Fichandler: The Burden of the Nonprofit System in US

Zelda Fichandler, the co-founder of Arena Stage in DC, and one of the Founding Mothers (along with Eva La Gallienne, Margo, Jones, and Nina Vance):

“There is no real way of likening us to other culture carriers such as the British National or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the present Moscow Art Theatre, since we are all of us broke and have small companies instead of very big ones. We spend half of our life at fundraising dinners and defending play choices to citizen boards of directors, since with the impulse that we should have theaters in our land came also the impulse that the community should be part of them, should put up some of the money, should even have a voice in them, and—now hear this!—should even commission theaters into being and hire artistic directors to run them. These artistic directors soon leave, out of enormous fatigue bordering on the Sisyphean, or out of wrath at non-professionals meddling in decisions that are hard enough to make all alone, or out of a general feeling of: ‘Who needs it? What I really want to do is direct, not run an inefficient branch of IBM.”’

This is the problem with the nonprofit system–there are too many non-artists involved, and too much money to be raised. It is why, in *Building a Sustainable Theater,” I suggest that theaters be for-profit, and live within their budget.

In The Long Revolution by Zelda Fichandler, edited by Todd London