes, as Seema Sueko points out. Much like life on this planet should humans render it uninhabitable for themselves and die out as a species, theatre will always find a way to keep going, even if the business model becomes something we can’t conceive of now. Theatre will always thrive, and people will always be obsessed about doing it, just like those of us who share their thoughts in this book.
Todd London spent much of the interview doing what has, in many ways, been at the center of much of his work and scholarship: bringing the nonprofit theatre movement back to the impulse that created it, if we can just rediscover that impulse and embrace it again. Perhaps the answer to all this, then, is more of a return than a discovery of a new way.
Stephanie Ybarra is onto something that could be considered both a return to the impulse and a new direction for this community when she talks about artistic leadership with a bent toward civic engagement and justice. That is certainly a part of what created the movement, though it could also be argued that the founding generation of artistic directors of many of these theatres was at least equally centered on keeping the doors open each week. Anyone who has run one of these organizations knows that they spend much of their time wishing they could focus more on civic engagement and social justice, and less on keeping up with bills, filling out grant forms, and making sure the restrooms are clean for the next performance.
There are certainly some observations made in this conversation that I considered eye-opening. I like to think of myself as someone who knows a lot about the subject—I got a publisher interested in my writing this book, after all—and I always had this vision of the early days of nonprofit theatres a young, upstart movement whose exponential growth was facilitated by the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts because they believed in the future of the movement. Imagine my surprise when Todd London described Ford almost as a colonial institution imposing its structure from the outside. These theatres are nonprofit in their business organization because it was the only way for the Ford to donate to them, and so the Ford imposed its will and its financial model on artistic companies that would have been, in Todd’s telling, better off making their art without them.
I found this striking. Am I worried about the wrong things? Is it such a big deal if the nonprofit theatre movement as we currently know it disappears? Perhaps it will give way to something even better. Perhaps it is indeed the art, and its ability to facilitate conversation and introspection among people, that is more critically important than the business model. perhaps the nonprofit theatre industrial complex needs to be destroyed. Most of the funding provided for this model, after all, goes to the administrative core, as Seema Sueko points out.
On the other hand, don’t we need a strong financial structure to make it possible for this art to be brought to the people? Isn’t it better if we have rooms that seat 500 people rather than 100? That’s several times more people to enjoy our work and participate in civic engagement. And what about the ideal of people making a living away from the center of the industry,New York City? How is that possible without a financial structure that allows these theatres to spend approximately twice what they earn at the box office,as many theatres do,facilitated by fundraising? Nonprofit is still what makes this legally possible.
Truth to tell, the ideal of making a living away from New York seems to have largely worked for theatre practitioners such as marketers, fundraisers, technical directors, and financial managers, but not for theatre artists. The resident acting companies that many of these theatres featured at their founding are long gone. By the 1990s, it had been resolute that, to survive in this financial model, the theatres needed the infrastructure of the home theatre with its venue, support space, and offices, and the people to maintain the infrastructure and fill the offices, and the people to raise the money to maintain the infrastructure and fill the offices, but not the artists. We could job them in on a show-by-show basis, and that would be good enough. As I point out later in this book, that decision, and the slow but precipitous drop in subscriptions at most of the country’s nonprofit theatres, run along almost exactly the same bar graph.
The panel in this chapter also bemoans the sameness of these theatres that were founded to be particular to their local community. Stephanie Ybarra talks about considering these theatres to be “local” rather than “regional.” In fact, the “R” in LORT stands for “resident,” not “regional,” which makes sense to me. At the time LORT was founded in 1966, most of its initial members had resident companies.
Douglas Clayton tells the story of an older actor at Asolo Repertory Theatre, in Sarasota, Florida, who recalls the halcyon days when he was paid a living wage by a theatre to act in plays produced by that theatre on a full-time basis. I met many such actors who wistfully recalled their days at the Cleveland Play House when I worked there. he also points out a seminal change that has taken place at nonprofit theatres, which used to talk about the relationship they had with their communityand now talk about the relationship they have with their patrons. The shift from “community” to “patron,” it’s suggested here, is caused by the nonprofit theatre industrial complex. The system, my interlocutors suggest, is what is making it impossible for us to move forward.
So do we chuck it all and start over? We currently have a partnership between the art of theatre—the desire to bring it to people in a way that fosters community and a positive role for theatre on the town square—and the IRS nonprofit designation. is this the seed of the problem, rather than the thing that needs to be repaired so that we can stay in business and get back to serving the people we wish to serve? In her native Hawaii, Seema Sueko points out, the nonprofit theatre movement is nowhere to be found and does not appear to be missed.
Perhaps the answer is all of the above. Perhaps Todd London is right that we need to look back and remind ourselves of the original impulse; Stephanie Ybarra is right that we have to reinvent how this is all done and let go of the preciousness of terms like “sustainability”; Seema Sueko is right that we should not be precious about any of this,because there are whole groups of people who seem to be doing just fine without us.
Perhaps it is out of all this confusion, and all the wonderful tenacity of the artists interviewed in this book, that we will arrive at transformative solutions.